Christian Women in the Greek Papyri of Egypt to 400 CE by Erica A. Mathieson (review)

Mathieson's volume, based on her doctoral dissertation, is a study of the religious lives of women in early Christian Egypt. The evidence comes from a small group of papyrus texts chosen for their obvious Christian identifiers, such as the inclusion of biblical references, nomina sacra, reference to clergy, or a writer's self-identification as Christian. For each text in the corpus, the author has included the Greek text, a translation, and a commentary that discusses and identifies its Christian elements. Although Mathieson refers to these texts as "texts written by Christian women," she acknowledges wisely that it is often impossible to tell whether the women themselves penned the texts. Of course, if women commonly dictated letters to male scribes, that in itself forms part of women's experience and does not lessen the value of the contents in determining women's expression of their religiosity.

Analysis of the papyri is divided into sections (e.g. use of biblical language, the practice of prayer, marriage and family) wherein the texts are examined to find commonalities and patterns. The conclusions of these chapters invite engagement with a much broader body of materials. For example, Mathieson concludes that the use of biblical language in this body of papyri "is consistent with an oral transmission of the Scripture" (99). This is an area that requires much further investigation to determine, for example, whether women's experience is different from that of men in the same context, and it must as well delve into the expansive scholarship on orality and literacy in both pagan and Christian contexts.

Later sections of the book use different small corpora of texts to look at asceticism and magic among Christian women. While the number of papyri that relate to these topics is very small—eight for asceticism and four for magic—they are important in that they show the earliest interaction of Christian women with these practices as recorded in the papyri. The texts introduce us to, for example, different vocabulary referring to women's status as ascetics (e.g μοναχή and μοναχή ἀποτακτική, which are not used in literary sources). Along with the Christian spells, these texts merit comparison with later papyri.

Overall, the author expresses the belief that Christian women in this mileu blended in with their pagan neighbors in most aspects of their lives (276–81). This will be affirmed with further study that incorporates a broader selection of texts. For example, Mathieson notes that the letters she has chosen to include demonstrate that women are committed to keeping their family members connected and praying for their health (200), an action that she finds consistent with the beliefs of the early church. But, of course, pagan women express the exact same sentiments in their letters (e.g. P. Haun. 2.18 or P. Mich. 8.514, both third century c.e., which address family disputes and include prayers for well-being to pagan gods).

Some minor infelicities in the volume could have been avoided. In the catalog of texts, the genre of text (the majority are letters) is not noted, although this is the norm in collections of papyri. Mathieson also does not say whether she translated the texts herself or used the work of another translator. I would have preferred to see the whole texts (rather than snippets) in Chapter Seven ("Documents Written to Christan Women or Referring to Christian Women") and to see conclusions derived from those papyri integrated with the material of the first six chapters. The author has also chosen to exclude a number of texts (listed in 15n1, 204n2, 236n35), but does not explain why. While these papyri presumably do not include the criteria Mathieson employed to identify her corpus (10–13), those texts have been identified as Christian for other reasons, and this needs to be addressed at least briefly.

As the author herself notes (4–5), it is problematic to separate any group of...