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MARIA OF BITHYNIA AND MITERIKON, AN ANTHOLOGY OF TEXTS
BY AND ABOUT HOLY WOMEN OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH, AS A
SOURCE FOR GENERAL HISTORIOGRAPHY AND WOMEN’S HISTORY
Anna‐Efrosyni MIHOPOULOU *
Miterikon: Narratives, sayings and lives of the holy mothers of the desert, women ascetics and
saints of the Orthodox Church is an anthology of age‐old texts about holy women (miteres, Greek for
mothers) of the Orthodox Church, that were narrated and/or written to serve as a source for
religious inspiration – addressed particularly, though not exclusively, to women; its publication in 7
volumes supervised by prof. D. Tsamis in the 1990s was sponsored by five Greek nunneries. 1
The texts of each volume are divided into: a. “Narratives”, i.e. accounts about the saints by direct
or indirect witnesses; b. “Sayings” of the holy women themselves; c. scholarly “Lives of Saints” (Bioi
hagion). Each saint is presented in one of those categories, usually by one text, occasionally by more;
the source of each entry (the work of a religious writer or, quite often, an earlier collection of lives of
saints, in manuscript or in print form) is noted in a footnote. On the left‐side pages of each volume
the texts are presented in the original, ancient Greek language, while on the right side there is a
translation in modern Greek. 2 Footnotes provide terminology and vocabulary explanations, historical
background, geographical data and further information, contributing considerably to the value of the
publication.
Through the 3.172, in all, pages we become acquainted with about 200 women who lived in the
time period between the early years of Christianity until the 14th century, in territories belonging to,
or influenced by, the East Roman / Byzantine Empire – from Mt. Sinai to Spain, from Egypt to Iberia
(Georgia). 3 Included in the Miterikon are women who became saints having devoted their lives to
God’s will – with the exception of the martyrs of the first Christian centuries (an anthology of whose
lives and accomplishments would, indeed, be a necessary supplement to the Miterikon, stated prof.
Tsamis). 4 Represented are all kinds of social environments and personalities – simple country women
or city dwellers, or wives of officials, or queens, virtuous and devout from a very young age or
repenting sinners; those who avoided marriage, others who submitted to violent husbands, some
who left their homes on pilgrimage or entered the monastic path along with their husbands and
children; those who lived alone in the desert and those who were –willfully or not– secluded in
nunneries, or found refuge in monasteries disguising themselves as –eunuch– monks.
All these cases offer us a spectrum of experiences and life stories –which otherwise remain to a
large extent invisible–, shedding light on the historical past of social and individual life arrangements,
especially of women (and women’s collectivities, if nunneries are to be counted as such), with their
ideological and spiritual connotations and their echoes up to the present. No matter how
fragmentary or through which particular viewpoint or literary tradition they are recorded (issues for
discussion in themselves), they offer an abundance of material useful for a variety of disciplines in
the humanities, and for the history of women in particular.
Of course the life‐stories provided are multiply mediated. To start with, religious women –except,
maybe, certain ascetics of the first Christian centuries– were under male guidance, even in
nunneries; thus, many women saints are presented through their relation to influential holy men –
sometimes occupying only a few lines in the life of a male saint. Furthermore, the narrations about
women saints come from men – a pious relative, monk or clergyman, an ascetic who met the holy
mother or heard about her from somebody else and so on; religious women as writers (even of
women’s lives) were nonexistent or, at least, did not represent themselves as such (although we
might presume that at least some of the texts of unknown or pseudonymous narrations have been
authored by religious women). 5 In addition, the narrations have been edited by –male– anthologers
contributing to the official corpus of teachings of the –male dominated– Church and, broadly
speaking, of the political and social –male dominated– establishment, reproducing, at the same time,
*
M.A. in Women’s Studies (University of York, UK).