Breaking Boundaries: Female Biblical Interpreters Who Challenged the Status Quo / Edition 1

by Nancy Calvert-Koyzis, Heather Weir, Andrew Mein, Claudia V. Camp

Overview

While people often believe that the feminist movements in Britain and North America began in the late twentieth century, this is certainly not the case.  Women throughout the centuries have sought to break out of the constraints that their societies deemed appropriate for them.  For interpreters in the Christian tradition, this often meant examining biblical texts that had been understood in ways that demeaned women and using their interpretations to encourage women to break out of their culturally proscribed spheres. 

The essays in this volume are drawn from the Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible Consultation at the SBL Annual Meeting and from sessions on female interpreters of Scripture at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies.  The essays address female interpreters of the Bible such as Eudocia and Anna Jameson whose publications have been largely ignored in the fields of the history of biblical interpretation and reception history. Through their publications these women used their interpretive and theological skills to break the boundaries that previous interpretations of the Bible and their societies imposed upon them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780567595034
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/26/2010
Series:	The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies , #524
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nancy Calvert-Koyzis, Ph.D. (1993), University of Sheffield, teaches part time at the Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University. Her publications include Paul, Monotheism and the People of God: The Significance of Abraham for Early Jewish and Christian Identity (T&T Clark/Continuum: 2004).

Heather Weir, Th.D. , (2008), Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, is an instructor at Wycliffe. She co-edited Let Her speak for Herself: Nineteenth Century Women Writing on Women in Genesis (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006).

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Boundaries Broken, Voices Heard
Nancy Calvert-Koyzis, Heather E. Weir
2. Retelling and Misreading Jesus: Eudocia's Homeric Cento
Brian Sowers
3. Vindicating Womankind: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Caryn Reeder
4. Reading Nature Before Reading the Bible: Sarah Trimmer's Natural Theology
Heather E. Weir
5. Eliza Smith's The Battles of the Bible: Biblical Interpretation in Service of a Christian Social Agenda in Nineteenth-Century Urban Scotland
Bernon Lee
6. "Miss Greswell Honed Our Hebrew at Oxford": Reflections on Joana J. Greswell and Her Book Grammatical Analysis of the Hebrew Psalter (1873)
J. Glen Taylor
7. Ready to Sacrifice All: The Repentant Magdalene in the Work of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Nancy Calvert-Koyzis
8. Olympia Brown: Reading the Bible as a Universalist Minister and Pragmatic Suffragist
Beth Bidlack
9. Leaving Eden: Resurrecting the Work of Katharine Bushnell and Lee Anna Starr
Kristin Kobes Du Mez
10. Elizabeth Mary MacDonald:  An Early Canadian Contribution to the Study of Women in the Ancient Near East Rebecca G. S. Idestrom
11. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Interpretation of the Virgin Mary: The Significance of Maternal Ideology for Home and Society
Nancy Calvert-Koyzis
Index