Prayer and gender in John Chrysostom’s homilies On Hannah

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the intersections of prayer and gender in John Chrysostom’s (ca. 349‑407 CE) homilies On Hannah (CPG 4411). Chrysostom speaks about prayer in many of his homilies. However, in the homilies On Hannah, notions of prayer and gender, especially masculinity, intersect quite clearly, which is not always the case with other discussions of prayer in Chrysostom’s oeuvre. The questions in this article include the following: What does Chrysostom do with the gender of Hannah as a woman of prayer in these homilies? How is the problem of infertility, and its intersection with prayer, handled in the homilies? How does Hannah pray as a woman, and what does this mean for the men in Chrysostom’s audience? In order to address these matters, the study examines the issue of Hannah’s infertility, which was the main motivation for her prayer. Chrysostom’s portrait of Hannah as an example of how to pray is then analysed, focusing especially on Hannah’s internalisation of her prayer, as Chrysostom perceives it. The article aims to demonstrate that prayer, like many other aspects of early Christian life and worship, was a highly gendered concept and issues of gender lie at the heart of our understanding of Christian spiritual practice in antiquity.