Abstract

Biblical women have a distinctively prominent verbal role in late antique Syriac homilies and hymns. Syriac writers granted these women a rhetorical voice often lacking in their biblical narratives, through the favored technique of imagined speech; and those words found a performative voice when women's choirs sang certain of these hymns in the liturgies of civic churches. This study asks how women's speech was represented in these Syriac texts, how that representation functioned in Christian teaching, and how the ritual performance by women's liturgical choirs contributed to the social meaning of women's voices in the late antique Syrian Orient.

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