SOURCE: Brakke, David. “The Lady Appears: Materializations of ‘Woman’ in Early Monastic Literature.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3 (fall 2003): 387-402.

In the following essay, Brakke discusses narratives about monks who, upon their deaths, were revealed to have been disguised women.

According to a famous monastic saying, the Egyptian desert in Late Antiquity was the place where, as in some recent theory about gender in history, “there are no women.”¹ To be sure, the desert was filled with thoughts of women, memories of abandoned wives and mothers, and demonic specters of women, but monks claimed that there were few, if any, flesh-and-blood women in their desert. Likewise, Elizabeth Clark has invited historians of Christianity to consider the prospect that our sources present us not with real women from the past, but with male authors' fantasies about or rhetorical uses of women, no more than the...