Holy Virgins and Blessed Rulers. What We Know and What We Would Still Like to Learn About

After having examined how some aspects of Christian asceticism have been studied in the last fifty years, some issues of female ascetic communities in Late Antiquity, which are still unresolved, are selected. One of them concerns the institutional and economic aspects of the monasteries, starting from those founded by great aristocrats as Paula, Melania the Elder, Melania the Younger, or Olympias. Since bishops also took care of virgins, exhorting consecrated ones to live in community and later founding monasteries, the case of the one led by Caesaria of Arles has been considered, since bishop Caesar had to face many problems, having founded it, and endowed it by alienating Church properties. Nuns in monasteries, who did not possess land and not have new endowments, could hardly survive. Justinian issued precise rules to limit both new female foundations and the number of nuns fed by the church of Constantinople. Gregory the Great divided the resources also among the female monasteries, to which a proportionate share of the Church’s annual revenue and eventually some donations reserved to the poor was reserved. Especially when subjected to strict enclosure, nuns could rarely use their work to support themselves. Their occupations, mostly related to textiles, brought no profit but fuelled a rudimentary barter economy.