Transvestite nuns is a really common topic in Byzantine hagiographical
literature. The stories of saints like Marina, Matrona of Perge, Anastasia
Patrikia or Euphrosyne of Alexandria, among many others, as well as in
other situations in hagiographies in which women dress up like men (i.e. in
Saint Tarasius Life, when a group of women in disguise to enter the saint's
tomb) reflect a common practice during Late Antiquity. Although it has been
studied as a peculiar case of Byzantine society or in a Medieval context, I
believe that this is the result of a long process about the role of women
in society that starts in Classical Greece and Rome and hatchs out with the
arrival of the new religions in the Mediterranean, specially Christianity.
Dress in Antiquity does not only mean clothes, but identity: dressing as a
man suppose the asuming of a maculine role or, at least, a denial of
feminity (and what it involves: marriage, children, housekeeping...).
Through cross-dressing and the renunciation of sexuality (another of their
classical primary functions), these women were able to preach and convert
as males, although they were not unanimously seing positively by their
peers. Christianity in Late Antiquity and Proto-Byzantine Period allowed
women an alternative discourse through asceticism, in which they could
assume an asexual masculine role. Asceticism meant a threat, especially in
Late Antiquity, to classical patriarchal family, because chastity and its
consecutive sanctity became a new element of prestige through which the
individual could arise. Christian transvestite Holy Women fought between
fame and marginalisation, between the new models that radical forms of
Christianity proposed and the classical patriarchal ones that defended
other Christian leaders, like Saint Paul or Tertullian.
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