ABSTRACT
THE MILLSTONE OF THE FEMALE LEGACY In the fourth century, the church, only newly legitimated with Constantine, held out new promise: and women were not behindhand in seeking out established roles. In this process, women devotees of higher secular status were forging the way, and their importance in the eyes of the world and the church necessitated a reconsideration of the rhetoric addressed to the female condition. One of the primary disadvantages under which women laboured was that ‘because you destroyed God’s image, man’, women ‘deserve to judged by men’ (Tertullian On Female Dress 1.2). Man’s judgement on their integral nature was indissolubly linked to the body, backed by traditional philosophical thinking as by apostolic teaching, and this association was advanced as their historical destiny following Eve’s sin and since at the outset women had tempted the fallen angels to lust: ‘those angels who rushed from heaven on the daughters of men; so that this shame also attaches to women’ (temptation, as we have seen, being the responsibility of the tempting party), and ‘were thus enslaved’ (ibid.). But if sufficiently pious, women were exhorted that they had the potentiality to attain ‘that self-same angelic nature as a reward, the self-same sex as men’ (ibid.); as written by men, the reward for being a virtuous female was seen as negation of her original abject nature.
