Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (review)

Unreliable Witnesses is several things at once. First, it is an intellectual autobiography, progressing from Kraemer's days as a "neophyte graduate student" at Princeton in her early twenties (3) to her present position as a professor at Brown in her early sixties, poised to transmit her legacy to a new generation of scholars (274). Throughout the work, Kraemer balances emphasis on continuities in her views of women and religion in the ancient Mediterranean with careful demarcation of the changes that have resulted from her increased attentiveness to the rhetoricity of ancient texts and their consequent limitations as sources for women's history—a shift encapsulated in the book's title.

Second, Unreliable Witnesses is an attempt to recapitulate and reframe the theoretical and methodological issues implicated in the study of religion and gender in antiquity. To this end, Kraemer initially invokes Elizabeth Clark's work as representative of historiographic trends arising from the influence of such post-structuralist theorists as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The hallmark of the "alternative reading strategies" associated with this approach is the eschewal of appeals to authorial intention, notes Kraemer, who at several points seems to elide the distinction between poststructuralism and its structuralist antecedents, suggesting that for poststructuralists authorial intention is displaced by "structures that are inherent in human thinking but not consciously present (although perceptible to trained observers)" (9). Kraemer observes that, for Clark, the embrace of theory produces pessimism regarding the possibility of reconstructing a history of women, as opposed to a history of social and linguistic constructions of gender. Kraemer herself is not only "cognizant of these discussions," as she asserts, but also apparently influenced by them in some measure: "my more recent work attends far more carefully to the degree to which the rhetorical uses of gender obscure our vision of antiquity." Nonetheless, she is wary of too close an identification with Clark and the poststructuralist company she keeps, pronouncing herself "equally cognizant of the extent to which some, if not much of the 'theory' that Clark invokes, is now on the wane, or even rejected" (11).

Her own interest is not in "postmodernism, 'literary-critical' theory, and Marxist-based 'cultural' theory, among others" but rather in "theory as explanation," Kraemer clarifies, without elaborating her objections to other kinds of theory. In this case, what she hopes to explain is "the relationships between [women's] behaviors and beliefs and ancient constructions of gender" (11). Taking hints from Pierre Bourdieu, she understands gender to be socially and culturally constructed (15) and religion to be "both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and human actions and ideas" (263). Religious behaviors and beliefs most typically enforce "proper" gender roles, but they can also be turned to transgressive ends. "Practices cannot have aims and intentions or purposes, which require agents," she stresses (265), without, however, entering into the theoretical debates over agency engaged by Bourdieu, among others. Kraemer also notes suggestively that aspects of religious practice tend to complicate conventional constructions of gender by privileging such feminine or feminizing acts as petitionary prayer, submissive postures, and erotically dependent or passive positions vis-à-vis the divine (265).

Beyond autobiography and theory, Kraemer's book is finally (and in my view most significantly and successfully) a collection of well-chosen case studies illustrating the various challenges attending the construction of a history of women and religion in the ancient Mediterranean. Following the introduction, an initial chapter offers four "short stories" from Livy, the Acts of Thomas, the Mishnah, and Justin Martyr that collectively illustrate Kraemer's basic thesis: ancient texts that seem to offer reliable evidence of women's religious practices are in fact shaped by "gendered concerns" that render such evidence anything but reliable (54). Subsequent chapters focus in more depth on the Therapeutrides (Philo's On the Contemplative Life), Thecla of Iconium (Acts of Thecla), Artemisia of Minorca (Severus's Letter on the Conversion of the Jews), and the...