Constructions of Gender in Religious Traditions of Late Antiquity PDF Download

Author: Shayna Sheinfeld
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1978714564
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This volume examines questions concerning the construction of gender and identity in the earliest days of what is now Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Methodologically explicit, the contributions analyze textual and material sources related to these religious traditions in their cultural contexts. The sources examined are predominantly products of patriarchal elite discourses requiring innovative approaches to unveil aspects of gender otherwise hidden. This volume extends the discussion represented in the volume Gender and Second-Temple Judaism (2020) and highlights the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research beyond anachronistic discipline distinctions.

Author: Todd C. Penner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004154477
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
A collection of essays on early Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman religious discourses in antiquity, focusing on the construction of gender in relationship to broader cultural and religious themes, argumentation and identity formation in the early centuries of the common era.

Author: Susanna Towers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503586663
Category : Manichaean cosmology
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Manichaeism emerged from Sasanian Persia in the third century CE and flourished in Persia, the Roman Empire, Central Asia and beyond until succumbing to persecution from rival faiths in the eighth to ninth century. Its founder, Mani, claimed to be the final embodiment of a series of prophets sent over time to expound divine wisdom. This monograph explores the constructions of gender embedded in Mani's colourful dualist cosmological narrative, in which a series of gendered divinities are in conflict with the demonic beings of the Kingdom of Darkness. The Jewish and Gnostic roots of Mani's literary constructions of gender are examined in parallel with Sasanian societal expectations. Reconstructions of gender in subsequent Manichaean literature reflect the changing circumstances of the Manichaean community. As the first major study of gender in Manichaean literature, this monograph draws upon established approaches to the study of gender in late antique religious literature, to present a portrait of a historically maligned and persecuted religious community.

Author: Richard Miles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134649924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The essays in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity concern themselves with the theme of identity, an increasingly popular topic in Classical studies. Through detailed discussions of particular Roman texts and images, the contributors show not only how these texts were used to create and organise particular visions of late antique society and culture, but also how constructions of identity and culture contributed to the fashioning of 'late antiquity' into a distinct historical period.

Author: Todd Penner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047411269
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
A collection of essays on early Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman religious discourses in antiquity, focusing on the construction of gender in relationship to broader cultural and religious themes, argumentation and identity formation in the early centuries of the common era.

Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199781201
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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.

Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009027050
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Theory is not a set of texts, it is a style of approach. It is to engage in the act of speculation: gestures of abstraction that re-imagine and dramatize the crises of living. This Element is a both a primer for understanding some of the more predominant strands of critical theory in the study of religion in late antiquity, and a history of speculative leaps in the field. It is a history of dilemmas that the field has tried to work out again and again - questions about subjectivity, the body, agency, violence, and power. This Element additionally presses us on the ethical stakes of our uses of theory, and asks how the field's interests in theory help us understand what's going on, half-spoken, in the disciplinary unconscious.

Author: Gert Melville
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643901240
Category : Christian women
Languages : de
Pages : 455

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Book Description
This book considers the development of female religious life between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages. It is the first general study to address this earlier period. Chapters range widely over major themes associated with spiritual ideas and social functions, normative structures and spatial organization, forms of communal life, economic foundations, and social relationships. Along with these, "evolutionary" aspects - including charismatic beginnings and the activity of founders in relation to institutionalization, but also the effects of crises, reformation, and transformation - are examined in chronologically-broad and geographically-diverse settings, based on the analysis of significant phenomena and examples. The book provides a comparative approach, which will allow a better understanding of the dynamics, complexities, and differentiations in women's religious life, as well as their cultural importance and - in relation to the male religious - occasionally ambivalent status. (Series: Vita regularis - Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter. Abhandlungen - Vol. 47)

Author: Mark D. Ellison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793611947
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
This collection of eleven new essays presents fresh, illuminating research by scholars who comparatively examine material, visual, and literary evidence to recover women’s religious experiences, perspectives, and activities in antiquity—perspectives often missing or underrepresented in the literary record.

Author: Christopher M. Flavin
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498592732
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Christopher M. Flavin examines the ways in which late classical medieval women’s writings serve as a means of emphasizing both faith and social identity within a distinctly Christian, and later Catholic, tradition, which remains a major part of the understanding of faith and the self. Flavin focuses on key texts from the lives of desert saints and the Passio Perpetua to the autobiographies of Counter-Reformation women like Teresa of Ávila to illustrate the connections between the self and the divine.