Las iglesias como escenario de la experiencia histórica de las mujeres en Hispania tardoantigua

This paper analyses the social dimension of churches as gendered spaces in the context of late-antique Iberia. It therefore studies the different dimensions of women’s historical experience of churches from an intersectional perspective, combining gender with other categories of social hierarchisation, such as personal legal and economic status, and taking as a basis for analysis and information the written or literary sources of the period (5th-7th centuries AD) and archaeological and epigraphic sources. It identifies and defines the role that women of the socio-economic elite played as a focus of attraction for Christian matronage and charitable behaviour, financing the construction and restoration of religious buildings or the donation of objects for worship, in a behaviour characteristic of their level of social excellence and no different from that of men of the same rank. Likewise, the possible feminine link to the micro-networks of social and symbolic power that emerge in these religious spaces is investigated, as well as the subaltern involvement of women of lower social ranks in the personal relationships that are woven around the churches. Finally, this study also consider the symbolic dimension of the relationship between women and the Church, mainly through the allegories or feminine metaphors of the Church, which are by no means rare in the written sources of the period, linking both, woman and Church, on a plane of metaphorical meanings, trying to determine their connection with the socio-cultural references of late-antique Iberian society.