RELG 221: Women and Gender in Early Christianity (HC)

In the early church, Thecla's example was associated with the piety of women - in particular, with women's ministry and travel. Devotion to Saint Thecla quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean world. This volume brings together literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the cult of Saint Thecla in Asia Minor and Egypt.

The author reads 1 Timothy and the Acts of Paul and Thecla (ATh) as texts that emerge out of and share a common cultural framework. In the Roman period, women were widely expected to exhibit gendered virtues like modesty, industry, and loyalty to family. However, women pursued these virtues in remarkably different ways, including active leadership in their communities. Reading against a cultural background with multiple and conflicting norms for women's behavior, Hylen shows that texts like the ATh and 1Timothy begin to look different. Hylen's approach points to a new way of understanding women in the early church, one that acknowledges women's leadership as a historical reality without neglecting the effects of the culture's gender biases.

This book reexamines the hagiographies of female monks to reveal that female protagonists possess a holy womanhood regardless of having layers of masculinity applied to their characters. Each masculine layer is scrutinized to explore its purpose in the plots and the plausible motivations for the utilization of transvestite figures in religious literature. Through an intertextual method, masculinity and literary themes work to contextualize hagiographical praise for a holy womanhood within an acceptable gendered language, which seems to support a belief in the spiritual potential of women. This book highlights the potential for complex irony to develop around a female transvestite in the human drama of salvation.

Perpetua's Passion studies the third-century martyrdom of a young woman and places it in the intellectual and social context of her age. Conflicting ideas of religion, family and gender are explored as Salisbury follows Perpetua from her youth in a wealthy Roman household to her imprisonment and death in the arena.

Women and knowledge are interconnected in several ways in late ancient and early Christian discourses, not least because wisdom (Sophia) and spiritual knowledge (Gnosis) were frequently personified as female entities. Ancient texts deal with idealized women and use feminine imagery to describe the divine but they also debate women's access to and capacity of gaining knowledge. Combining rhetorical analysis with social historical approaches, the contributions in this book cover a wide array of source materials, drawing special attention to the so-called Gnostic texts.

A collection of studies about Perpetua, a young female Christian martyr who was executed in 203 AD. Like her spiritual guide, Saturus, Perpetua left a diary, and a few years after their deaths a fellow Christian collected these writings and supplied them with an introduction and epilogue: the so-called Passion of Perpetua. The result is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic works of antiquity, which the present volume examines from a wide range of perspectives: literary, narratological, historical, religious, psychological, and philosophical.

Why did some early Christians consider Mary Magdalene to be an apostle while others did not? Some Christian texts, underlining her role as one of the very first witnesses to the resurrection, portray Mary Magdalene as the "apostle to the apostles," while other sources exclude or replace her in their resurrection accounts. This book examines how the conferral, or withholding, of apostolic status operated as a tool of persuasion in the politics of early Christian literature. Drawing on both canonical and noncanonical literature in her comprehensive study, the author reveals some intriguing correlations between the prominence of Peter in a text and a corresponding diminishment of women's leadership and apostolicity. This historical study of early Christian tensions has serious implications for current denominational discourse because authority, apostolic status, and the ordination of women continue to be highly disputed topics within many Christian circles today.

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. Sacred Fictions unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. The author discerns distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings, and shows that Biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways.

Over several decades, scholarship in New Testament and early Christianity has drawn attention both to the ways in which ancient Mediterranean conceptions of embodiment, sexual difference, and desire were fundamentally different from modern ones and also to important lines of genealogical connection between the past and the present. The result is that the study of "gender" and "sexuality" in early Christianity has become an increasingly complex undertaking. This is a complexity produced not only by the intricacies of conflicting historical data, but also by historicizing approaches that query the very terms of analysis whereby we inquire into these questions in the first place. Yet at the same time, recent work on these topics has produced a rich and nuanced body of scholarly literature that has contributed substantially to our understanding of early Christian history and also proved relevant to ongoing theological and social debates. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in the New Testament provides a roadmap to this scholarly landscape, introducing both students and other scholars to the relevant problems, debates, and issues.

This text presents and interprets evidence for women's lives in the social context of the New Testament. Some of the evidence from this period of Roman history suggests that women's roles were sharply restricted. Other evidence shows women taking on leadership roles, managing property, and the like. Previous interpreters have often argued that the two kinds of evidence describe different groups or arenas where women's activity was either forbidden or allowed. However, this work argues that the evidence points to complex gender norms that were sometimes in tension.

Given its eschatological orientation and its marginal position in the Roman Empire, emergent Christianity found embodiment, as an aspect of being in the world, problematic. Those identified and identifying as Christians developed two broad responses to that world as they embraced the idea of being in, yet not of it. The first response, martyrdom, was witness to the strength their faith gave to fragile bodies, particularly those of women, and the ability by suffering to overcome bodily limitation and attain the resurrection life. The second, asceticism, complemented and later continued martyrdom as a means of bodily transcendence and participation in the spiritual world.

Argues that genre deeply affects how early Christian female philosophers are characterized across different works. The included case studies are three women who feature in both narrative and dialogic texts: Thecla, Macrina the Younger and Monica. Based on these examples, the author demonstrates that the narrative sources tend to eschew secular education, while the dialogic sources are open to displays of secular knowledge. Philosophy was not only seen as a way of life, but sometimes also as a mode of educated argumentation. Further argues that these female philosophers were held up in their femininity as models for imitation by both women and men.

Open access book. Reveals exciting early Christian evidence that Mary was remembered as a powerful role model for women leaders--women apostles, baptizers, and presiders at the ritual meal.  Early Christian art portrays Mary and other women clergy serving as deacon, presbyter/priest, and bishop. In addition, the two oldest surviving artifacts to depict people at an altar table inside a real church depict women and men in a gender-parallel liturgy inside two of the most important churches in Christendom--Old Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome and the second Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Dr. Kateusz's research brings to light centuries of censorship, both ancient and modern, and debunks the modern imagination that from the beginning only men were apostles and clergy.