When AJR reached out to see if we (Shayna Sheinfeld, Sara Parks, and Meredith Warren) would be willing to outline why we saw the need for a textbook on ancient Mediterranean religions that did not ignore or compartmentalize Jewish and Christian women, but instead centered them, we jumped at the chance. It was a need–both practical and ethical–that we keenly felt during our first teaching experience. In this piece, we’ll explain the steps that led to the process of building a collaborative textbook, and provide some ideas for how colleagues might use it.
We first co-taught a class we called “Reading Women in Greco-Roman Judaism and Early Christianity” at McGill University in 2013 and 2014. While there were a number of valuable separate sourcebooks in existence for Roman, Greek, ancient Jewish, or early Christian women, we had to do an incredible amount of legwork to organise so much siloed information into some kind of cohesive narrative that students could learn from, especially students who didn’t have previous knowledge of the methods or contexts of biblical studies, classics, gender, or even of the humanities.
To prepare for the class, we brought together ancient and contemporary materials scattered throughout these disciplines. We selected some standard and some off-the-beaten-path examples of antique texts and realia, along with instances of their ancient reception, and diverse contemporary analyses of them. We made sure to incorporate both traditional and cutting-edge scholars, so students would come away with a solid idea of “the basics,” but also with exposure to early-career and innovative work.
For us as new teachers at the time, the task of curating all that disparate material was especially daunting. So as we continued to teach versions of the class on our own over the years, we shared the wealth of primary sources, secondary readings from diverse voices, images, and examples from material culture we were amassing. We also built up a treasure-trove of practical classroom discussion questions, quiz questions, and interactive activities.
We knew that we somehow wanted to pay forward all the work we’d put into these classes. We wanted teachers who decided to approach ancient Mediterranean religions without sidelining gender not to have to reinvent the wheel each time. But we were among the early-career precariat, juggling teaching, writing, and the job market. Then one year at SBL, Routledge Press approached Meredith Warren to inquire about any future book projects she had in mind. It suddenly hit her: yes, a textbook! And the project was born. Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (Routledge, 2022) is the first ready-made classroom resource dedicated to the study of ancient Jewish and Christian women in their wider Mediterranean context.
The goal of incorporating an awareness of gender into explorations of ancient Mediterranean literature and history is close to our hearts and our training, so we put a lot of care into how we put the book together. We wanted to write accessibly enough to reach a wide range of learners, from students and teachers to early career scholars, faith groups, and ordinary interested folks. We wanted a resource that was ready to go as a stand-alone class, but with sections that could be lifted out to support existing classes.
Part of what makes the resulting textbook so useful is the way it arranges the material. First, it provides overviews of the canonical and extra-canonical texts and traditions of early Judaism and Christianity, while highlighting that those categories and time periods are scholarly constructions rather than ones that arise organically from the evidence. It treats Jewish and Christian women, and their non-Jewish and, non-Christian neighbours, as both internally diverse and also dynamically engaged with one another in a way that points out the porousness of religious community boundaries in antiquity. That’s something that we struggled with a lot when writing the book, and we actually took several chapters apart more than once to reorganise the material in a way that we were happy with.
Second, we wanted to be transparent with students about positionality, and provide the framework for teachers to help students figure out how to position themselves in relation to the evidence, and to do so honestly. The introductory chapter is a toolkit that explains the basics of gender theory and its widespread relevance, then shows how all scholars come to the evidence from a particular position that inherently affects their readings. Students are encouraged to write an “I Am From” poem to explore factors that shape their outlook. And far from portraying this positionality as a detriment, our textbook teaches students how to wield various perspectives on the material constructively, like looking through sets of reading glasses that can bring different things into focus.
In chapter 4, “Accessing Ancient Sources,” we provide one of the most accessibly-written overviews we’ve seen of the major critical methodologies in the field, specifically covering historical criticism, feminist and intersectional criticism, queer theory, marxist/class criticism, postcolonial or aware-settler criticism, and textual criticism. Students have a chance to practice additional approaches such as disability studies, race studies, or sensory studies in the suggested exercises. More than any other single chapter in the book, we immediately started getting feedback that teachers were using chapter 4 as a stand-alone reading for a wide variety of undergraduate classes across disciplines. It serves as a highly accessible general introduction to subjectivity and hermeneutics, and includes concrete examples of reading closely through a lens or cluster of lenses.
Importantly, we also take care to visually flag material that might be difficult for some students or teachers to read, for example when we cover discussions of sexual violence. We did this with little “difficult topic” flags illustrated by Sara Parks. This pedagogical best practice allows everyone to plan ahead and manage potentially distressing conversations carefully, without avoiding them altogether or bombarding students unexpectedly.
Because we want to encourage people to teach this material more widely, we aimed to make the textbook a one-stop shop, including for non-specialists. It can stand alone as the text for a class by the same name, or its individual chapters can be used within various classes in history, literature, classics, biblical studies, Jewish studies, or theology. In terms of pedagogical use, we planned each chapter to have all the materials needed for someone relatively new to the topic to teach it without too much prep. We include several activities per chapter for use in hands-on seminars that range in level from high-school or A-Level all the way to undergraduate or even postgraduate. These allow students to frequently practise the various critical methodologies. There are also discussion questions at the end of each chapter, suggestions for further reading, a glossary of key terms, and a wealth of images, among other teaching tools.
At the beginning of the book is a special introduction just for instructors. This section includes ideas for assessments, explains the text boxes and activities, and provides other ways to make the most of the book. In the future, we would love to provide sample outlines suitable for a range of international teaching contexts. We know that semester lengths vary widely, so we included frequent additional sidebars in case expanded content is needed. We also included ample signposting to appropriate further reading, for those particularly interested students who want more, or are writing essays. These reading suggestions do not neglect racialized and international voices.
Each chapter contains a number of elements:
1) The main content. This is the written material accompanied by images, from which you can draw your lectures and slides.
2) Discussion questions. These appear at the end of each chapter and reinforce its main content. They are designed to help with in-class engagement, either as you go along (interwoven with lectures) or at the end (interwoven with designated interactive engagement time or out-of-class reflection). They can be assigned for use in pairs, in small groups, as a whole group, or as reflective homework. You can also incorporate them into assessment (short-essay exam questions or unassessed/formative reflections whether written or recorded). For example, one of the discussion questions in Chapter 8, Women and Literature, reads: “In this chapter we saw some personifications of cities as women in literature, in art, and in coinage, images such as ‘weeping’ Zion or Babylon ‘the harlot.’ Can you think of some examples of this phenomenon today? Knowing what you know about how women are used rhetorically, can you make any comment about your example and the author or artist’s use of a woman to represent their ideas?”
3) Activities. Activities appear throughout each chapter in shaded boxes. These activities might include reading a primary text together using a specific lens, brainstorming, writing a short analysis, or even writing a poem or making a short video or a piece of art. Like the discussion questions, activities can also be used in pairs, in small groups, with the whole class, or as individual reflection-based homework. They might easily also serve as the basis for exam questions or writing assignments. For example, after students have learned about different ways of approaching evidence in Chapter 4, an activity invites them to look up the definitions of additional “lenses” such as trauma theory, ecocriticism, or critical disability studies, and then attempt to read Sirach 26:5–12 using the lens of their choice.
4) Further reading: The Further Reading sections are short, curated selections of topical readings appropriate for further exploration at the undergraduate level. The complete bibliography at the end of the textbook contains our full list of sources.
5) Glossary terms: Each chapter has a collection of key terms to use on quizzes, work into lectures or discussions, or use for activities. At the end of the book is a full glossary.
In addition to being a storehouse for our collective pedagogical tools and materials over the years, the book is an intentional embodiment of the intersectional feminist ethos we are trying to practise. Our shared mentor, Dr Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, passed away in 2014, but not without making a deep and permanent impression on her students. She modelled a feminist praxis that was collaborative, that prized teaching and student development as highly (or more highly) than solo research, and that never pretended to neutrality, but allowed that forthrightly taking sides and acting with compassion was part of honest academic practice. In each chapter, we tried to model the honing and owning of one’s own positionality for students. We didn’t only incorporate the research of “giants” in the field, but wove early-career, postgraduate, and minoritized voices throughout. We aimed to create an affordable, accessibly written resource that lays as much of the classroom groundwork for teachers as it can in advance, in an effort to acknowledge the strain under which (often precariously-employed) lecturers frequently toil. So we decided, and, we think, succeeded, to create something in a feminist way, not just on a feminist topic.
The results of these decisions have been both satisfying and surprising. One thing that might surprise readers is that this textbook could simply be titled “Jews and Christians in the Ancient Mediterranean.” Just because we chose to aggregate sources, methods, and discussions for the study of women and for the construction of gender in antiquity doesn’t mean the book doesn’t also cover all the contexts, bodies of literature, and methodological approaches that any other textbook of this time period would or should cover. It simply means we did so without ignoring gender entirely–or stuffing it into one hermetically sealed chapter as though gender is an optional niche, rather than an inescapable reality that permeates every interaction, ancient and contemporary. We are ever cognisant of what Sara Parks has called “The Brooten Phenomenon,” where research on women and by women is ignored or sidelined in favour of studies which pose as “objective” but are exclusively by and about men, as though the study of men is a natural “default” and the study of gender is naturally “optional.” During a virtual review of the book, Francis Borchardt said, “this is not simply a textbook on women in the ancient Mediterranean, it’s a textbook on the ancient Mediterranean, full stop." This book makes it easy to incorporate the study of ancient women without siloing them, and to note that our ancient texts and artefacts are laboriously constructing and wielding notions of femininity and masculinity—in other words, of gender—all the time.
Our dearest wish is that this is a resource that colleagues and students find inspiring and useful. We love hearing from folks who have used chapters for research and teaching outside the fields of early Judaism and early Christianity. We are also tickled to hear when the book is selected for discussion in non-scholarly book clubs such as “Theology on Tap.” We were happy to learn recently of postgraduate courses in Germany, Canada, and Ireland built around the book. The icing on the cake was winning the Frank W. Beare Award from the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies for “outstanding book in the areas of Christian Origins, Post-Biblical Judaism, and/or Graeco-Roman Religions”—not least because such awards are so often reserved for individual research projects, written by scholars for scholars, and rarely bestowed on collaborative pedagogical resources. In a historical moment when intersectional feminist pedagogy and nuanced understandings of gender seem more urgently needed than ever, we hope this accolade is a sign of hope.