‘‘Wear the Armor of Your Shame!’’: Debating Veiling and the Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early third century, Tertullian (approx. 150—220 C.E.) penned On the Veiling of Virgins to cajole unveiled virgin women to cover their heads. While scholars have read the treatise primarily as evidence of his misogyny or his attempt to establish a male ecclesiology, this article examines it as evidence of a debate between Tertullian and virgin women in Carthage over the nature of a woman’s flesh and the possibility of its transformation. Employing Judith Butler’s conception of performativity, I consider how Tertullian connects veiling to his conception of the salvation of the flesh, and why he perceives the virgins’ unveiling a visible contestation (or, in Butler’s terms, a performative undoing) of that vision. For Tertullian, the flesh is both corruptible and shameful and only transformed through Christ’s death and resurrection. Across his writings, women’s flesh serves as evidence of the degradation of the human condition. The notion that women’s flesh indicates sordidness also underlies his complaint against the virgins who ‘‘expose’’ their heads. In On the Veiling of Virgins, Tertullian employs a host of cultural discourses—most especially the notion that a woman’s head indicates her genitalia, and materialistic conceptions of vision that cast the gaze as erotic and intrusive—in order to establish veiling as the outward sign of a Christian woman’s shame. Ultimately, however, connecting his vision of salvation to the performance of veiling, he reveals why unveiling threatens this link. When virgins refuse to veil, they suggest that their flesh does not signal shame, but instead reveals their exalted spiritual status.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it