Alongside the developments which allowed fathers a more emotive language for their relationships with their children, a similar, although less overt, series of developments can be seen concerning motherhood in the post-Imperial world. In 1988 Suzanne Dixon, author of the seminal work on Roman motherhood, wrote that ‘the Roman mother was not associated with the young child or with undiscriminating tenderness … but was viewed primarily as the transmitter of traditional morality – ideally, a firm disciplinarian’. In 1996, John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler wrote in their volume on Medieval mothering and motherers (by which they referred to both men and women who engage in maternal behaviours) that the primary facet of the Medieval mother was affection characterised by nurturing behaviour. Clearly something changed in the dominant conception of motherhood between the Roman, Late Antique and high Medieval periods. As with almost all other changes, this was primarily fuelled by Christianity.

Mothers are not common figures in post-Imperial literature of any genre, not least because men tend to be writing about themselves. Motherhood is overlooked on a number of levels and there are few overt models of motherhood or motherly behaviour offered for women to emulate. Even more problematically, there are very few depictions of mothers interacting with their children. While in earlier Christian centuries the roles and responsibilities of Christian women within the household formed a central part of Christian discourse on many topics, after the fourth century and before the eleventh women returned to being all but invisible in the sources. During this period, neither the misogynistic diatribes nor the icon of Mary as mother is prominent in any Christian discourse. It has been argued that Mary was an influence on the construction of the Christian family in the early Christian centuries, but the examples raised by Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose all focus overwhelmingly on her role as a wife and on the construction and development of Christian marriage over her role as biological mother and parenthood. She appears to have been presented as a mother in late-Roman catacombs, however, particularly in nativity scenes, but she can be seen as an ‘unsatisfactory model for women who have given birth’ as she is presented most often as a virgin not a mother.