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Ausgabe: | Dezember/2022 |
Spalte: | 1179–1180 |
Kategorie: | Altertumswissenschaft |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Mowat, Chris |
Titel/Untertitel: | Engendering the Future. Divination and the Construction of Gender in the Late Roman Republic. |
Verlag: | Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2021. 201 S. m. 2 Tab. = Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge, 75. Geb. EUR 49,00. ISBN 9783515129343. |
Rezensent: | Blossom Stefaniw |
This slightly revised dissertation was submitted at Newcastle University in 2018. Chris Mowat has since taught in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield and continues to demonstrate ethical and scholarly concern with divergent gender identities.
There is some precedent for connecting gender, performativity and identity in the context of ritual expertise in antiquity. This includes, among the most recent publications noted in the bibliography, Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2016) and Jason König and Greg Woolf, Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2017). Scholarly interest in gender and ritual expertise is also to be found in Heidi Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests and Gnostics in the Third Century C. E. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press: 2016) or Sissel Undheim, Borderline Virginities: Sacred and Secular Virginsin Late Antiquity (London, Routledge: 2018). Observing that lists of diviners include numerous women, M. sets out to examine the »very specifically gendered rules that form divinatory traditions« (13). M. asks for example »who (sic) was allowed to divine? how (sic) did their gender role play into their presumed ability as well as the sanctioning of their practice? in (sic) what ways did gender play an implicit, if important part in the construction and performance of the divinatory traditions of the period?« (14). The author de- ploys classics of queer theory, gender theory, and performance theory (Sedgwick, Butler, Foucault, Austin) to characterize the dynamics traced through close reading of a large corpus.
After surveying the relevant theoretical apparatus and defining terms, M. presents six chapters. Chapter 2, »Marcus« examines Marcus Tullius Cicero's de Divinatione, a literary dialogue presenting the arguments for and against the validity of divination. M.'s reading of this text focuses on »considering how gender is understood in the Div. as a whole and in the traditions this dialogue-treatise represents« (35). Chapter 3, »Sibyl(s)« works across a variety of texts to investigate the sibylline tradition as one showing fluid yet distinct prophetic identity and the impact of feminine gender on an agent's perceived divinatory capacity. In Chapter 4, »Callo/n«, M. uses Diodorus and Livy to examine the interpretation of the birth of intersex persons as a prodigy indicating disruption in the pax deorum. Chapter 5, »Martha« brings us to Plutarch's account of an eponymous Syrian diviner in the retinue of the consul Gaius Marius. M. compares the embedding of the woman Martha in a hyper-male military context with the parallel case of Diotima's embedding in the hyper-male philosophical context to conclude that the »wrongness« of Martha's social location and ethnicity was in line with customary expectations for what sort of women could participate in divinatory practice. In Chapter 6 »Calpurnia« we examine numerous historiographer's accounts of the wife of Julius Caesar who dreamt of her husband's death but whosewarnings were ignored. Here a Roman woman in her proper gen-dered context (unlike Martha) gains prophetic knowledge but that knowledge is, M. argues, effectively meaningless, as it is not credited as grounds for altering one's behavior. The book concludes with a review of the different ways the gender of the practitioner interacts with the perceived quality of their divinatory abilities. In terms of style there are some infelicities such as (13) »[…] I am aiming to demonstrate the ways in which those rules of gender stood in the late Roman Republic […]« or sentences with jumbled syntax suggesting hasty work, such as (52) »As an alternative to a negative reading of desperation, loss, helplessness or other attributes the normative derision might direct us (and/or the ancient viewer) to feel when looking at this anus ebria, R. J. Barrow has posited a reading based on a celebration of the non-ideal […]«. There is an orderly apparatus including index locorum, subject index, bibliography and tables.
As to the relevance of this volume to theology, it does not make any explicit connections to Christian texts or practices (for which the author cannot be faulted given the periodic constraints chosen). Colleagues from church history or biblical studies could profitably connect interactions of gender and special religious ability in Christian and/or Biblical sources to M.'s findings. For example, a consideration of the roles of female or ambivalently gendered ascetics, martyrs, apostles, prophets or other special religious agents in Christian communities is enabled by this publication.
The ethics of gendered religious practice and epistemic justice entailed by this book are likewise relevant to systematic and practical theologians.