Perhaps more than most ancient traditions, Thecla’s has been characterized by controversy, and yet little attention has been paid to the positive value of indeterminacy in the Thecla tradition. After offering an overview of approaches to the Acts of Paul and Thecla and related texts over the last half-century, we ask how the open qualities of Thecla as a protagonist may have enhanced her tradition’s ability to serve as the basis for successive re-imaginings. We conclude by suggesting that as ‘an ambiguous heroine in an unstable story’ Thecla exemplifies the value of indeterminacy and instability in hagiography.

This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.

The studies in Part III explore how the Christian preachers and writers of late antiquity used a wide range of pedagogical and literary techniques to evoke empathetic responses in their audiences. Deployed effectively, such techniques could prove pivotal in cultivating both empathy and an imaginative apparatus for thinking about the relationship between individuals and the community to which they belonged, at the same time establishing the authority of the teacher within their particular small worlds, from classroom to monastery and beyond. Yet, making a success of this intermediary position was not easy and, as we shall see, such victories were often hard won in the face of interference from superiors, competition from peers, and the recalcitrance of audiences.

In thinking about how social control was reproduced over time and space, the problem of agency comes into focus – especially when we consider the position of women. Women had distinctive problems of access to rights and resources in the late ancient world. The constraints imposed on wives and daughters meant that their autonomy in domestic environments was compromised both domestically and in the public sphere. Women had distinctive problems of access to rights and resources, and yet it was a well-known fact that they had their own way of seeing things, and sometimes of helping each other behind the scenes.

Conflict and Social Control in Late Antiquity examines how the cultivation and application of violence across a range of ‘small worlds’ contributed to the making of society in the late Roman period. From households and families to schoolrooms and monasteries, chapters address the different roles that violence played in maintaining and reinforcing the social order, even during a period of intense religious and political change. Elites adopted a range of approaches – formal and informal, legal and illegal, private and public – to keep subordinates in their place. Especially important were the efforts of social elites to inculcate in their followers the idea that the social order was natural rather than contingent, and therefore should not be challenged but rather perpetuated. Chapters focus on written sources from the fourth and fifth centuries, mainly on Christian authors. Collectively, they show that rather than seeking to transform the fortunes of those who were most vulnerable in society (slaves, women, children), such writers drew creatively on pre-existing discursive traditions, in the process reproducing and (occasionally) attempting to mitigate the plight of the downtrodden.

Part II considers how Christian authors addressed the issue of slavery. In the late Roman world, slavery functioned as a fundamental socio-economic framework around which contemporaries organised their lives, conceptually and practically.1 Just as Jonathan Tallon’s chapter in Part I shows how slavery within the household found acceptance, albeit sometimes grudgingly, in the writings of John Chrysostom, so the following chapters demonstrate how slavery was woven into the fabric of Christian society in later antiquity. Christian writers and preachers used metaphors of slavery in order to communicate with their audiences, while slaves were ever-present, if not always recorded, in Christian communities.

Part IV explores what Conrad Leyser has called a ‘rhetoric of vulnerability’ among the Christian writers of late antiquity, who saw personal vulnerability as a claim, under certain circumstances, to enhanced moral authority.1 The righteous suffering of martyrs2 and the fragile autonomy of virgins3 offered powerful new symbolic capital to the Christian imaginary.