Material Culture and Women's Religious Experience in Antiquity

"Material Culture and Women's Religious Experience in Antiquity is a veritable compendium bringing together invaluable sources from a wide geographical, cultural, and chronological range, accompanied by offering expert guidance on how to understand them. The book gives us the tools to think comparatively about how the women in different societies addressed similar challenges, and to gain a better understanding of which differences in the source record are caused by differences among ancient societies, and which by the hazards of preservation. This is a book I expect to return to again and again - a splendid achievement. The fascinating essays in this book make an important contribution to the scholarship seeking to recover women's religious experience in antiquity. They show how archaeological and iconographic evidence can be invaluable in the quest to recover the lived experience of women in the past--from ancient Egypt to late ancient Christianity. Using material remains, the authors provide compelling arguments about women's religiosity that often differ from the impression one gets from texts alone. This readable and well-illustrated book is a must for both scholars and general readers. This excellent collection of essays by scholars illuminates the question of women's religious practices from different academic fields, different times and places, and different faith traditions. Because the authors also bring different methodologies to their subject and integrate material evidence into their analyses, this work will be an absolutely invaluable resource for teachers and students as well as general readers. This new study is important for its focus on retrieving women's experiences in ancient religion through evidence from material culture--areas so often underrepresented in past discussions. Its eleven well-illustrated chapters offer a rich spread of case studies that cross time and space, people and objects, from an Egyptian woman of the thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE to Merovingian rings of the fifth to eight century CE. Individually fresh and insightful about women's devotional experiences (some material has not been published before), they also have great strength as a collection since the rewards of such an ambitious range of topics are the many common questions and issues to emerge. This volume presents new material and asks searching questions about what material culture can tell us about women's religion in early Christianity and the ancient Mediterranean. As one of the editors says, if some of them ""are ultimately unanswerable, it does not necessarily follow that they are not worth asking and pursuing,"" and they are to be congratulated for opening exciting new perspectives in the growing field of material religion. With a sustained focus on women's interactions with and commissioning of sacred objects, images, and spaces, this collection enriches and enlivens scholarly conversations about domestic religious practices, visual histories of biblical interpretation, and the generative role of women's religious participation in antiquity. Readers will encounter a wide range of archaeological and textual evidence from diverse geographies. The sheer diversity of materials in this volume--a diversity rarely found in a single collection--makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working at the intersections of religion, material culture, and ancient history."