‘Here lies the monastic Theodosia’: shedding light on female asceticism in late antique Asia Minor and the Near East through inscriptions

ABSTRACT Despite the extensive use of literary and papyrological sources to research female asceticism in late antiquity, epigraphic evidence has not yet been fully employed in this regard. Scholarship on inscriptions mentioning female ascetics has mostly been limited to creating lists of inscriptions, which are useful but lack broader analysis. In this article, I gather and analyse a corpus of thirty-eight Greek inscriptions, limited to fourth to eighth century Asia Minor and the Near East. By combining both quantitative and qualitative methods, my article provides a complex examination of the terminology and intersectional identity markers mentioned in inscriptions (name and age; name of monastery; social status and wealth; ethnicity and language; relation to other people), as well as a case study with close reading of a particularly informative inscription mentioning a domestic ascetic. Providing a starting point for further research, this article argues that inscriptions offer confirmatory evidence of phenomena described in hagiographical sources that emphasize the miraculous. The article also reflects on the advantages and difficulties of using epigraphic evidence to research female asceticism, emphasizing the need to integrate the material context of inscriptions into analysis.