Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature

Meghan R. Henning. Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

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. The book makes important contributions to scholarship on the tours of hell as a literary tradition within early Christianity, to ongoing engagements between Disability Studies and ancient Mediterranean religion, and to the long-standing study of bodies as sites of subject formation in late antiquity.

Henning begins by observing the enduring relevance of hell in the contemporary [Western] world before surveying the primary ancient sources for the tour of hell tradition (e.g., Apocalypse of Peter, Apocalypse of Paul, Acts of Thomas, etc.) as well as the evidence for hell, such as it is, in the New Testament. Building upon scholarship that sees juridical contexts at the heart of these conceptions of punishment and just desserts, Henning pushes such conclusions further by asking what other assumptions, namely concerning bodies and gender, are brought into our scholarly interpretations of hell and the afterlife (10-11). The question allows for fresh insights into the tour of hell tradition as well as an integration of these traditions, replete with complex renderings of embodied punishment, in scholarly discussions of the body in Late Antique Christianity. By the end of this clear and informative introduction, Henning sets out her two primary claims for the book: “These texts use masculinity and bodily normativity to police behavior, equating early Christian ethical norms with masculinity and bodily health. The punishments of early Christian hell not only mirror the bodies of the disabled in the ‘real’ world, but also intensify and reenforce the ancient idea that bodily difference was a punishment for sin” (19).

Chapter one provides a discursive landscape for understanding suffering in the ancient world with special emphasis on the ways suffering related to gendered difference. Able-bodied men, she shows, occupied the top of a gender hierarchy which privileged the supposed non-suffering body above the porous, penetrable, pain-enduring bodies of women. Chapter two tracks a historical shift in the ways punishments in hell were assigned with respect to changing expectations around gender in late antiquity, showing how different Christian groups “reinstantiated, amplified, or subverted the gendered social norms of the world around them” (53). While the earliest tours of Hell order punishment for sin around household codes (e.g., the Apocalypse of Peter) or expectations of holiness for ecclesial offices (e.g., the Book of Mary’s Repose), later texts combine these two traditions in ways that define sin as “the failure to embody particular gender norms (79).

Chapters three and four integrate the earlier concentration on gender alongside consideration of disablement to analyze how punishments in hell are mapped onto ancient evaluations of gendered and embodied difference. Chapter three considers a wide range of specific punishments and gives detailed insights into their (often implicit) statements about gender, disability, and, at least in one case, ethnicity. Henning shows convincingly how such punishments are not only the product of juridical practices or fantasies but also both a product and producer of ancient ideologies of gender and bodily difference. Chapter four investigates the role of Mary with respect to her suffering and its redemptive effect upon the damned. Through a complex intermingling of tour of hell traditions and those describing Jesus’s descent to hell, these late ancient texts “subvert and reenact” ancient ideas of the female body (146); Mary takes on the apostolic, masculine duty of witnessing to the damned while she simultaneously suffers propitiously as mother of her “spiritual children” (147).

The book’s conclusion gestures toward an important contribution for those outside the study of ancient Christianity. By providing detailed analysis of the ways gendered and embodied discourses from antiquity reenforce already prevailing hierarchies around women and disabled people, Henning provides ancient precedence for a development often centered around post-Enlightenment discourses. In this way, the book both draws upon and contributes to the field of Disability History. The epilogue returns to issues of contemporary relevance, this time gesturing toward the endurance of bodily normativity and gendered ideologies of suffering within public health, incarceration, and so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminism.

Hell Hath No Fury exemplifies the importance of Disability Studies for scholars of ancient Mediterranean religion. This book, along with other recent examples,[1] no longer speaks to the “potential” for Disability Studies in our fields but rather demonstrates the necessity of thinking with disablement for our analyses of embodiment, authority, and hierarchy in the ancient world. The book exceeds at interrogating disability alongside gender in these sources, and future work can build upon it to refine disability’s connections with race, enslavement, incarceration (discussed briefly throughout), and labor in ancient Jewish and Christian texts, as well as the social and material conditions that shape ancient ideas of disablement and bodily difference in antiquity.

[1] See, for example, Julia Watts Belser, Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Candida R. Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

Daniel Charles Smith is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Classics at Whitman College. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 from the Department of Religious Studies. His research considers the material and ideological formations of power at the intersection of religion and empire, exploring how Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire leverage constructions of social and embodied difference to establish and maintain authority. He can be reached at smithdc@whitman.edu.