This collection of eleven new essays presents fresh, illuminating research by scholars who comparatively examine material, visual, and literary evidence to recover women’s religious experiences, perspectives, and activities in antiquity—perspectives often missing or underrepresented in the literary record.

How can material artifacts help illuminate the religious lives of women in antiquity? In what ways do archaeological and art historical studies recover women’s religious perspectives and experiences that the literary record misses or underrepresents? The authors of the essays in this volume set out to answer such questions in fascinating, new case studies of women and ancient religions in the Near East and Mediterranean world. They cover a broad historical, geographic, and religious spectrum as they explore women’s lives from the time of ancient Egypt in the second millennium BCE into the early medieval period, from the Syrian Desert to Western Europe, in the religious traditions of Egypt, Canaan, Greece, Rome, ancient Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity. Working at the intersections of religion, archaeology, art history, and women’s history, these authors make fresh contributions to interdisciplinary studies, and their essays will be of interest to students and scholars across these academic fields.

Introduction

Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Carolyn Osiek

1.Keynote: Between the Holy and the Ordinary: Women’s Lives in Early Christianity

Carolyn Osiek

2.Transferring and Transforming Religious Identity Abroad: The Personal Adornment of an Egyptian Woman in Canaan

Krystal V. L. Pierce

3.Besieged Maternity: Reading Textual Cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible through Material Culture

Susannah M. Larry

4.Material Expression and Mantic Performance: An Examination of Women’s Religious Experience at the Time of Josiah

Amanda Colleen Brown

5.“Part of the Same Miracle”: Women and Visual Art in the Dura Europos Synagogue

Sarah E. G. Fein

6.Female Experience at the Tomb: Ritual Commemoration and Sarcophagus Imagery

Sarah Madole Lewis

7.Assessing the Roles of Women in New Syrian Funerary Reliefs in Japanese Collections

Kerry Hull and Lincoln H. Blumell

8.Foreseeing the Divine Bridal Chamber: A Household of Mosaics from Shahba-Philippopolis

Catherine Gines Taylor

9.Reimagining and Reimaging Eve in Early Christianity

Mark D. Ellison

10.Female Materialities at the Altar: Mary’s Priestly Motherhood and Women’s Eucharistic Experience in Late Antique and Byzantine Churches

Maria Evangelatou

11.Rings on her Fingers: Merovingian Rings and Religion in Late Antiquity

Isabel Moreira