{"product_id":"unreliable-witnesses-religion-gender-and-history-in-the-grecoroman-mediterranean","title":"Unreliable Witnesses: Religion  Gender  and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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: Womens 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 womens religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.  Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livys account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandrias envisioning of idealized  masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyrs depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Pauls fictive disciple  Thecla  in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and) Thecla; Severus of Minorcas 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 womens 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  womens 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44959926485045,"sku":"ByrdShop_0199916519","price":37.35,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780199916511.jpg?v=1770379436","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/unreliable-witnesses-religion-gender-and-history-in-the-grecoroman-mediterranean","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}