Maria Doerfler (Yale University)
The necrosima, a collection of 85 Syriac funerary madrāshê ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian, encompasses hymns in a variety of meters, commemorating Christians of all ages, genders, social stations, and professional backgrounds. Scholarly interest in this collection peaked in the nineteenth century; in the intervening decades, the hymns have retreated into relative obscurity, a fate precipitated in part by the recognition that few appear to be of genuinely Ephremic vintage.
Their contents nevertheless provide compelling glimpses into the ritual construction of social identity, particularly for groups whose bodies rarely intruded into texts and who throughout their lifetimes remained aspirationally remote from the public square. Madrāshâ 31, titled In funere matrisfamilias by the hymns' first editor, the Maronite priest Buṭros Mubārak, thus served to accompany the funerary procession of a wife and mother. It assumes the literary form of a dialogue between the deceased woman and her community, and centers largely on the former’s self-identification as daughter, victim, and unwitting double of the biblical Eve.
In its original setting, this hymn and others like it were performed by women choirs who accompanied the body from home to cemetery, and who assumed both the roles of the deceased and of her interlocutors. In a real sense, both female corpse and hymning bodies could together move into spaces otherwise foreclosed to them. It is this heterotopic and -chronic character of the funerary procession that creates space (and time) for the presence of women in the public square. Here as in the liturgy, time and space are transfigured in light of different realities – a transformation in which the virgin choirs both participate and which they exploit.
There is perforce a transgressive element to funerary hymnody – a genre that insists on the presence of life in the face of death, on the worthlessness of temporal goods, and that frequently celebrates that which otherwise gives rise to mourning. The hymning of the departed materfamilias in madrāshâ 31 adds, however, a further element of transgressiveness, by bringing into civic space the voices of the very women most emphatically excluded from it: those of chaste wives and mothers. This paper draws on contemporary spatial theory, especially the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Soja, to explore the function of the female corpse, ritually identified as both mother and virgin, and constructed in dialogue with the bodies of women choirs, in the city spaces of late antiquity.