Material Culture and Women''s Religious Experience in Antiquity : An Interdisciplinary Symposium

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.

How can material artifacts help illuminate the religious lives of women in antiquity? In what ways do archaeological and art historical studies recover women’s religious perspectives and experiences that the literary record misses or underrepresents? The authors of the essays in this volume set out to answer such questions in fascinating, new case studies of women and ancient religions in the Near East and Mediterranean world. They cover a broad historical, geographic, and religious spectrum as they explore women’s lives from the time of ancient Egypt in the second millennium BCE into the early medieval period, from the Syrian Desert to Western Europe, in the religious traditions of Egypt, Canaan, Greece, Rome, ancient Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity. Working at the intersections of religion, archaeology, art history, and women’s history, these authors make fresh contributions to interdisciplinary studies, and their essays will be of interest to students and scholars across these academic fields.