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

Dados Bibliográficos

ID22240254
AutoresValentina A Grasso (0000-0002-4497-0063, Bard College, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume5
Fascículo2
Páginas1-25
Data de publicação2025-06-19
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoOld World Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2667-0755 • E-ISSN: 2667-0755
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/26670755-00502004
OpenAlexW4411518749
IdiomaEN
Referências 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