Ross Shepard Kraemer's Books

Unreliable Witnesses

Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Unreliable Witnesses

Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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.

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344

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

0190453923

ISBN 13

9780190453923

Her Share of the Blessings

Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Her Share of the Blessings

Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

In this pathbreaking volume, Ross Shepard Kraemer provides the first comprehensive look at women's religions in Greco-Roman antiquity. She vividly recreates the religious lives of early Christian, Jewish, and pagan women, with many fascinating examples: Greek women's devotion to goddesses, rites of Roman matrons, Jewish women in rabbinic and diaspora communities, Christian women's struggles to exercise authority and autonomy, and women's roles as leaders in the full spectrum of Greco-Roman religions. In every case, Kraemer reveals the connections between the social constraints under which women lived, and their religious beliefs and practices. The relationship among female autonomy, sexuality, and religion emerges as a persistent theme. Analyzing the monastic Jewish Therapeutae and various Christian communities, Kraemer demonstrates the paradoxical liberation which women achieved by rejection of sexuality, the body, and the female. In the epilogue, Kraemer pursues the disturbing implications such findings have for contemporary women. Based on an astonishing variety of primary sources, Her Share of the Blessings is an insightful work that goes beyond the limitations of previous scholarship to provide a more accurate portrait of women in the Greco-Roman world.

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268

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

0199879788

ISBN 13

9780199879786

Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World

A Sourcebook

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World

A Sourcebook

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

This is a substantially expanded and completely revised edition of a book originally published in 1988 as Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics. The book is a collection of translations of primary texts relevant to women's religion in Western antiquity, from the fourth century BCE to the fifth century CE. The selections are taken from the plethora of ancient religions, including Judaism and Christianity, and are translated from the six major languages of the Greco-Roman world: Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Coptic. The texts are grouped thematically in six sections: Observances, Rituals, and Festivals; Researching Real Women: Documents to, from and by Women; Religious Office; New Religious Affiliation and Conversion; Holy, Pious, and Exemplary Women; and The Feminine Divine. Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World provides a unique and invaluable resource for scholars of classical antiquity, early Christianity and Judaism, and women's religion more generally.

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526

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

0199883629

ISBN 13

9780199883622

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

What Christianity Cost the Jews

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

What Christianity Cost the Jews

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity examines the fate of Jews living in the Mediterranean Jewish diaspora after the Roman emperor Constantine threw his patronage to the emerging orthodox (Nicene) Christian churches. By the fifth century, much of the rich material evidence for Greek and Latin-speaking Jews in the diaspora diminishes sharply. Ross Shepard Kraemer argues that this increasing absence of evidence is evidence of increasing absence of Jews themselves. Literary sources, late antique Roman laws, and archaeological remains illuminate how Christian bishops and emperors used a variety of tactics to coerce Jews into conversion: violence, threats of violence, deprivation of various legal rights, exclusion from imperial employment, and others. Unlike other non-orthodox Christians, Jews who resisted conversion were reluctantly tolerated, perhaps because of beliefs that Christ's return required their conversion. In response to these pressures, Jews leveraged political and social networks for legal protection, retaliated with their own acts of violence, and sometimes became Christians. Some may have emigrated to regions where imperial laws were more laxly enforced, or which were under control of non-orthodox (Arian) Christians. Increasingly, they embraced forms of Jewish practice that constructed tighter social boundaries around them. The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity concludes that by the beginning of the seventh century, the orthodox Christianization of the Roman Empire had cost diaspora Jews--and all non-orthodox persons, including Christians--dearly.

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517

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

019022228X

ISBN 13

9780190222284

When Aseneth Met Joseph

A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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When Aseneth Met Joseph

A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

This is the study of an anonymous ancient work, usually called Joseph and Aseneth, which narrates the transformation of the daughter of an Egyptian priest into an acceptable spouse for the biblical Joseph, whose marriage to Aseneth is given brief notice in Genesis. Kraemer takes issue with the scholarly consensus that the tale is a Jewish conversion story composed no later than the early second century C.E. Instead, she dates it to the third or fourth century C.E., and argues that, although no definitive answer is presently possible, it may well be a Christian account. This critique also raises larger issues about the dating and identification of many similar writings, known as pseudepigrapha. Kraemer reads its account of Aseneth's interactions with an angelic double of Joseph in the context of ancient accounts of encounters with powerful divine beings, including the sun god Helios, and of Neoplatonic ideas about the fate of souls. When Aseneth Met Joseph demonstrates the centrality of ideas about gender in the representation of Aseneth and, by extension, offers implications for broader concerns about gender in Late Antiquity.

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384

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

0190253991

ISBN 13

9780190253998

Unreliable Witnesses

Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Unreliable Witnesses

Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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339

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Oxford University Press

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0199781206

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9780199781201

Her Share of the Blessings

Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Her Share of the Blessings

Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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268

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Oxford University Press

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ISBN 10

0199879788

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9780199879786

Women & Christian Origins

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Women & Christian Origins

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

This new collection of fourteen integrated, original essays by prominent scholars and experienced teachers provides a comprehensive and accessible entree to current research on women and the origins of Christianity. Engaging for both the interested reader and the specialist in religion, Women and Christian Origins is sensitive to feminist theory and attentive to distinctions between the (re)construction of women's history in early Christian churches and ancient constructions of gender difference

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417

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Oxford University Press, USA

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ISBN 10

0195103963

ISBN 13

9780195103960

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

What Christianity Cost the Jews

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

What Christianity Cost the Jews

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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517

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0190222271

ISBN 13

9780190222277

When Aseneth Met Joseph

A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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When Aseneth Met Joseph

A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

This is a study of an anonymous ancient work (surviving in shorter and longer versions) conventionally titled Joseph and Aseneth, but here simply designated as Aseneth. Composed in Greek, the text narrates the transformation of the daughter of an Egyptian priest into an acceptable spouse for the biblical Joseph (whose marriage to this woman is given brief notice in Genesis). Relatively unknown outside of scholarly circles, this story is remarkable for its focus on a female character and for its apparent absence of overt misogyny. This unusual tale has traditionally been viewed as a Jewish conversion story composed no later than the second century C.E. Through a detailed examination of the texts, however, Ross Kraemer arrives at conclusions that disagree with previous findings with respect not only to questions of date, provenance, identity, geographic origin, and textual relationships, but also to many matters of interpretation. She argues that the tale is as likely to beChristian as it is to be Jewish. She also contends that it was written at least a quarter of a century later than previously believed. She shows that the tale's account of Aseneth's interactions with an angelic being is heavily influenced by ancient portraits of the magical adjuration of powerful divine beings, including that of the sun god, Helios, and by Neoplatonic ideas about the fate of the souls. Kraemer demonstrates the centrality of ideas about gender in the representation of Aseneth,and goes on to explicate the story's implications, within the context of constructs of and concerns about gender in Late Antiquity.

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365

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Oxford University Press on Demand

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ISBN 10

0195114752

ISBN 13

9780195114751

Women & Christian Origins

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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Women & Christian Origins

By: Ross Shepard Kraemer

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0195103963

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9780195103960

Book's by Ross Shepard Kraemer

Unreliable Witnesses

Unreliable Witnesses

Her Share of the Blessings

Her Share of the Blessings

Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World

Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

When Aseneth Met Joseph

When Aseneth Met Joseph

Unreliable Witnesses

Unreliable Witnesses

Her Share of the Blessings

Her Share of the Blessings

Women & Christian Origins

Women & Christian Origins

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity

When Aseneth Met Joseph

When Aseneth Met Joseph

Women & Christian Origins

Women & Christian Origins

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