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I am really pleased with the book. It is a book that began 25 years ago when I agreed to teach a class on gender and the bible at Albion College. That was a long time ago. Back then I didn't have the faintest idea that I would want to write a book on gender, let alone do it. I did not study gender in graduate school. This only became an interest of mine when I began teaching. Each time I taught the class and revised it, I became more and more shocked at what I was finding in the early Christian literature, and was frustrated that this material was not being covered in books authored about early Christianity. I couldn't understand why because the material was so important. So eventually I overcame my own anxieties about not having been formally trained in gender studies, and wrote the book myself.
I hope you like it, or at least, I hope it gives you something to think about.
"An intriguing, important, and appropriately dangerous book. DeConick brings her study of the difficult canonical and apocryphal texts into conversation with contemporary concerns in a satisfying and accessible way. Her style is both technical and easy-going. This is a book for the general public as well as the academic classroom. I learned a great deal from it and am left with many questions to chew on happily and to discuss. The reader is aided in the search for 'Lady God,' and in the struggle to create societies that abhor and reject violence to the female body." — Jane Schaberg, Professor of Biblical Studies and Gender/Women’s Studies, University of Detroit Mercy, USA
4 comments:
That's odd on timing. Amazon emailed me to say they'd shipped my copy 5 days ago (its coming to the UK, so I didn't expect to have it). Unusual for author's copies to get there after a booksellers.
Still, I'm mightily looking forward to it. Congratulations on finally nurturing it through to publication.
I think my copies got sent late.
And now the Kindle version is out, too. Excellent!
Dear April,
At last I had the opportunity to completely read and, I assume, digest your "Holy Misogyny". And so I want to thank you for the presentation of this history as facts in perspective. The result of your years and years working on these topics offers so many new insights to those like me who know that there is more to know but do not have the opportunity to study and combine the facts themselves. Those who will study your book will have much to digest, but how enormous a help it is to find the most important texts, problems, analyses etcetera interpreted within their own historical context. That you have mastered these subjects so well can be concluded from the clarity of not only presenting the facts but presenting them so that they can be seen as meaningful in their own often complex contexts! All your readers have to thank you for that, is really a great achievement.
At the end of the book you mention the still actual refusal of the admission of women in church offices. I appreciate that but hasten to say that IMHO your book and its subjects have much farther reaching implications, theoretically as well as practically. I think of the wider historical context of Western misogyny within broader cultural divergions of 'male 'and 'female' not only as designations of sex or gender but as designations of nearly any cultural opposition, be it of character, of archetype, and many other projections in which not only concrete women and men play roles but as well their psychological, philosophical etc. differences and similarities. I am convinced that the facts of your presentation in this book will have even more meaning in a broader context of cultural comparison and still broader historical perspective, including prehistorical times and non-Western cultures and ways of arranging relations between 'male' and 'female'.
The new insight you give me through your new book in "Early Christianity" (of which I would say, it was not yet "Christianity" then because that is associated with the later institution) is marvelous and very helpful in understanding the change from varying Jesus worshippers to more and more monolithic institutions in new relations with political power and big normative society.
I hope you will once have the oportunity to shed more light on the ways the figure of Jesus and his co-deities or -halfdeities was clothed in the clothes of other Palestinian, also non-Palestinian Jewish images and representations and ofcourse very interestingly non-Jewish ones. Because you might know already a lot of that, and until yet I see, within the literature I know, little clear oversight about this.
I thank you very very much. Again you have presented us with much historical oversight and insight like in your books about the Gospel of Thomas and many of your other publications.
Hope to read more from you soon,
Boudewijn Koole'
Driebergen, the Netherlands
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