Holy Women, Tortured Bodies, and Imperial Politics at the Margins of Late Antiquity

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22240254
AutoresValentina A Grasso (0000-0002-4497-0063, Bard College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen5
Número2
Páginas1-25
Fecha de publicación2025-06-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaOld World Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2667-0755 • E-ISSN: 2667-0755
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/26670755-00502004
OpenAlexW4411518749
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas12

From the third century CE onwards, Afro-Eurasian rulers enacted policies promoting systems of beliefs centered on a supreme entity to provide their subjects with a communal identity and to consolidate their dominions. This paper examines the relationship between Late Antiquity’s changing religious landscape and the construction of womanhood in three martyrdom narratives unsettling Eurocentric teleologies while foregrounding the politicization of gendered violence against female bodies across the Mediterranean, Armenia, and Arabia. To this end, I frame the circulation of mythicized accounts of the execution of Agatha of Catania, Hṙip‘simē of Armenia, and the women of Najrān against the broader geopolitical shifts that occurred in the period, shedding light on the antinomic articulation of gender identity in three distinct religious milieux arising at the margins of empires, between myth and historical reality

Aesthetics · Agatha · Ancient history · Art · Art history · Citizenship · Dismemberment · Foregrounding · Geopolitics · Late Antiquity · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law