Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity by Franchi, Roberta; Barnes, Aneilya;

Short description:

Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity provides a thorough understanding of women’s significance in the establishment and development of early Christianity throughout the Mediterranean.

Long description:

Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity provides a thorough understanding of women’s significance in the establishment and development of early Christianity throughout the Mediterranean.

This volume provides an interdisciplinary approach to the role of women in the early Christian Church, incorporating history, literary criticism, gender theory, family studies, material culture, and a variety of other methodologies in an effort to extract women from the erasures of time. It situates a wide variety of influential roles women held, from apostle to martyr, within the broader contexts of their Mediterranean communities, arguing that women’s participation in and contributions to the burgeoning religion restructured cultural norms for female positions of authority, making women central to the spread and establishment of the fledgling movement. In its efforts to extract women from the historical margins, the volume also asks new questions about what constituted authority in early Christian congregations, what the sources of authority were for women’s claims to leadership, who could wield power, and how notions of authority varied from one community to another.

This book is suitable for students and scholars working on women in the early church, as well as those interested in theology and the history of early Christianity.

"This marvellous volume brings together answers from a wide range of experts to a tremendously important question: what do we know about early Christian women and their leadership? How do we know what we know? Students and their teachers alike will be grateful to Roberta Franchi and Aneilya Barnes for this collaborative labor of love." - Kate Cooper, Professor of History, Royal Holloway University of London. 

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity - Roberta Franchi and Aneilya Barnes; Part I: Family, Household and the Body: Reconstructing Christian Women’s Authority; 1. From the Gospels to the Catacombs: Sourcing Women’s Authority in the First Christian Centuries - Roberta Franchi and Aneilya Barnes; 2. ‘Gospels Hanging from their Necks’: Women as Ritual Agents in Christian Household    Cult - Caroline Johnson Hodge; 3. The Dimensions of Authority Exercised by Early Christian Women - Margaret Y. MacDonald; 4. Contested Authority?: Thecla, Mary, and Power in the Reconfigured Christian Family - Meghan Henning; 5. Bodies of Authority and Aspiration in the Acts of the Apostles - Davina C. Lopez and Todd Penner; Part II: Guiding the Way: Women’s Voice and Authority as Congregational Leaders; 6. Martha and Her Sister(s): Female Voices in the Fourth Gospel - Andrea Taschl-Erber; 7. Conduits of Wisdom: Women as Spiritual Guides in Gnostic Circles - Pheme Perkins; 8. Who were the Widows of the Early Church? - Charlotte Methuen; Part III: Power and Defiance: Women’s Charismatic Authority as Prophets and Martyrs; 9. The Charismatic Authority of Women Prophets - Carolyn Osiek; 10. More than Prophetesses: Women Clergy in Montanism - William Tabbernee; 11. The Authority of Perpetua, the Martyr - Clementina Mazzucco; 12. The Martyrdoms of St. Agnes of Rome and St. Eulalia of Mérida as Acts of Defiance - Alberto Ferreiro; 13. Concluding Remarks - Roberta Franchi and Aneilya Barnes.