This essay was part of a 2026 NAPS Conference Book Review Panel devoted to Things Unseen Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World by Ellen Muehlberger. Read the full forum here.
Let’s begin where Ellen Muehlberger does. In the very first chapter, she introduces a scene that is deceptively ordinary: a boy, about fourteen, sitting in a classroom somewhere in the late ancient Mediterranean—Antioch, perhaps—who is working through an assignment. He is asked to compose a speech in character, to answer a question that is both precise and conceptually unstable: “What would a prostitute who has come to her senses say?”
This is not simply an exercise in writing. It is an exercise in inhabiting, in rehearsing, in producing a voice that is not his own and yet must come to feel as though it is. As Muehlberger carefully shows, these exercises trained boys not only to represent women but to experience themselves as capable of doing so with authority. What begins as rhetorical play becomes, through repetition, a form of knowledge. Or, perhaps more precisely, a conviction of knowledge that does not require verification.
Muehlberger’s formulation is as elegant as it is unsettling: these imagined speeches, “even though they were deliberately made up—indeed, especially because they were made up—worked to instill a disposition of arrogance and a confident, self-generated knowledge of others.”[1] The force of that claim rests not simply on the presence of imagination, but on its elevation into evidence. The aim of this exercise is to train certainty and not empathy.
What emerges in this chapter, then, is a clever read of both the ancient world and the scholarly exercise: the less real the woman, the more knowable she becomes. The “impossible woman” as the chapter gestures then is not a failure of representation; she is its most efficient form. She is a paper doll of late antiquity and infinitely reproducible. As a repetitive figure she remains internally coherent and rhetorically satisfying. Most of all she is resistant to contradiction because she cannot answer back. She cannot exceed the script. She exists precisely at the point where imagination replaces encounter.
This is where Muehlberger’s intervention becomes so important for how we think about the archive of late antiquity. Muehlberger is not simply describing a pedagogical practice; she is identifying a mechanism by which gendered knowledge is produced and stabilized. These boys, trained in speaking as women, carry that practice into adulthood. They weave their way into the writing of histories, sermons, and, important for my own work, hagiographies. The classroom becomes the quiet foundation for a much larger discursive world—one in which women are already known before they are ever encountered.
At this point, I want to bring Muehlberger’s argument into conversation with Christine Luckritz Marquis, whose work on ascetic bodies exposes a related dynamic. Luckritz Marquis observed in her article “Better off Dead” that female and feminized bodies within monastic literature function not as subjects but as problems to be resolved—problems whose resolution often takes the form of elimination.[2] In the texts Luckritz Marquis examines, “the best female form is the dead one,” a conclusion that raises the pointed question: better for whom?
If we place this alongside Muehlberger’s rhetorical women, our paper doll pattern comes into focus. The imagined woman is already contained. The ascetic woman, when she appears in narrative form, is subjected to a similar containment—her body disciplined then her story ends. In both cases, the instability of the female figure is resolved through forms of control that render her legible. The rhetorical exercise and the ascetic narrative operate on different registers, but they converge on a shared outcome: a woman who can be known without any remainder.
This convergence becomes even more visible, when we turn to the layered Marys of late antiquity, whose overlapping identities resist any attempt at singularity. Mary of Egypt is perhaps the most striking example highlighted in the chapter, not because she is unique, but because she is so clearly assembled from prior forms as Muehlberger notes. She is not, strictly speaking, the prostitute of the rhetorical exercise, and yet she arrives already shaped by that figure. Her story read through a lens that expects sexual excess is quickly followed by repentance and transformation. She carries within her the folds of other Marys: Mary Magdalene, whose retrospective and false association with prostitution is itself a product of interpretive layering. The many Marys of the New Testament all collapse in on one another and take other unnamed women with them. These figures do not remain discrete. They produce a composite Mary that is at once overdetermined and strangely flat.
In this sense, Mary of Egypt is not one woman, and she cannot be. She is, rather, what the tradition makes possible when rhetorical types and the ascetic imagination converge. She becomes, as I have argued elsewhere, a figure constructed through “a web of interconnected themes… where gender violence and sanctity blur,” and where narrative excess produces what can only be described as monstrous coherence—but maybe that’s where the eventual Mary of Egypt escapes the final act where she is named in the sand after she has resolutely died.[3]
In the vita, before she is Mary, she is a sexual predator and a terrifying specter who floats without a name or identity. As I note in my last chapter of Gender Violence in Late Antiquity, she frequently reduces the pursuing monk to tears and prostrate gestures. He is frequently described as shaking with fear. Even in her description of her pre-flight to the desert life, she is more recognizably male than female. The yet to be named Mary is careful to note—a section of the text that Muehlberger draws our attention to—that she was not a typical prostitute. She would not accept payment for her sexual conquests.
The question is not whether this soon to be Mary was a prostitute, but why she must eventually be read as one. The answer lies not in her story, but in the structures and literary folds that precede it. Muehlberger’s chapter helps us see those structures with new clarity. The rhetorical training of boys does not simply prepare them to write; it prepares them to recognize certain kinds of women, to identify them as already understood. The “is she is she not” a prostitute, that blurry figure of sexual excess, must come to her (and his) senses and answer our historical questions. She cannot be an anomaly; she must be a template. And once that template is in place, it becomes remarkably difficult to ignore the writing in the sand. Even figures who resist it are eventually chained back to it.
This is where Muehlberger’s discussion of ventriloquism becomes especially sharp. The act of speaking in another’s voice might appear, at first glance, to offer the possibility of empathy, a way of bridging difference and maybe even give a woman agency. But as she shows, this hope is misplaced. There is no bridge but a link back. Identification does not undo hierarchy (patriarchy?). It can only reinforce it. To speak as another is not necessarily to encounter them—it may instead be to replace them—especially when she’s dead.
We see this dynamic repeatedly in late ancient Christian texts, where male authors inhabit female perspectives only to redirect them toward familiar ends. In my own work, I have described this process as a form of narrative appropriation, in which “the violent reality many wo/men still face” is not condemned but reworked into a theological framework that renders it meaningful.[4] He who casts the first stone or review take note!
The female voice, when it appears, is already aligned with that framework. It confirms what the author, and the audience, expects to hear. What Muehlberger allows us to see is that this is not simply a literary strategy. It is also the product of a long-standing habit of thought and performance. The confidence with which these voices are produced—the ease with which they are accepted—derives from a training that begins in the classroom and extends outward into the broader culture of knowledge-making. The result is a system in which imagined women stand in for real ones, not as approximations, but as authoritative and repetitive representations.
This has significant implications for how we, as late ancient historians, approach these texts. Muehlberger’s work forcefully challenges the assumption that we can recover women’s voices from the sources that survive. It does not foreclose that possibility, but it does complicate it. The voices we encounter are already always mediated, already always shaped by practices of imagination or fantasy that carry their own authority.
At the same time, her work does not leave us without resources. By exposing these mechanisms, she invites us then to read differently. We must attend not only to what is said, but to how it becomes sayable. The impossibility of these women, their instability, their excess, then becomes a point of entry rather than a barrier. It reminds us that what appears coherent is often the result of sustained effort, that what feels natural has been carefully constructed.
What I find most compelling about Things Unseen as a whole, and in this chapter in particular, is its focus on these affective dimensions of knowledge. Muehlberger is interested not just in what late ancient Christians knew, but in how they came to feel certain that they knew it (and how we too become certain in what we know). The rhetorical exercises she examines do more than produce texts. These habits persist, shaping not only ancient writing but modern scholarship.
And so, we find ourselves implicated in the very structures and folds she describes. We, too, work with fragments, with mediated voices, with figures who are always already constructed—most especially when we’re chasing after women. The difference, perhaps, is that we are asked to do so with an awareness of the limits of that process.
Muehlberger’s prose, as always, makes this look effortless. The argument unfolds with clarity and control. Her examples are carefully chosen and the implications allowed to emerge without overstatement. But beneath that surface lies a deeply challenging claim: that knowledge, particularly knowledge about others, is never neutral. It is produced through practices that carry their own histories and their own investments.
To return, then, to the boy in the classroom: he writes, he performs, and he learns. He learns not only how to speak, but how to know. The question is what happens when that knowledge encounters the world beyond the classroom. When that same knowledge meets bodies that do not conform, voices that do not align, or lives that exceed the script so he must once again play the man.
Muehlberger does not resolve that tension, and neither should we. Instead, she leaves us with a more difficult task: that is, to recognize the repetitive patterns that make knowledge possible and to remain attentive to what they render unseen.
Jennifer Barry is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Mary Washington and is a Women’s Studies and Religion Program Fellow at Harvard University (2026-2027). She is a historian of late antiquity whose research examines early Christianity, gender, violence, ecclesiastical historiography, and the construction of religious identity. She is the author of Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2019) and Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025). Her two forthcoming monographs include Scandalous Christian Histories in Late Antiquity (University of Edinburgh Press) and Terrifying Women in the Ancient World (Basic Books).
[1] Ellen Muehlberger, Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World (University of California Press, 2025), 20.
[2] Christine Luckritz Marquis, “Better off Dead?: Violence, Women, and Late Ancient Asceticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 33.2 (2025): 305-334.
[3] Jennifer Barry, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025), 167.
[4] Barry, Gender Violence in Late Antiquity, 167.