When is a Text About a Woman a Text About a Woman: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian of Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean

Prof. Ross S. Kraemer

The 2003-2004 Weltin Lecture in Early Christianity

Professor Ross S. Kraemer is a Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. She is the author of numerous articles and books on aspects of women's religions in the Greco-Roman period, particularly in ancient Christianity and ancient Judaism. Her books include Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (Oxford University Press, 1992) and When Aseneth Met Joseph: A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Revisited (Oxford, 1998). She is also the co-editor of (and contributor to) Women and Christian Origins: A Reader (Oxford, 1999) and Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal-Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament (Houghton-Mifflin, 2000). Her latest book is Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook, due out shortly from Oxford University Press, a greatly expanded and updated edition of a collection of ancient sources in English translation which she first published in 1988. Her talk explores the problem faced by historians of antiquity when ancient narratives about female figures, while seeming to be about women, instead may be primarily vehicles for ancient male writers to talk about other matters.