Breaking Boundaries

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.

Contenu

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