Constructions of Gender in Religious Traditions of Late Antiquity

Constructions of Gender in Religious Traditions of Late Antiquity
Author: Shayna Sheinfeld
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1978714564

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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.

Constructions of Gender in Late Antique Manichaean Cosmological Narrative

Constructions of Gender in Late Antique Manichaean Cosmological Narrative
Author: Susanna Towers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre: Manichaean cosmology
ISBN: 9782503586663

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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.

Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity

Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity
Author: Richard Miles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2002-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134649924

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Identity is a 'trendy' and 'hot' topic in classics Eminent contributors, including Pat Easterling, Gillian Clarke Identity examined from different perspectives and as different structures - sexual, ethnic, geographic, status, religions - comprehensive Theoretically and critically up-to-date

Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses

Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses
Author: Todd C. Penner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2007
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004154477

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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.

Being Christian in Late Antiquity

Being Christian in Late Antiquity
Author: Carol Harrison
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2014-01-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0191629537

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What do we mean when we talk about 'being Christian' in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity and, Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honour of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, `Being Christian through Reading, Writing and Hearing', analyse the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to be Christian. The essays in Section II move on to explore how late antique Christians sought to create, maintain and represent Christian communities: communities that were both 'textually created' and 'enacted in living realities'. Finally in Section III, 'The Particularities of Being Christian', the contributions examine what it was to be Christian from a number of different ways of representing oneself, each of which raises questions about certain kinds of 'particularities', for example, gender, location, education and culture. Bringing together primary source material from the early Imperial period up to the seventh century AD and covering both the Eastern and Western Empires, the papers in this volume demonstrate that what it meant to be Christian cannot simply be taken for granted. 'Being Christian' was part of a continual process of construction and negotiation, as individuals and Christian communities alike sought to relate themselves to existing traditions, social structures and identities, at the same time as questioning and critiquing the past(s) in their present.

Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity

Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity
Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1009027050

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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.

Unreliable Witnesses

Unreliable Witnesses
Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2010-12-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199781206

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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.

Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World

Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World
Author: Ross Shepard Kraemer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195170652

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This text is a collection of translations of primary texts relevant to women's religion in Western antiquity, from the 4th century BCE to the 5th century CE.

Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition

Constructions of Feminine Identity in the Catholic Tradition
Author: Christopher M. Flavin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2020-01-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498592732

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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.

Women and Goddess Traditions

Women and Goddess Traditions
Author: Karen L. King
Publisher: Continuum
Total Pages: 474
Release: 1997
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN:

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Goddess religion was widespread in the world of the Bible and is reflected in many biblical texts. This provocative and reliable book, based on thorough analyses of primary sources, examines the role of the feminine deity in religious piety in three areas: Asia, the ancient Mediterranean, and in three contexts today.