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ancient sources consistently depicted the Melanias’ vast wealth—both monetary and spiritual—as a legacy to support and inspire future generations. In their lifetimes, familial and religious connections embedded the Melanias within extensive social networks. Soon after the Melanias’ deaths, the writings of their contemporaries embedded them within an even farther-reaching set of textual networks. These proved to be particularly resilient and long-lasting, connecting the Melanias to ages far removed from their own. Well over a thousand years after their deaths, the Melanias still loomed larger than life.
This does not mean, however, that the Melanias’ influence remained constant. Rather, knowledge of the Melanias ebbed and flowed. But the last hundred or so years appear to have been particularly important for the shaping of the Melanias’ cultural afterlife. This section, “Modernities,” examines three recent rediscoveries of the Melanias. The first essay begins in the early twentieth century with the unexpected discovery of Gerontius’s Life of Melania the Younger by an “almost-pope.” The second essay begins in the 1970s and examines the increasing prominence of the Melanias within modern Coptic Orthodox homilies and devotional literature. The third essay begins in the late twentieth century with Western feminist scholars rediscovering Gerontius’s hagiography. In each of these cases, many of the issues so prominent in ancient discussions of the Melanias—wealth, gender, asceticism, orthodoxy, apologetics, and polemics—again come to the fore, though often in radically different contexts and configurations.
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