AJR is pleased to publish remarks delivered as part of a book review panel at the annual meeting of the 2022 Society of Biblical Literature in Denver. The panel was organized by members of the Disability and Healthcare in the Bible and the Ancient World steering committee. The book is Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (Yale University Press, 2022) by Meghan R. Henning and the panelists were: Benjamin H. Dunning (Harvard University), Mark Letteney (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Lynn R. Huber (Elon University), and Candida Moss (University of Birmingham).
Before the panel we featured a review of Hell Hath No Fury by Daniel M. Smith, and we ended our series with a conversation between Meghan Henning and John Penniman.
Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature
Meghan R. Henning’s Hell Hath No Fury breaks new ground in the study of ancient Christianity, bringing the fruits of Critical Disability Studies and Gender Studies to bear upon early Christian tours of hell. Henning draws upon this ancient literary corpus to offer important correctives for disability history and early Christian conceptions of embodiment.
Hell and the Human
What we find when we do so—with Henning as a surefooted guide through these hellscapes—is a stunningly vivid and visceral picture of how the Christian anthropological imagination actually worked during the formative centuries of the movement and extending into late antiquity.
Where, the Hell?
My thesis is this: Henning has impeccable historical intuition. Even without detailed archaeological knowledge of ancient prisons, she managed to divine that early Christians used what they knew of prison architecture to imagine what hell looked like, and what it was like for people inside.
A Queer Tour of Hell
This makes me wonder about the practice of articulating one’s interpretive commitments, a practice admittedly more common in biblical studies than in Early Christian History, and what is gained or lost by not more explicitly announcing a feminist, or for that matter crip or queer, agenda.
Hell Bound Bodies No More: Unhoused, Disabled, and Incarcerated Bodies in the Ancient Imagination
by Candida Moss
Henning’s central point, however, is not just that eternal convicts were reshaped and disabled by the structures of hell. Rather it is to show the ways in which the representations of damned bodies had real world effects on those whose bodies were similarly feminized, queered, leaky, and impaired.
Hell Hath No Fury: A Response
It goes without saying that I could talk for hours about any one of the questions that has been posed in this forum, but I will just share a few initial thoughts in response to each of the panelists.
AJR Conversations | Hell Hath No Fury
by Meghan Henning and John Penniman
Before we get into your most recent book, I’m wondering how you chart the origin and development of your interest in what is a rather morbid subject? Did you fall backwards into hell or have you always been interested in the history of a punitive afterlife?