DOC Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Fad=a'il-i Balkh (Oxford Oriental Monographs) by Arezou Azad in History

Description

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.