Motherhood in Antiquity

270 Pages·2017·4.48 MB·English

by  Dana Cooper

Edited by
DANA COOPER AND CLAIRE PHELAN
Motherhood
in Antiquity
Motherhood in Antiquity
Dana Cooper • Claire Phelan
Editors
Motherhood in
Antiquity
Editors
Dana Cooper Claire Phelan
Stephen F. Austin State University University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
Nacogdoches, Texas, USA Belton, Texas, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-48901-8 ISBN 978-3-319-48902-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48902-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933310
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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To Brenda Cooper, to all a mother, in every sense of the word.
In memory of Louise Hewlett, a beautiful and much-beloved child.
C
ontents
Introduction 1
Dana Cooper and Claire Phelan
Part I Motherhood and Religion 7
“I Arose a Mother in Israel”: Motherhood as a Liberating
Power in the Biblical Stories of Miriam and Deborah 9
Dvora Lederman-Daniely
Models of Devotion?: The Rhetoric of Ambivalence
and Admonition in Late Antique and Early Christian
Discourse on Women and Motherhood 29
June-Ann Greeley
Motherhood in the Ancient Indian Buddhist World:
A Soteriological Path 55
Pascale Engelmajer
Part II Motherhood and Politics 77
vii
viii CONTENTS
Mother Knows Best: Motherhood and Succession in 
the Seleucid Realm 79
Alex McAuley
Mamaea’s Little Man: Alexander Severus, His Mother,
and the Germanic War 107
Karl E. Baughman
Jingû: Narratives of Motherhood and Imperial Rule in
Early Japan 123
Kendra Strand
Part III Motherhood and Identity 143
Earthly and Divine Mothers in Ancient Egypt 145
Emily Teeter
Bronze Age Beginnings: The Conceptualization of
Motherhood in Prehistoric Europe 169
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury
From Cybele to Artemis: Motherhood and Great Mothers
of Ancient Anatolia 197
Nilgün Anadolu-Okur
Motherhood, Personhood, Identity, and Place-Making
in Ancient Mesoamerica 223
Kathryn M. Hudson and John S. Henderson
Index 257
L C
ist of ontributors
Nilgün Anadolu-Okur is Professor of African American Studies at Temple
University. She is the author of Dismantling Slavery: Frederick Douglass, William
Lloyd Garrison and the Formation of the Abolitionist Discourse, 1841–1851;
Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry
Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller; Essays Interpreting the Novels of Orhan
Pamuk; and Islam, Women and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century. Her
work has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Black Studies
and Gender Issues besides contributing chapters to reference books and encyclope-
dias. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including two
International Fulbright awards, the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Award,
and the J. Howard Wert American Heritage Award.
Karl E. Baughman is Assistant Professor of History at Prairie View A&M
University, Prairie View, Texas. His interests center on the Roman Empire, early
Christianity, and gender, and his most recent research and publications explore the
connection between gender and imperial authority in Rome, particularly the influ-
ence of empresses in the first three centuries. Currently, he is also working on a
monograph about the Roman emperor, Commodus.
Dana Cooper is Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University,
Nacogdoches, Texas, specializing in women, gender, and transatlantic history. She
has presented papers in England, Holland, and Austria and has published with
presses in Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States. Her latest work,
Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-
American Relations 1865–1945 (2014), led to her interview for the documentary
Million Dollar American Princesses, which appeared on the Smithsonian Channel.
Other works include Transatlantic Relations and Modern Diplomacy: An
ix
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Interdisciplinary Examination (2013) and Motherhood and War: International
Perspectives (Palgrave, 2014).
Pascale Engelmajer teaches Religious Studies at Carroll University, Wisconsin,
USA. She is the author of Women in Pāli Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Path in
Mutual Dependence (2014) and Buddhism: All That Matters (2013). Her research
focuses on women in Buddhism. She has lived and taught in the United Kingdom,
Thailand, Hong Kong and the United States.
June-Ann Greeley is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and
Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut. Her research
interests and publications focus on Medieval Latin literature; religious and intel-
lectual history of the late antique/early Christian and early medieval (including
Carolingian) eras; early medieval religious culture and piety; early Christian and
medieval women’s spirituality; medieval Christian and Islamic mysticism, Celtic
Studies, especially Celtic Christian hagiography, and medieval aesthetics.
John S. Henderson is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. His inter-
ests center on early complex societies, especially how distinctions in status, wealth,
and authority develop and how imagery and text are deployed to maintain and
enhance them. Another set of interests revolves around identity and how groups
are reflected in archaeological remains. Henderson has written extensively about
these issues in the context of ancient Mesoamerica. His field research focuses on
the Ulúa River valley in Honduras.
Kathryn M. Hudson is a member of the Department of Anthropology and the
Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo. Her archaeological research
focuses primarily on ceramic analysis and the study of ancient imagery systems,
particularly in Mesoamerica and Southeastern Europe, and on mechanisms of
identity construction and processes of visual and non-verbal communication. Her
linguistic work focuses on linguistic documentation as well as on historical research.
She has published and presented widely on both topics.
Dvora Lederman-Daniely is a lecturer at the David Yellin Academic College of
Education in Jerusalem, and a researcher in the field of feminine traditions in the
biblical stories. She focuses on the reconstruction of the traces of Goddess’ reli-
gion in the religion of ancient Israel.
Alex McAuley is a lecturer in Hellenistic History at Cardiff University. In addition
to his principal work on localism and globalism in the Hellenistic World, he is also
the principal author and editor of the ongoing Seleucid Genealogy project, and
along with Altay Coskun he edited the volume Seleucid Royal Women. He has
published widely on women in the Hellenistic World, Seleucid Dynastic practice,
and the political culture of Greek cities. He also works extensively on the reception
of antiquity in film and television.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xi
Claire Phelan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mary Hardin-
Baylor. She regularly presents her research at conferences both in the United States
and overseas. Her publications include Motherhood and War: International
Perspectives (2014), of which she was a contributor and co-editor with Dana
Cooper.
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury researches motherhood in prehistoric Europe at the
Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her approach is to combine archaeologi-
cal data with physical anthropology, forensics, ancient DNA and isotope analysis to
understand social responses to pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing. Previously,
she has worked on the archaeology of the human body, art and identity at the
Universities of Cambridge and Leicester, UK.
Kendra Strand is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of Iowa, where
she teaches Japanese literature and culture. Her research focuses on premodern
Japanese travel writing, poetry, and visual culture. She is also interested in issues of
canon, reception, and the links between political power and literary production in
Japan from the earliest times to the present day.
Emily Teeter is Egyptologist, Research Associate, and coordinator of exhibits at
the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago. She is the author of a
wide variety of scholarly and semi-popular works, including Baked Clay Figurines
and Votive Beds from Medinet Habu (2011), Egypt and the Egyptians (2006, with
Douglas Brewer which has appeared in Arabic and Turkish editions), and Religion
and Ritual in Ancient Egypt (2011).