Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World)

Reconstructing Women’s Roles in Early Christianity provides a thorough understanding of women’s significance in the establishment and development of early Christianity throughout the Mediterranean. This volume provides an interdisciplinary approach to the role of women in the early Christian Church, incorporating history, literary criticism, gender theory, family studies, material culture, and a variety of other methodologies in an effort to extract women from the erasures of time.It situates a wide variety of influential roles women held, from apostle to martyr, within the broader contexts of their Mediterranean communities, arguing that women’s participation in and contributions to the burgeoning religion restructured cultural norms for female positions of authority, making women central to the spread and establishment of the fledgling movement.In its efforts to extract women from the historical margins, the volume also asks new questions about what constituted authority in early Chr