The Milk of Salvation: Redemption by the Mother in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity

Abstract

In their recovery and interpretation of the evidence for women's religious involvement in antiquity, feminist historians of religion employ terms like “image,” “reflection,” and “symbol” as constants in their vocabulary. This terminology indicates the importance feminist scholars attach to the ways in which women's activities are presented and the ways in which they are interpreted. Interpretation becomes the more difficult as one approaches the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, not only because of the relative paucity and elusive nature of the evidence for women's participation in these religions, but also because the two great bodies of canon in the West—the literary artifacts of the Greco-Roman world and the canon of biblical literature—reflect a dual process of “canonization.” Certain cultural constructs and dominant metaphors have become embodied in the text themselves, while a tradition of “canonized conventions” has been modeled by these metaphors to “evaluate a priori what we see.” The interaction of conceptualization, representation, and interpretation of appearance, moreover, is such that there cannot be an “innocent eye.” Nelson Goodman observes: “The eye always comes ancient to its work. …Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and perspective. …It does not so much mirror as take and make.” Moreover, the use of the term “image” itself reflects a process by which a particular representation is shaped and subsequently held up as the way in which something is conceptually “seen” or meant to be “seen,” and which is not necessarily or even possibly a “true” reflection.