The Memory of Melania

Melania the Elder, the “female man of God,” performs several masculine functions throughout Palladius’s Lausiac History, even as he repeatedly defines her as female. In a work based on collective memory, she serves as a source of stories about those in the desert and as a recipient of holy relics from male monks to preserve their memory. Her prominence is particularly noticeable in her relationship with Evagrius, serving as a confessor of his love affair and as his spiritual director in sending him to Egypt. Palladius therefore creates a social memory of Melania as both female and male, making her a counter to the women associated with the ascetic writer and teacher Jerome. These women appear as extensions of the argument about gender that were part of the Origenist controversy. Jerome’s women are properly female, subordinate to male teaching, while Palladius’s Melania has a gender ambiguity.