Two recently-published works involved in the representation of women in the Christian past show two contemporary but divergent historiographic modes. The following essay examines each study within a larger frame of inquiry as to how patriarchy continues to shape both the institutional and embodied orders within which feminist historiography of early Christianity and Late Antiquity takes place. Using Critical Race Theory as the best available perspective from which to engage with systems of oppression, I articulate certain revisions which should be made to current efforts towards equality and consider what it would mean to write feminist historiography as counter-narrative or counter-storytelling without that becoming a decorative or extra-curricular practice in the academy. When feminist historiography is treated simultaneously in institutional, embodied, and epistemic terms it becomes evident that the way we think about women is part of a high-stakes conflict around the use of the past.

The 20 th century saw intense change in theories of knowledge. How can we integrate such developments with our approach to knowledge (as represented in texts) in Late Antiquity? What happens if we apply the notion of knowledge as a product of specific acts and institutions with specific purposes and functions to late ancient texts which concern themselves with the production, collection or display of different grades of knowledge? How would such an approach change the way we frame research on theological, philosophical, and pedagogical texts? In this essay I argue that we should abandon debates about whether to categorize specific texts as esoteric, theological/Christian or philosophical/pagan, and turn our attention to culturally and historically particular features of the terrain of the late ancient episteme. I describe six features of knowledge production through textual practices and articulate the imagined epistemic world in which reading practices took place and which defined the conditions of the value or legitimacy of those practices. This essay is offered as a framework for the interpretation of texts concerned with the production of knowledge, whether on the quotidian level of grammatical education or in its more rarefied forms. This framework allows texts to be read together according to function rather than formal genre or the the religious identity of their authors, so that new conversations around late ancient knowledge production can emerge and models of influence or borrowing can be left behind. The six features I have identified are patrimony, curatorship, mimesis , oikonomia , cosmos, and the product of all of these, the object-subject.