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Rethinking Ancient Women: Re-Membering Hypatia of Alexandria
Cara Minardi
Dissertation Prospectus
GSU Department of English
Committee: Dr. Lyneé Lewis Gaillet, Dr. George Pullman, Dr. Beth Burmester
The forthcoming text entitled The Present State of Scholarship in Historical Rhetoric
edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Winifred Bryan Horner tells a single and clear story:
scholarship in the history of rhetoric is needed. This claim is especially true concerning ancient
women. There have been important and numerous contributions over the last thirty years to
feminist historiographical research of all periods, however, the amount of work left to do in the
ancient world is enormous. We have, in fact, barely scratched the surface of potential research
on the ancient world. Thanks to Cheryl Glenn and Jan Swearingen we have scholarship about
Aspasia and Diotima from the fifth century BCE. However, as The Present State of Scholarship
in Historical Rhetoric indicates, scholars have not recovered another single historical woman of
note between these fifth century BCE Greek women and Hildegard of Bingen who lived in
Germany between the years 1098-1179. Recovery work in history is essential if scholars will
ever overturn what Cheryl Glenn calls the “paternal” narrative of traditional history and a
tradition of scholarship that established women’s (appropriate) absence from participation in
rhetoric and philosophy in the ancient world (Glenn Retold 4).
In Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance
Cheryl Glenn addresses the question of women in rhetorical history and asks, “where on the
landscape we call rhetorical history should we look for women? How many women are hidden in
the shadows of monumental rhetoricians? How many others remain misidentified as holes and
bulges on out-of-the-way territories? (Glenn 3). My dissertation is an attempt to add to the work
of feminist historiographers in the ancient world and to fill a small portion of the 1500-year gap
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as well as suggest ways for other scholars to identify, and conduct research on historical women.
I plan to recover Hypatia of Alexandria (355-415 ACE) for the rhetorical canon as a teacher and
as a rhetorician/philosopher. According to ancient histories and encyclopedias, Hypatia of
Alexandria was born, educated, lived, worked, and was murdered in Alexandria, Egypt in 415
ACE. It seems that the only reason historians bothered to document her life and work was
because of her murder. Most scholars blame St Cyril of Alexandria for instigating the murder,
although there is debate about his motive for having done so. Hypatia’s life and the
documentation of it demonstrates that women did contribute to philosophy and rhetoric in the
ancient world. Because women are not included in traditional history and because none of her
works survive, I will assess secondary and tertiary texts for evidence of Hypatia’s activity. In
addition, my cursory research indicates that Hypatia was not the sole woman engaged in
intellectual work at the time, and I will name and discuss other women who participated in
philosophy and rhetoric during Hypatia’s lifetime in the Mediterranean. My hope is to
reinvigorate scholarship in the area of ancient women for the goal of creating a more accurate
and balanced record of rhetorical history. I also hope that the completed text will serve as a
resource guide for scholars interested in ancient philosophy and rhetoric and the teaching of
ancient philosophy and rhetoric.
Justification
“To be unacquainted with what has passed in the world, before we came into it ourselves, is to be
always children” (Cicero the Brutus).
The writing of history is an important endeavor that gives us a sense of place, and
sometimes, a sense of purpose. While I do not claim that history is complete in any way, what I
am suggesting here is that most of what we count as history is really the story of men, and this is
especially true of ancient history. Women’s history, by contrast, often remains shrouded in myth
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and legend, according to tradition, much of it is fiction. The risk then, is that women, as Cicero
warns, remain infantile, and I would say, infantilized to some extent because women still must
justify moving into traditionally male spaces, allegedly in contradiction to “tradition.” This is
not to say that the lack of women’s history does not affect men, too. An unbalanced history
affects men in gendered constraints and prejudices that continue.
As a research subject, Hypatia of Alexandria offers an opportunity to address lost,
missing, or erased texts by and about women while also considering the biases of historical texts
authored by men. Hypatia as a subject also offers the potential to question the biases of white
supremacy in history while simultaneously dismantling the problematic ideal of the universal or
exceptional woman. Hypatia lived in Roman Alexandria after the Ptolemaic era and evidence
suggests that she was of Egyptian Greek ancestry. Her mixed ethnicity brings into question
biases of historical documentation based on race and gender. As such, the recovery of Hypatia
will allow me to question the way our historical canon of rhetoric has been constructed, and who
benefits from it. Michael Berubé reminds us “canons are at once the location, the index, and the
record of the struggle for cultural representation; like any other hegemonic formation, they must
be continually reproduced anew and are continually contested” (qtd. in McLaughlin 12). The
struggle to build a historical canon applies directly the field of Rhetoric and Composition, a field
preoccupied with establishing its history and thereby justifying its importance and growth over
the last thirty years.
Feminist scholars in many fields have taken up much recovery work since the 1970s,
with a proliferation of texts about women in the 1980s. It is impossible to include every text that
recovers women philosophers and rhetoricians because these materials come from a vast array of
disciplines including Women’s Studies, Literature, History, Science, Mathematics, and
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Archaeology, among others. The scholarship also covers a vast array of historical times and
locations. Hence, I will focus on some of the texts that have specifically influenced my thinking
about approaches to research that recovers the work of ancient women.
Scholars often begin by questioning the absence of women from history to try to
determine why women did not participate or if they did, what happened to their work, or why
there is not much evidence of their work in secondary sources. There are several answers. Texts
degenerate, and since women’s texts have not been valued they have not been preserved at the
same rate as men’s; we have fewer primary resources as a result. In addition, because male
authors have written much of history, there are biases in our historical record in terms of what
has been included and how it was included. As Gillian Clark observes in her 1993 book, Women
in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles, “men (at least men in the writing classes)
either did not know any detail, or did not see fit to say more than general comments on . . . the
role of women” (94). Most women recovering women’s history, for example Gerder Lerner,
Kathleen Wider, Mary Ellen Waithe, Gillian Clark, Susan Jarratt, Cheryl Glenn and others, point
to biases in historical texts. The problem is that such biases “make it difficult to separate the
facts of these women’s lives from the fancy of scholars,” and in the end, we are left with
distortions of history (Wider “Donning” 42). Such distortions tell us that only the most
exceptional woman in exceptional circumstances participated in intellectual life, an assumption
that is as distorted as the male biases on which it is based.
What if scholars have read women’s participation in the ancient world entirely wrong? It
seems to me that one of the most important problems is in our assumed ideology about historical
women itself. The ideology is the one that tells us, assures us, requires us to believe that ancient
women did not participate in philosophical or rhetorical tasks, except in rare situations. Feminist
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scholars have not questioned this assumption; instead, they often cite texts espousing misogynist
ideology as that which has served to oppress women,1 as proof of women’s oppression, and as
proof that a particular woman was exceptional2. Many feminist scholars blame the Greeks, in
Politics, for example, Aristotle tells us, “silence is a woman’s glory.” St. Paul wrote, “women
should keep silent . . . they have no permission to talk, but should keep their place as the law
directs” and in 1 Timothy, he stated he did not “permit women to teach or dictate to the men” (1
Corinthians 33-34; 1 Timothy 2:12). In Moralia, Plutarch states the Roman position on women
clearly, “the two great duties of a virtuous woman . . . are to keep at home and be silent. For she
is only to speak to her husband, as by her husband. Nor is she to take amiss the uttering of her
mind . . .”3 By adopting Aristotelian, Pauline and other misogynist ideologies that suggest
women did not speak in public or were not students and teachers, we have, in many ways,
reconstructed the universal woman and the universal woman’s condition in the ancient world as
unvaried and universally oppressed almost without question. What I am asking about women in
the ancient world is this: If women already were silent, if they did not teach men and participate
in public life, why would men need to speak out against such activities? My contingent answer
here is they wouldn’t. What I am suggesting is that we read admonitions by men of women as an
indication of what is perhaps an abundance of women’s activity and participation4 because we
have confused ideology with the material reality of women’s lives. The extant texts of ancient
men, then, can be read as a counter-discourse to women’s activity, centering women’s activity
Following Susan Jarratt, I am suggesting we question “an Aristotelian orientation for describing the history of
rhetoric [and that we seek] to provide an alternative . . . an attempt to take into account those changes, to recreate the
classical roots of rhetoric in their light” (xix).
2
Cheryl Glenn’s work on Aspasia is a good example.
3
I would further suggest that the misogynist attitudes of the ancients influenced scholars throughout the ages so that
the result is continued constraining ideologies of women in our own time. For example, Lawrence Summers 2005
comment about women’s inability to do mathematics.
4
Although I suspect this was not necessarily widespread or all permeating abundance. However, my research
indicates that there were pockets of women who were very active all over the ancient Mediterranean in a variety of
capacities.
1
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and potentially illuminating the importance of it. Furthermore, that there are so few primary texts
to study does not necessarily prove that women were inactive, if anything, the paucity of
materials suggests that women’s work may have been too threatening to preserve. Perhaps
feminist historiographers need to reconsider historical periods in which men speak most against
women’s activities. If the work of ancient women will be recovered satisfactorily, we need to
deliberately misread the admonitions of men as a sign of women’s activity and not as an
indication of their oppression (Bizzell).
Scholars have also concluded that women have been deliberately erased from history. In
discussing Hypatia, McLaughlin reveals one instance of men’s deliberate erasure of women from
the history of rhetoric and philosophy in her discussion of Raphael’s painting entitled the School
of Athens.
Some scholars believe that [Hypatia] was originally included among the famous
classical philosophers in Raphael’s iconic School of Athens (1508-10), but she
was morphed into Pope Julius II’s nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, in the
final version of the fresco. The argument that her exclusion is explicable on the
grounds that her beliefs ran contrary to the Church cannot carry any serious
weight in a discussion of a work littered with polytheistic pagan philosophers. It
would appear that Hypatia was considered the only female philosopher worthy of
inclusion: as it is, her ultimate exclusion means that not a single female
philosopher appears in the fresco (McLaughlin Women’s Influence 17).
McLaughlin explains Hypatia’s exclusion as part of the “agonistic process involved in creation
of a canon” that she suggests functions in textual as well as visual history (17).
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Scholars also indicate that women have been historically excluded from education in
rhetoric and philosophy, which led to their exclusion from participation in public discourse
(Lerner, Clark, Pomeroy, Glenn, Jarratt, and others). Complicating the notion of the necessity of
formal education is a narrow definition of what counts as rhetorical participation or contribution
which has served to exclude recognition of women’s achievements in rhetoric and philosophy as
well. In Reclaiming Rhetorica Andrea Lunsford explains “the realm of rhetoric has been almost
exclusively male not because women were not practicing rhetoric—the arts of language are after
all at the source of human communication—but because the tradition has never recognized the
forms, strategies, and goals used by many women as “rhetorical” (Lunsford Reclaiming
Rhetorica 6). Lunsford’s concerns have been addressed by scholars questioning and redefining
what rhetoric is or should be in order to expand our notions of rhetoric and identify places other
than public political venues where rhetorical activity may be found.
In spite of the paucity of primary and secondary materials, biases, and other constrains on
the study of ancient women, some scholars have pieced together the lives of women and their
rhetorical, philosophical, or other public contributions to their ancient societies. Scholars such as
Kathleen Wider, Mary Ellen Waithe, Gillian Clark, Fiona McHardy and Eirann Marshall, and
Bella Vivante, among many others have completed recovery work in the ancient world. Their
scholarship documents the difficulty of conducting research on ancient women as well as the
often negative response to their work by modern, often male scholars to this work.
In “Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle,” Wider
asserts “there were women in most, if not all, the ancient schools of Greek philosophy” (Wider
“Donning” 22). Her article recovers women philosophers and students in the Classical and
Hellenistic periods. She claims the Epicurean, Stoics, Cyrenaic, and Pythagorean schools in
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particular, included women teachers, students or both. Among the Epicureans, Wider names
Leontion, Mammarion, Hedia, Erotion, Nikidion, Bordoin as students, and credits Leontin for
writing a book “refuting Theophrastus, the head of Aristotle’s Lyeceum” (Wider 51). Among the
Stoics, Wider names Daughters of Diodorus Cronus (315-284 BCE) Menexene, Argeia,
Theognis, Artemisia, Pantacleia all of whom became dialecticians (52). She claims that Arete,
daughter of the founder of the school of Hedonism, Aristippus, took the leadership of that school
after her father’s death and trained her own son in philosophy. Wider recovers women
“Pythagorean philosophers in the latter part of the sixth century and into the first half of the fifth
century BCE;” Theano, Myia, Damo, and Arignote, (Wider 29). Her article includes
documentation and fragments about or written by Perictione, Phintys. Aapasia, Diotima, Arete,
Hipparchia, and Pamphile. After her recovery and documentation of women, Wider addresses
controversy over the authorship. Traditional scholars claim that these pieces were not written by
women, but instead were attributed to women for a variety of reasons. She counters by stating
that
all we can deduce with any certainty from the existence of such texts and their
attributions to women is that it must not have been uncommon or at least unheard
of in the ancient world for women to write philosophical treatises, at least popular
ones. If this were not the case, it is hard to imagine why writers would attribute
their works to women. (Wider 40)
Mary Ellen Waithe’s (1987) A History of Women Philosophers includes four volumes
that document the lives and works of women philosophers from 600 BCE-1900 ACE. In the first
volume covering 600 BCE-500ACE, she discusses Theano, Theano II, Phintys, Perictione,
Perictione II, Aesara, Aspasia, Diotime, Hypatia, Makrina, Julia Domina, Arete, Asclepigenia,
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Cleobulina, Hipparchia, Axiothea and Lasthenia. These women lived in Athens, Alexandria,
Sparta, and other places in the Mediterranean world. Waithe claims that during the project she
concluded, “some one hundred or more women philosophers had been omitted from the standard
philosophic reference works and histories of philosophy” (x). Based on the objection of male
scholars who were under the impression that women philosophers were only concerned with the
domestic sphere, she read fragments and concluded that “the women were engaged in precisely
the same kind of philosophic enterprises that have historically characterized male philosophers”
(xii). This will be a useful text since it includes many fragments of women philosophers and the
sources from which Waithe collected them.
Concerned that those who teach the history of philosophy do not teach the work of
women, Waithe followed up on her history of women philosophers with a 1989 article entitled
“On Not Teaching the History of Philosophy.” In this article, she reminds us that ancient men
and women were “part of larger intellectual circles which included other philosophers and
learned persons” (Waithe 135). By not teaching the work of women, she states, “we invite our
students to infer that such women were both prodigies and oddities . . . [which] perpetuates
untruths about women and philosophy” (133). She suggests subject areas in which many of our
ancient women can be read including epistemology, philosophy of mathematics, and moral
philosophy and closes her article with suggestions for more research. Clearly, this work is
necessary for course in the history of rhetoric in our own field in order for us to understand the
variety of rhetorical practices and those who engaged in it.
In Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles, Gillian Clark considers a
wide period of history and location and examines law and social convention as related to women
in the ancient world in order to more fully contextualize their participation and the
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documentation of it. Clark documents names of important women who were active in
philosophy, medicine, and politics. Her chapters on early Christian women are especially strong.
Many of these women were teachers of Christianity and some of them founded monasteries or
churches with their inheritances after they were widowed (Melania, Paula, Demetrias). Clark
also names women with rhetorical or philosophical skills. One important woman is Eudocia
(also known as Athenais 401-460 ACE), the wife of Theodosius II. Clark claims that Eudocia’s
father was an Athenian Sophist who educated her, that she addressed the people of Antioch, and
could “deploy public rhetorical skill” (136-137). Clark also names Sosipatra and Hypatia as
philosophers and explains that both women studied philosophy and taught philosophy and
mathematics. Finally, Clark addresses the ancient ideology of women that has served to keep
women constrained. She states that the “ideology of femaleness had different aspects, so that
strength or weakness could be invoked according to need” in the ancient world (Clark 139).
What Clark suggests here is that women could and did manipulate ideology to suit their needs as
they saw fit for their own purposes, an important notion that counters common notions of
women’s lives as homogenous and nearly universally unempowered in the ancient world.
Fiona McHardy’s and Eirann Marshall’s 2004 edited collection Women’s Influence in
Classical Civilization, also questions scholarly biases about women in the Greco-Roman world.
In the introduction to their text the authors claim,
in a cultural mix which existed in Roman Egypt, women were able to take
advantage of more lenient Egyptian laws to achieve their ends . . . it is not
possible to pigeon-hole women, saying that they belong exclusively to an
Egyptian/private category. Instead . . . women united with men to create a
unique, shared culture. (5)
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The contributors demonstrate the unique shared culture in Roman Egypt as well as consider
women’s influence in other parts of the Mediterranean. Authors specifically consider the realms
of economics, politics, science, law, and the arts, normally deemed the domain of men and
demonstrate how women influenced these areas. Of particular interest is Gráinne McLaughlin’s
chapter “The Logistics of Gender from Classical Antiquity,” which suggests the difficulties of
the ancient female philosopher and scientist within her own time and place, as well as within
modern scholarship. Roman Egypt, in some ways, was a unique culture in its attitudes toward
women. The problem, however, may not be the question of whether or to what extent women
contributed to intellectual work in the ancient world. The problem of Hypatia, McLaughlin
claims, is that biased historical scholarship has obscured her achievements, denigrating her to the
role of scribe for her father, Theon5. Crediting men with work completed by women is a
common problem.
Bella Vivante’s 2007 Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World
considers four cultures in particular, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome and their
considerable influence on one another. Vivante states her goal for the book is to acknowledge
the cultural and legal restrictions while accentuating “the features that empowered women and
that affirmed their active cultural participation,” as such, Vivante changes the trajectory of
scholarship on women preferring a focus on empowerment rather than oppression (Vivante
xxiv). According to Vivante, focus on the oppressions and limitations of the ancient world are
restrictions on our view that create an inaccurate picture of women’s participation and influence.
In her consideration of goddesses and religious rituals, health, medicine, women rulers, and
women’s philosophy and poetry, Vivante provides an account of women’s work and
contributions in these areas to ancient societies. Vivante’s work complements that of Wider and
5
Historians claim that Theon was the last librarian of the great Library of Alexandria.
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Waithe in its recovery of ancient Greek philosophers as well as recovery of Hypatia of
Alexandria and Asklepigenia of Athens. This important text further complicates traditional,
biased histories of women in the ancient world by situating women more accurately within
cultures that empowered women in some ways while they oppressed them in others.
There are many other scholars who have engaged in recovery work or who have provided
contextual work about women in the ancient world. The work of Sarah Pomeroy including
Women’s History and Ancient History, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, and Goddesses, Whores,
Wives, and Slaves, provides important context either in terms of the historical period, or in terms
of approaches and assumptions of women by scholars. Mary R. Lefkowitz’s and Maureen B.
Fant’s Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation will also provide
helpful material, as may Madeline Henry’s Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and her
Biographical Tradition. In the field of Rhetoric and Composition, Diotima and Aspasia are the
only two ancient women who have been recovered and for my scholarship I am dependant on
Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, which includes C.
Jan Swearingen’s “A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, Logos, and Desire” and Jarratt’s and Ong’s
“Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender and Colonial Ideology.” Bizzell’s and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical
Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present and Ritchie’s and Ronald’s Available
Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetorics provide secondary sources as evidence of Aspasia
and Diotima with little comment or context. Cheryl Glenn also includes a chapter on ancient
women in Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance.
Among them, only Glenn’s chapter “Classical Rhetoric Reconceptualized, or Vocal Men and
Muted Women” in Rhetoric Retold addresses women other than Diotima and Aspasia; none of
these texts so much as mentions Hypatia. Why have scholars of the history of rhetoric neglected
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her? Disciplines such as Women’s Studies, Mathematics, and Philosophy have already
recovered Hypatia and her importance. The historical canon of Rhetoric and Composition needs
to include Hypatia because she was, first, a renowned teacher that drew students from all over
the ancient Mediterranean. Furthermore, she was a teacher who lectured on Plato and Aristotle,
figures whose work is essential for our discipline, and we have already recovered the works and
lives of those who followed the works of Plato and Aristotle. Hypatia is a woman who has
captured the collective intellectual imagination of scholars and non-scholars and I find her
exclusion from the canon of historical rhetoric disappointing.
Numerous artistic treatments of Hypatia of Alexandria include poetry, drama, historical
novels, plays, libretti, children’s books, etc., written during the 1600 years since her death. The
most recent artistic treatment is the forthcoming movie, Agora6, directed by Alejandro Amenábar
and starring Rachel Weisz, scheduled for release on December 18, 2009. However much
Hypatia may have caught our collective fascination during the last 1600 years, there is little
academic scholarship addressing her. Most of what does exist takes the form of articles, many of
which debate why she was murdered and a few of which discuss her importance or her
achievements. We have only two scholarly books, both of which lack appropriate context to
explain Hypatia’s achievements.
Polish scholar Maria Dzielska published the first book, Hypatia of Alexandria, in English
in 1995. In her treatment of Hypatia, Dzielska briefly considers the literary legend of Hypatia,
which spans 1,600 years, before making her assertions about who Hypatia’s students, friends,
6
The trailer can be viewed on Joblo.com, <http://www.joblo.com/video/joblo/player.php?video=agora-trl1>, on
Twitch Film.com <http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/amenebars-epic-agora-in-trailer-form/>, or on You Tube
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u50zEun07b4>. IMDB.com’s synopsis of the movie states that the story centers
on Darus, a slave in love with Hypatia, who must choose between his love for her and his freedom by way of
Christianity.
Wikipedia reports that novelist Ki Longfellow is writing a novel of Hypatia's life, tentatively titled Flow Down Like
Silver, with a tentative publication date of 2009.
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and colleagues were, and the nature and extent of her influence in Alexandria. Dzielska
concludes with a theory of Hypatia’s murder. The second book, Hypatia of Alexandria:
Mathematician and Martyr, was published in 2007 by Australian mathematician Michael A. B.
Deakin. Deakin’s major argument is that within the context of the late Roman Empire where
“there was little mathematical activity” Hypatia was “very likely the leading mathematician in
the world” (110-111).
I have discovered some problems with Dzielska’s assertions about Hypatia; simply, her
recovery is incomplete in several aspects, culminating in a biased recovery of Hypatia. While it
is clear that she was an important person in Alexandria, Dzielska asserts that Hypatia was an
unusual and privileged woman of Greek ancestry who remained a virgin. In essence, Dzielska
recreates stereotypes of the exceptional ‘white’ woman accepted into the scholarly community of
Alexandria, in no small part, because of her virginity. Dzielska’s assertion is based on the
translation of the Greek word sophrosyne to mean virgin. However, this may be a mistranslation
of the word. According to Hanne Blank’s book Virgin: The Untouched History, “for both
women and men, the various aspects of unchastity, such as excessiveness, decadence, and lack of
self-discipline, were to be shunned. But at the same time, complete celibacy or adult virginity
were considered physically harmful, philosophically extreme, and socially bizarre” in short, to
refer to someone as a sophrosyne meant that people engaged in moderate or chaste sexual
relations, not that they necessarily remained abstinent or virgins (122-123). Hypatia’s virginity
may indeed be valid, but if so, it is likely based on her Neoplatonism, something I know little
about at this point. In any case, the recreation of Hypatia as a virgin reinscribes patriarchal
control of women’s sexuality, which may indeed not have been the case in the ancient world.
Her depiction as a virgin, by contemporary standards, naturalizes and requires virginity as a state
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through which women were and can be empowered. Virginity, then, remains an important
criterion by which women can be valued, and adherence to it may function to further obfuscate
women in need of recovery. The reconstruction of Hypatia as a virgin may further function to
hide a motive for her murder, something I hope to be able to address in my research.
Dzielska also misses Hypatia’s ethnicity—Greek Egyptian, and this is no small matter
within the context of Roman Alexandria in terms of Hypatia’s access to social and legal
empowerment. Based on her father’s7 ethnic identification as Greek Egyptian combined with
patterns of emigration from Greece to Alexandria, it is unlikely that Hypatia was of “pure” Greek
ancestry. Simply, historio-demographic studies completed by Bagnall indicate that there were
not enough eligible Greek women in Alexandria to provide wives for Greek men by the time of
the Roman occupation, so it is unlikely that Theon could have married a Greek woman or that his
own heritage was entirely Greek. Constructing Hypatia as a Greek woman indicates important
researcher biases related to whiteness and “Westerness.” The common assumption that any
important historical act or life was white is a serious problem that continues in much
contemporary history and historiography. Correcting Hypatia’s ethnicity addresses white
supremacist ideology common in the writing of history, an important goal of my work.
Dzielska’s research is incomplete because it does not recreate Hypatia’s historical context
sufficiently and as such, cannot properly contextualize Hypatia’s life and accomplishments;
hence, it misses the mark. Dzielska also asserts that Hypatia did not have any female students;
another claim I find unlikely given the high value of education in Alexandria, the relatively easy
access to an enormous amount of material and teachers, and the laws and customs concerning
women at the time. While it is true that I have not found the names of any of Hypatia’s female
students and am unlikely to, the practice of teaching women was more common than scholarship
7
Theon
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might lead us to believe8. This combined with the fact that women were teaching elsewhere in
the Mediterranean, suggests that it was at least possible that Hypatia had female students, and
furthermore, that scholars should not confuse a lack of documentation with the actual lived
reality of women’s lives.
As far as Deakin’s book is concerned, it is not as scholarly as Dzielska’s as it glosses
information Deakin claims is too difficult for a lay reader. Although Deakin’s appendices
reproduce important scholarship and illuminate Hypatia’s mathematics, his overall argument is
highly dependant on Dzielska’s. Nonetheless, Deakin reclaims Hypatia as a teacher of
mathematics and asserts that Hypatia continued her father’s intellectual work after his death.9
Both scholars entirely avoid discussion of other women working in the Mediterranean around
Hypatia’s lifetime, and as such, both are oversimplifications that cannot contextualize her
appropriately.
In addition, no one has considered that Hypatia may have been murdered because she
was a woman, but her murder is an important aspect as, no doubt, it is because of her brutal
murder that her life was documented at all. Many historical sources, from Edward Gibbon’s
eighteenth century The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Pollard and Reid’s 2006 The
Rise and Fall of Roman Alexandria name the virginal Hypatia’s murder as the final fall of
Hellenic paganism and the triumph of Christianity10. In some ways, historians say, her murder
8
Pollard and Reid, Clark, Netz, Pack, and Vivante, among others, name women students and women teachers all
over the Mediterranean world before, during, and after Hypatia’s lifetime. Also, there is some indication that in
Alexandria, women were literate at a higher rate than in other cities of the Mediterranean world.
9
Deakin reprints “Pappus and the Pandrosian Puzzlement” by Winifred Frost which claims that Pandrosian, an
Alexandrian mathematician and teacher who lived a short time before Hypatia, was, contrary to previous
scholarship, a woman and not a man. Deakin also assesses the myth of Saint Catherine, who many claim to have
been modeled on Hypatia, includes translations of primary texts, and a specific discussion of his research materials.
10
To their own rhetorical purposes, I might add. For example, Gibbon vilifies Christianity and St. Cyril in particular
for Hypatia’s murder and suggests it as the final eradication of intellectual inquiry that would last until the
Renaissance. By contrast Parsons’ Some Lies and Errors of History, following, in part The Chronicle by John,
Minardi 17
was necessary for Christianity, the ‘true religion,’ to bloom11. This claim is not trivial because
with the focus on the eradication of paganism, it is easy to miss the eradication of female
authority, which shifts as Christianity establishes itself12. Her murder may also have served as a
warning to other women who might have been participating in intellectual or public life.
Although Molinaro’s13 fictional account of Hypatia’s murder is problematic, it brings up an
interesting connection to the Church’s later treatment of women who do not follow proscribed
rules set for them. Molinaro states that Hypatia’s murder serves to “warn[. . . ] future centuries
of reformers and [women] healers that they must hush their knowledge if they wished to avoid
burning as heretics, or witches” (Molinaro 6). I mention this broad reference here because these
issues may be examples that reveal the rhetorical nature of history and its power to maintain a
disciplined population, something that affects women today.
Methodology
As I have already stated, many scholars in the field of Rhetoric and Composition have
addressed the absence of women from the ancient rhetorical canon. My assumptions match
theirs in the understanding that women have been erased by time or by deliberate destruction of
their written works. In addition to loss of manuscripts through natural deterioration, it is
important to remember that in the ancient world the Romans deliberately censored the rhetorical
canon to “close and constrict the range of [intellectual] debate,” a tradition that Christian
scholars continued until the Renaissance and which frequently excluded women, erased, or
minimized their participation (Cole 42). Hence, my first assumption is that women have been
Coptic bishop of Nikiu, states that the typically violent mob of Alexandria was responsible for her murder because
Cyril, having been canonized, “would prevent us from supposing that he could ever have been a murderer” (62).
11
See The Chronicle by John, Coptic bishop of Nikiu
12
At least until the rise of women intellectuals such as Hildegard of Bingen and Heloise after the eleventh century.
13
See Molinaro, Ursule. “A Christian Martyr in Reverse Hypatia: 370-415 A Vivid Portrait of the Life and Death
of Hypatia as seen Through the Eyes of a Feminist Poet and Novelist.”
Minardi 18
erased from history for the purposes of maintaining white patriarchal power. The writing of
history is never innocent or benign, and must be contested in order to establish a more accurate
historical account. I will rely on much of Foucault’s work that theorizes the relationship between
power and knowledge in order to frame my work because it will help explain the power
associated with building historical knowledge as well as identify exclusionary practices that
continue in historical discourses.
Another important point I hope to make is that interlocking identities (race, class, gender
etc.,) do not always function for oppression, depending on a particular place and time, they can
function to empower. To my knowledge, no one has actually theorized a paradigm of identity
that reverses or questions this feminist assumption. I will be looking for one or more theorists
who can help me explain such empowerment in the disciplines of Women’s Studies and
Sociology.
Methods
My primary method will be that of historical ethnography, which I understand to be an
approach to the writing of history that can recover women for whom no primary texts exist.
Historical ethnography is a method that pieces together legal, social, intellectual and other
customs and practices that create the context of historical women’s material conditions. From
this context, a scholar may make a reasonably inductive argument. I will be looking to
Anthropology for explication of this method. In our own field, I will also adopt a method of the
same name developed by Jacqueline Jones Royster in Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social
Change Among African-American Women14. She explains historical anthropology as a method
in which she had to “spend more time considering context than text,” forcing her to depend the
I do not know how Royster’s method intersects or contradicts the method of the same name in Anthropology as
yet.
14
Minardi 19
perspectives of other disciplines in order to consider “the specific impact of race, class, gender
and culture on the ability to be creative and to achieve . . . in terms of a particular group of
human beings (257). She claims this “transdisciplinary approach” helped her develop “the habit
of caring as a rhetorician” that allowed her to illuminate the uniqueness of the women she
studied (258). The assumption of this “kaleidoscopic” view is that a research “has greater
interpretive power than a singularly defined view would have,” because by deliberately shifting
perspectives we can create scholarship that is richer, more complex, and more accurately situated
in time and place (277). Contributing to this kaleidoscopic view, and compensating for the fact
that Hypatia left no primary texts, will be my readings of secondary and tertiary texts. I also plan
to read several translations of each of the ancient accounts so that I might address the
inconsistencies or biases and practice Fetterly’s idea of being a “resisting reader” more fully
(qtd. in Bizzell “Opportunities”). Additionally, “reading it crookedly and telling it slant, could
help me shape—re-member—a female rhetorical presence” that until now has not been
recovered for the historical canon of rhetoric in our field (Glenn Retold 8).
Secondary and Tertiary Texts
Evidence of Hypatia’s life, works, and murder are documented in several ancient sources
including The Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius: As Epitomized by Photius, Patriarch of
Constantinople from the late fourth early fifth century, the fifth century Ecclesiastical History (c.
439 CE), written by Socrates Scholasticus, and The Chronicle of John Malalas from the late fifth
early sixth century. There is also an entry in the Chronicle by John, Coptic Bishop of Nikiu from
the sixth century, and an entry about Hypatia in the tenth century encyclopedia Suidae Lexicon.
These documents establish who Hypatia was and provide a sense of the importance of her
scholarly work, in spite of the contradictions between accounts. The tertiary texts about
Minardi 20
Hypatia’s life are considerable in number and appear in many languages. At this point, I have no
intention of including the obviously artistic treatments of her life and plan to narrow the scope of
my study to academic resources only15. The tertiary texts often illuminate, complicate, or
complete secondary texts.
In order to flesh out who Hypatia was and how she lived the life she did, I will also read
about the legal, demographic and intellectual context, the works of Synesius of Cyrene, her most
renowned pupil, and St. Cyril, allegedly her biggest enemy. Thick historical ethnography will
allow me to recreate the legal, intellectual, and social context that enabled Hypatia’s
empowerment. Just as important, I hope to demonstrate that Hypatia was not aberrant by
recovering the context of Hypatia’s life and the material conditions that empowered it and the
lives of women doing intellectual work in the Mediterranean during her lifetime, further
complicating, questioning, and hopefully balancing the gendered historical record more
appropriately.
I do not claim that my contribution vis-à-vis the recovery of Hypatia is objective;
historical knowledge is never objective, but rhetorical. Hence, the goal of my research has
political purposes. I agree with Glenn when she states, “the project of regendering rhetorical
history is a feminist performative act, a commitment to the future of women, a promise that
rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women” (Glenn Retold
174). In light of Glenn’s statement, I first hope to contribute to feminist corrections to the
historical record to undermine the notion that only white men (or white women) did anything
important in history. Second, I hope to empower other feminist historiographers to consider the
period to recover other women, as Roman Alexandria may prove rich in research subjects.
Third, I hope to dismantle the idea that only exceptional, privileged and elite women contributed
15
Although I may still consider texts dealing with Hypatia that have been written over the last ten years.
Minardi 21
to history. My political goal here is to document ways that women have participated in
intellectual and public life and demonstrate how material conditions, at least in Roman
Alexandria, sanctioned it. The deliberate effort to consider race, class, and gender as
empowering may reveal much of what has been hidden by this application to illuminate
oppressions that do not necessarily serve women as a group now, or for the historical record.
Content and Structure (chapter outline)
Again, my claim is that Hypatia of Alexandria needs to be recovered for the historical
canon of rhetoric, and that she is only one among many women perusing intellectual work in the
ancient Mediterranean. In order to support my claim, chapter one will introduce Hypatia and the
myth of Hypatia as the last educated and Hellenistic pagan in the Mediterranean through the use
of secondary sources. In chapter two, I plan to recreate the social, legal, historical, political, and
intellectual period. By recreating the historical milieu, I can recover and contextualize Hypatia
and the women scholars working in the Mediterranean who were her contemporaries. To push
the argument farther, this move may also allow me to state that it is likely that Hypatia knew a
different Greek intellectual tradition than scholars today know, and that Hypatia, by way of her
teaching, was actually participating in a long tradition of women teachers teaching women; an
important rhetorical move. In chapter three, I will spend some time detailing other women who
were teaching or writing rhetoric/philosophy in the ancient Mediterranean during Hypatia’s
lifetime. In chapter four, I would like to consider the discourse of feminist historiography and
suggest ways for scholars to continue research in the ancient world. Here I plan to discuss that
race, class, and gender can be used as a guide to historical women who may have been
empowered rather than oppressed, reversing the paradigm to feminist scholars’ advantage. In
chapter five I will conclude the dissertation with a timeline of women that I plan to cross-
Minardi 22
reference with an annotated bibliography documenting the location of fragments by or about
Hypatia and her contemporaries. My hope is to encourage other scholars to consider feminist
historiographical projects of their own so that we can close the 1500-year silence of women in
order to create a more balanced, accurate historical account. I also hope that by including this
information and where it can be found, I can provide easy access to those who teach ancient
rhetorics so that they may add this materials to their courses more readily.
Hypatia may very well explain at least one place and time in the ancient Mediterranean
world in which women led independent, scholarly, active, and public lives (as it seems Hypatia
did). This fact alone could provide those involved in revisionist history a new way of
approaching and interpreting the ancient world in spite of the paucity of primary materials.
Perhaps more importantly, it may be the information I need to demonstrate the limits of claiming
educated, intellectual women as anomalous and special, which may allow me to establish a new
pattern that demonstrates how women participated in intellectual life all over the ancient world.
Hypatia and other women intellectuals in the ancient world indicate that in the course of world
history there may have been places and times that have provided a variety of opportunities for a
diverse array of women to engage in intellectual pursuits on many levels and that may cut across
class privilege in addition to gender and race. Constraints on women have not been a stable,
cohesively defined set of restrictions imposed on all women at all times despite what histories,
including women’s histories, might lead us to believe. Opening the discussion will allow
feminist historiographers to reconsider such universalizing claims and may encourage them to
look again for women they missed. My goal here is a political one that attempts to resist not only
the erasure of women from the rhetorical canon, but one that attempts to essentialize and
privilege women based on embedded and unexamined biases associated with whiteness, class, or
Minardi 23
educational privilege. I hope that by engaging in this I can provide some “insights into gendered
social existence” in the ancient world as well as in contemporary interpretations of women in the
ancient world (Ramazanoğlu 147).
Minardi 24
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Minardi 25
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