TAISIA (TAIDE, THAIS), saint. — Egyptian penitent of the 4th century.
The legend presents her as a young Christian woman of Alexandria, a courtesan, brought back to the right path by the abbot Serapion (BHG, 1695; in the *Vitae Patrum*: PL 73, 661-62 the one who converts her is called Pafnutius; in the Syriac version he is called Besarion, in a Greek redaction John the Little, and the penitent is called *Ἰασύλα*: see Nau, cf. *op. cit.* in bibliography, p. 80) who shuts her up in a cell of a women’s monastery. After three years of a life of penance, the author of her conversion releases her from confinement, but a few days later T. dies. There are not sufficient elements to identify, as has been attempted, the tomb of a certain *ἀσάς* and of a certain Serapion, found at Antinoe, now in the Guimet Museum in Paris (cf. H. Leclercq, *Antinoe*, in DACL, I, 11, cols. 2337-40) with that of our *ἀσάς* (not Coptic, deriving from *Isis*) and of Serapion, her spiritual father. Moreover, in the more ancient redactions of the legend the name of T. does not appear, and the courtesan is anonymous. For this reason it is very probable that T. is a fictitious name, and her *Life* a moralizing tale of the late 4th century, which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the Middle Ages: Hroswitha (v.) made it the subject of her comedy *Paphnutius*; Marbodus in the 11th century versified it; from the 12th-13th centuries there are two long poems in French. The Greeks celebrate her feast on 8 October.