Material Culture and Women's Religious Experience in Antiquity

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.

-- Carol Meyers, Duke University

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.

-- Janet Huskinson, The Open University, UK

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.

-- Averil Cameron, University of Ox