Foreword

The past twenty years or so has seen a healthy blossoming of work on an­cient Mediterranean religions - and I especially wish to draw attention to the plural noun with which I ended that phrase: one important advance has been an enhanced appreciation of the fact that ancient Mediterranean reli­gions must be studied in the same way as they were often practiced: in concert with one another.

At about the same time (although, notably, nowhere near as visibly at the AAR and SBL) the importance of understanding women’s religious ex­periences, in the ancient world and elsewhere, began to be more keenly appreciated. This brought a new awareness, however, of the difficulties of recreating female experience for any time prior to about the twentieth cen­tury. How can we properly dissect the comments of male writers and the artistic creations of male painters and sculptors in order to arrive at some approximation of what it was like to be a female participating in a religious system? How do we read the second-hand cues our texts and artifacts pro­vide, and how do we expunge from ourselves the accumulation of andro­centric impressions that we accrue from reading the scholarship of the past few centuries? Although the challenges inherent in these questions have not yet been fully met, certainly there has been progress in recent years, especially in conceptualizing the issues (as Patricia Ahearne-Kroll particu­larly demonstrates, in this volume, throughout her discussion of Joseph and Aseneth).

Interestingly, however, there have been very few attempts to build on these developments by bringing these two areas of inquiry together: few scholars have set out to study the religious lives of ancient Mediterranean women within a comparative context. Thus, the present volume is all the more welcome. Classicists rub elbows with scholars of Judaism and Chris­tianity; the words of Greek curse tablets, Alexandrian grave epigrams and Roman philosophers are brought cheek to jowl with those of the apostles and church fathers. Many of the essays are comparative in their own right: Loveday Alexander, for instance, shows how in both the Greek novel and the New Testament, religious sites and festivals are the scenes for signifi­cant encounters between men and women - but also that the narrative of Acts begins to redefine sacred space so as to include the household, a pre­dominantly female sphere in almost every society. Mary Rose D’Angelo studies the divorce dialogues in Mark 10:2-12 in the context of Julian di­vorce laws and, more generally, first century Roman political and moral discourse. In addition to this emphasis on cultural comparativism, we find attention to comparison amongst genres: Clare Rothschild, for instance, looks at the question of whether medical texts concerning the generation of embryos influenced the Fourth Gospel; in addition to analyzing that issue itself, she offers the important reminder that we must not privilege ancient scientific theories over theories provided by myth, theology or over narra­tive discourses - all are equally embedded in their cultures. Also welcome is the long overdue attention paid to several topics that engage issues that are vital to both the study of religion and the study of gender construction: Can we identify females in antiquity that can properly be called ‘witches’? asks Radcliffe Edmonds, and if we can, for what sorts of disasters are they blamed? On the same topic, Fritz Graf emphasizes that, whatever the an­cient literary portraits of the witch may imply, seldom were such creatures actually identified and charged with crimes.

The brief scope of a Foreword does not allow me to more fully praise the contributions that the authors included here have made to our under­standing of ancient religions, ancient women, and the interface between them. But as a final note I must stress how appropriate it is that such a vol­ume found its origin in a conference honoring Adela Yarbro Collins, a scholar who has contributed so much not only to these topics, but to the spirit of comparativism that I have sketched here. In my years of knowing Adela, I have become just as accustomed to meeting her at symposia spon­sored by classics programs or ancient history departments, for example, as at conferences on Christianity. Her eagerness to learn more about ancient Mediterranean cultures that span from Bactria to Gibraltar (and for I know, beyond) is an admirable model for her many friends, colleagues, and stu­dents, as are her scholarly publications.

Sarah Iles Johnston, August 2010