Thecla’s Devotion: Narrative and Emotion in the Acts of Paul and Thecla. By Jane D. McLarty

Abstract

The imaginative story of a ‘well-born’ young woman’s brief encounter with the preaching of the Paul of the canonical Acts, as re-imagined, throws an intriguingly varied light on some (probably second-century) Christians’ attitudes to society, and on their concerns, at least among the social elite, with issues of gender, passion, and control—both communal and individual. A self-contained story of Thecla seems to have been incorporated as an episode into a longer Acts of Paul and Thecla—and then to have broken free from that frame (itself only fragmentary now), to be circulated again on its own, later prompting a fourth-century devotion to her. In this careful (and very readable) study, leading themes of the tale are illustrated on the basis of a wide reading both of ancient sources and of recent and older secondary literature, significantly including some detailed and tabulated comparisons with one ancient popular romance in particular, Chariton’s Chaireas and Callirhoe, also probably from the same century.