Embodied Violence: Late Antique Asceticism or the Slow and Fast Configuration of Female Saintly Bodies.

This contribution examines the bodily and gendered dimension of violence. Extreme physical oppression was a key component of hagiography, turning spectacular and gruesome executions, and their resistance, into a public statement (Castelli 2005).

There was however another type of violence that pervaded hagiographies, particularly concerning ascetic practices. It was a silent, slow, even intimate violence –along the concept proposed by Nixon (2011) of slow violence–. This was materialised on the martyrs' bodies through forms of extreme bodily configurations: famine, long and slow bodily mortifications, etc. The slow consequences of isolation and marginalisation constructed saintly bodies and shaped their religious and social engagement.

This contribution examines the gendered and bodily dimensions of slow violence (Christian & Dowler 2011) by assessing its impact on female ascetic bodies in Late Antiquity. It revolves around a case study: the Passio of Shirin (ed. Devos 1946), a hagiography preserved in Greek, and written in the early seventh century in Sasanian territory, a geopolitical space where Zoroastrianism dominated the hegemonic spheres of politics and religion. It narrates the life, conversion to Christianity, and execution of a young Zoroastrian noble woman from Karka d-Beit Slok (present-day Kirkuk, north- eastern Iraq). Here, rapid and spectacular violence is exercised by the Sasanian authorities –the opposite side of the spectrum–, who publicly inflict upon her physical and judicial punishments. However, there is a certain type of violence that materialises upon her – hunger, marginalisation, bodily demotion, etc..–; it is an intimate violence, that slowly transforms her body, but one that is publicly seen as praiseworthy and as a sign of religious commitment.

Here, fast violence does not exclude slow but the two complement each other, constituting a "single complex" (Christian & Dowler 2019, 1072). Taking as methodological groundwork feminist studies that have described how slow and gendered violence is inscribed upon bodies (e. g., Roberts 1997), this contribution explains how both types of violence are presented in hagiographic testimonies and how these representations helped to depict religious engagement and negotiation.

By conceptualising representations of violence and its gendered and bodily dimensions, we can critically examine how female saints resorted to the extreme configuration of their

bodies to express publicly their notion of religious commitment, shuttling between the gendered binaries of the intimate and the public, the masculine and the feminine, the sacred and the non-sacred.