ABSTRACT
The women in this study, inspired by the ascetic Christian tendencies of their age, will be observed mainly from the viewpoint of the patristic authors. It is through these male commentators we must look at the women: from them learn the kind of rhetoric addressed to women and their condition, the models held up for imitation, exemplary females adduced from personal experience; and from them receive assessments of whether and how women lived up to the ideals projected for them. All of this has to be received through the medium of the church Fathers of necessity. The first and most obvious problem in studying women of the early church is that what these women thought of themselves and their devotions has not survived in their own writings-though some of the writers purport to be using their words.
