The Rationality of the Miracles of the Apostolic Women: Thekla, Drusiana, and Maximilla as Anti-Function

Abstract

Far from being beyond the reach of reason, the miracles narrated in the Apostolic Acts actually instantiate a specific type of rationality, as anti-function, that disrupted the phallocentric economy of the Greco-Roman world. This article will discuss the lives of three apostolic women—Thekla, Drusiana, and Maximilla—as case studies and demonstrate how their lives, and the miracle narratives associated with them, disrupted the two processes that ensured the rationality of the symbolic order of the Greco-Roman world, namely specularization and abjection. Since the maintenance of the symbolic order depended on the specularization and abjection of women, the liberation of women necessitated the disruption of these processes.