The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity by Kim Haines-Eitzen (review)

This book is an example of the good things that can happen when a very careful, detail-oriented, and sequential mind gets to grips with a very abstract, synthetic, and big-picture idea. What immediately whets the reader’s appetite is the author’s engagement with ancient books as physical objects and her view of readers as fully embodied humans. Decades of philosophy and numerous shifts in intellectual culture, including the rise of new philology, went into making that perspective possible. It is enticing to see it gaining ground within studies of early Christianity.

Haines-Eitzen makes a complex set of connections in this book. First, there is the connection between texts as specific physical objects (i.e. individual codices rather than narratives) and women as embodied human beings acting upon their environment, including books. Second, there is the connection between women as gendered (that is, the ideological and contested aspect of being a woman in early Christianity) and texts as palimpsests (that is, unstable, malleable, changeable, and re-writable instances of human work). These connections determine how the book is organized. The first section deals with where and how we see women interacting with books. The second section is still anchored in the physical text but uses textual criticism to trace out interactions between women as gendered and texts as always open and contestable, examining numerous examples of the effects of debates about the proper gendering of women on the transmission of stories about women in early Christian literature.

Chapter one, entitled “Women Writers, Writing for Women: Authors, Scribes, Book-Lenders, and Patrons,” surveys the diverse relations between women and books-as-objects, mustering documentary, epigraphic, and literary evidence for the quotidian involvement of women in producing, circulating, sponsoring, and collecting texts. By gathering examples of late ancient women in each of the above roles, Haines-Eitzen very carefully and meticulously makes a mess of the traditional notion that men completely controlled the production and circulation of the books that now constitute our textual evidence. She concludes that we need not assume that we have only “male representations of reality” (38).

In chapter two, “Reading, Not Eating: Women Readers in Late Ancient Christian Asceticism,” Haines-Eitzen pursues the idea of consuming books or ingesting their ideas and assimilating them to the human heart and begins to touch on the role of books in women’s ascetic practice. Several examples, both literary and historical, are drawn together into a survey of female ascetics who are praised for their avid reading. Part one then closes with chapter three, “Women’s Literature? The Case of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.” Here Haines-Eitzen calls into question the claim (a traditionalized anachronistic non-sequitur) that stories that prominently feature women were not intended for everyone but only for women.

Part two opens with chapter four, “Sinners and Saints, Silent and Submissive? The Textual/Sexual Transformation of Female Characters in the New Testament and Beyond.” Case studies of female figures in the New Testament serve to demonstrate “different methods by which Christians fashioned an identity for women through the medium of story” (71) and to resolve perceived tensions or contradictions in the portrayal of specific female figures. After this survey, chapter five, “First among All Women: The Story of Thecla in Textual Transmission and Iconographic Remains,” treats the shifting portrayal of one very popular female figure. Part two then closes with “Contesting the Ascetic Language of Eros: Textual Fluidity in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles,” which correlates textual variants with shifting ideas about what constitutes legitimate female sexuality.

This book is very well-written, brief, and carefully structured. It can be read easily in two or three sittings. The twenty-eight pages of notes connect the book’s argument to the current scholarly standard of research and provide transparent references to the codices and papyri discussed in each chapter. There is a citation index, a general index...