The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women Virginia Burrus Nicola Denzey. The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Pp. xxi + 290. $27.95. The Bone Gatherers is, for starters, a brilliantly titled book. The words boldly inscribed on the cover evoke loss and the rituals of recollection; they gesture towards the shadowy spaces of social marginalization; they allude, delicately, to an ancient drama that has survived only in fragments. If I were to add that this title also hints at the pleasures that a good mystery novel might afford, I would still be able to say that Nicola Denzey’s book delivers faithfully on its cover’s various implicit promises—no small feat! The image on the cover is as important as the words—the figure of a woman standing with arms outreached, familiar from early Christian art. Although Denzey begins with tales of ancient bones unearthed and repeatedly directs us toward those women who (in one way or another) gathered and tended such bones, her story circles most tightly around a series of paintings found in the burial catacombs of ancient Rome. This is a book about Christian catacomb art, then, and it is, more specifically, one that asks us to pay attention to the surprising prominence of women in the preserved paintings as well as to the histories encrypted therein—histories of the women who died, of the women who commissioned their commemorative art, and of the women who continued to visit their burial places. It asks us to engage these paintings and their settings imaginatively. Indeed, Denzey will speculate quite freely at times, taking up a feminist historiographic practice associated most famously with Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her (1983). In so doing, she hopes to restore agency to the women of the ancient church of Rome. If necessary, she gives them names: “let’s call her Proba” (25). She imbues them with emotions—“the profound loss and wrenching grief of burying her own child” (54)—and assigns them social roles—“presiding over the meal” (100). She restores the sensual texture of their daily lives: “the wind wrings her long, striped red dalmatic around her ankles” (74). Throughout the book, Denzey draws with confident grace not only on the skills of a story teller but also upon the knowledge of an impressively learned historian. Each of the book’s seven chapters focuses on two “lost” women who lived and died in Rome between about 250 and 350 c.e. while using these women to introduce larger topics. What can the tomb of a young bride tell us about the physical and social realities that conditioned an ordinary woman’s life? What does [End Page 261] “Christianization” look like from the point of view of a pagan woman who is choosing the art for her Christian daughter’s burial site? How did women express themselves through religious images more generally, and how did they want their viewers to interpret those images? What kinds of ritual acts might women visiting the tombs have performed? And so on. Raising such questions, Denzey skillfully draws her readers into the adventure of interpreting not texts but spaces and paintings. At the same time, she tracks momentous changes taking place in the course of the third and fourth centuries. Many of the original female patrons who had provided and tended the Christian burial sites came to be misrecognized as apostolic or martyred figures, and once again women seem to have played major roles, participating prominently in the early development of a markedly feminized cult of saints in Rome. However, as memories were being reconfigured, power relations were also continuing to shift. By the late fourth century the already layered topography of female piety had been decisively reinscribed, as a newly centralized church hierarchy extended the reach of patriarchy into the catacombs themselves. Every good story needs a villain, and Denzey identifies hers quite forthrightly in the final chapter of the book—Damasus, bishop of Rome from 366 to 384, who was largely responsible for the masculinization of the Roman calendar of saints. Yet in Denzey’s account one could...