Breaking Boundaries: Female Biblical Interpreters Who Challenged the Status Quo

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Description

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.

Reviews

The business of recovering women interpreters of biblical texts is still in its early stages of research, and the field owes a deep debt of gratitude to these intrepid investigators and their collaborators who have contributed to Breaking Boundaries... The editors appear to have asked writers to be particularly careful to establish the intellectual and socio-cultural context of each of the women considered, and in the best of the articles this contextualization lends a fascinating light on the hermeneutical issues involved in the particular interpreter's work. -- Carol A. Newsom, Emory University * Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception Vol 3 No 1 (2013) *

Author Bio

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 (2006).