The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”

Abstract

History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, for their models and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.

Inscribing Authority: Female Title Bearers in Jewish Inscriptions

“…Scholars have become increasingly aware, however, of the distinction between the historical Macrina and the textual Macrina. The former was a real woman whose reality is lost to modern scholars, whereas the latter is a representational character created by Gregory for specific uses in his text [5,22]. This realization leads to more sobering conclusions regarding Macrina's presence and prominence in the text, but also to more credible understandings of women's roles in early Christianity.…”

“…She notes that whereas the initial -discovery‖ of respected, authoritative female figures in male-dominated religious roles was cause for celebration, the gradual realization of the representational nature of such figures has tempered expectations about their proving the empowerment of -real‖ women [5]. Clark gives the example of St. Macrina in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, whose prominent, positive depiction of his sister initially was lauded by feminist historians.…”

“…Her research reveals women asserting themselves within male-dominated power structures, but with the goal of supporting the very discursive strategies that normalize and reify their subordination ( [34], pp. [4][5]. This insight encourages a reconsideration of the conclusion that female title bearers accrued, or even sought to accrue, equal power, authority, and responsibility within the synagogue community.…”

“…Synagogue title inscriptions offer a rare example of material culture illuminating questions of gender and women's religious expression in the context of Late Antiquity's synagogues and as such merit continued and rigorous examination. Without disputing the importance of publishing newly discovered women's title inscriptions, scholarship on synagogue titles in general and female title bearers specifically is trapped in a pattern in which, to quote Clark, -we retrieve another forgotten woman and throw her into the historical mix [5].‖ Given the absence of progress interpreting these inscriptions over the past thirty years, a reconceptualized approach to the corpus as a whole is warranted. The pattern can be broken and progress renewed by the adoption of a new theoretical position from which to investigate synagogue titles and their female bearers.…”

From Women's Piety to Male Devotion: Gender Studies, theActs of Paul and Thecla, and the Evidence of an Arabic Manuscript

“…In the face of this shift, as Elizabeth Clark so famously put it, "the lady vanishes." 9 The experience of real, historical women was no longer visible in such texts. Instead, all that historians were left with were traces-a complex web of representations oriented toward the regulation of power within specific social life settings (Sitze im Leben).…”