Death at the Door of the Karapet: Gendered Space, Masculinity, the Breastfeeding Mother, and Cultic Competition in Late Antique Tarōn

Abstract

This article centres gender as an important analytical category to explore regionally-specific expressions of religiosity that bridge the pre-Christian and Late Antique periods. It relates the story of a sixth-century noblewoman who reportedly entered an exclusively male monastery dedicated to John the Baptist, known in Armenian as the Karapet. Her challenge to the monastery is mapped spatially, where male order separates homosocial, sacred from heterosocial, mundane space, while female disorder threatens to dissolve that divide. Her death at the hand of a heavenly apparition establishes the militant model of the Karapet as intermediary in lieu of the nourishing motif developed about the Virgin Mary throughout the text. This story demonstrates how Late Antique motifs find very different iterations in local contexts. It must be understood in its Tarōnec‘i particularities, drawing on traditions specific to Tarōn to envision Christian cultic competition as continuation from a pre-Christian past.