Unreliable Witnesses

Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-991651-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 340 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 518 g

In her latest book, Ross Shepard Kraemer shows how her mind has changed or remained the same since the publication of her ground-breaking study, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (OUP 1992). Unreliable Witnesses scrutinizes more closely how ancient constructions of gender undergird accounts of women's religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.

Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livy's account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandria's envisioning of idealized, masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyr's depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Paul's fictive disciple, Thecla, in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and)
Thecla; Severus of Minorca's depiction of Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressures to convert, and others.

While attentive to arguments that women are largely fictive proxies in elite male contestations over masculinity, authority, and power, Kraemer retains her focus on redescribing and explaining women's religious practices. She argues that - gender-specific or not - religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. As in many cultures, women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged, only so long as it conformed to pervasive
constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled and subordinated to masculinity.

Extending her findings beyond the ancient Mediterranean, Kraemer proposes that, more generally, religion is among the many human social practices that are both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and on human actions and ideas. Her study thus poses significant questions about the relationships between religions and gender in the modern world.

Zielgruppe

Students of: ancient religion, gender studies, women's studies, historiography, and Mediterranean antiquity

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kraemer, Ross Shepard

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike Griechische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike Römische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Four short stories: a Bacchic courtesan, the reporter from Hell, the daughters of rabbis, a Christian matron in Rome
3. Spouses of Wisdom: Philo's Therapeutae, reconsidered
4. Thecla of Iconium, reconsidered
5. Artemisia of Minorca: Gender and the Conversion of the Jews in the 5th century
6. Veturia of Rome and Rufina of Smyrna as Counterbalance: Women Officeholders in Ancient Synagogues and Gentile Adopters of Judean Practices
7. Rethinking Gender, History and Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Index

Über Autor(innen)

A native of New York City, Ross Shepard Kraemer majored in Religion at Smith College and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University. She is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles on women's religions in the Greco-Roman world, particularly Christian and Jewish women. She is Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University, where she has taught since 2000.