Building upon the published monograph of her dissertation research, Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell: “Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth” as Paideia in Matthew and the Early Church (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), Henning’s second volume narrows her expertise on the rhetoric of hell to particular bodies as depicted in particular literature. Hell Hath No Fury focuses on the gendering and disabling of bodies in early Christian apocalypses set in hell and the impact of such literary tropes on real bodies on earth.Henning notes early on that she is interested in “studying hell as a beginning, not as an end” (p. 1). Hellscapes shape how societies think about and live out ideas concerning “torture and controlling the body” (p. 2). Informed by gender and disability studies, Henning is attentive to the ways that “hell’s images of the body intensify cultural ideas in which femininity and impairment were linked to weakness and moral failing” (p. 3). The introduction acquaints readers with the literature from which Henning will draw: several Apocalypses and Acts from the second century up to the early medieval period. These later and often popular texts fill in the gaps of the New Testament, which says relatively little about the personal afterlife. As these have been largely ignored in previous modern scholarship, Henning seeks to recover their voice for insight into “early Christian thinking about the afterlife, gender, and the body” (p. 14). By depicting punished bodies as more feminine and disabled, they reinforce “the ancient idea that bodily difference was a punishment for sin” (p. 19). She attends to early generations who made this equation so that she might begin to disentangle it. By reading these texts in their own social contexts, she hopes to make positive changes in her own.The first chapter highlights the ancient beliefs about male and female bodies. Suffering was more associated with the female body, which could be interpreted both negatively and positively for the person and society as a whole, but the fact remains females were much more associated with suffering than males. This chapter also includes reflections on the juridical nature of these tours of hell. The punishments do not critique the torture implements of the empire but inscribe them. By drawing upon the feminization of suffering bodies, this literature “reinstated and reinforced dominant ideas about gender and bodily suffering” (p. 48).The second chapter retains interest in gender but expands it to the specific treatments of sin in the hellscape literature. Because the bodies in hell retain their gender, the accounts can be analyzed through that lens. Henning traces how sins related to sex and marriage appear, including modesty, prostitution, adultery, homoeroticism, pederasty, and incest. She devotes a special section to those sins of failures in parenting. The final sections of the chapter pivot from sins to groups of people, namely how children, slaves, and leaders appear in these texts. Some examples show more equitable treatment for the sins of men and women, such as those who fail at parenting or those who commit adultery (Apocalypse of Peter); but others, typically later texts, show increasing disdain and culpability for women. If the concern of these communities was to maintain order in both the home and the church, sinners who failed to keep that order deserved punishment. By punishing bodies in hell, Christians were to learn from this literature what sins to avoid, but such depictions also reinforced the link between those who suffer on earth and their connection to sin.Chapter 3 seeks to move beyond analysis of the suffering in hell as lex talionis to discover how these narrated punishments relate to “the experiences of real bodies on earth” (p. 81). These tortured bodies not only reveal the condition of the person’s soul who committed such sins but also reinforce ideas about gendered bodies. She draws from Foucalt’s term “heterotopia” as a descriptor of hell in these narratives, “a space that is both mythic and real, and that calls lived spaces into question” (p. 83). Those who observe those punished could become the object of the punishment, either in eternity or in the present world, and this is more likely if they are already “weak, female, sick or deformed” (p. 86). For example, blindness was a common punishment. As such, it “intensified and codified the view that physical disability was the consequence of sin” (p. 87). Henning brings forth examples of various punishments and responses, including weeping, fire, worms, cold, falling, blackness, and various destructions of parts of the body through a gendered lens. In sum, “damnation is depicted as a womanly condition” (p. 113).The fourth and final chapter attends specifically to the literature depicting Mary’s tours of hell in which the character of “Mary subverts and reenacts the ancient expectations of the female body” (p. 119). Henning argues that by virtue of date and influence these should be a part of the decensus tradition, about which she gives a helpful orientation. Mary is unique in the titles of honor given to her and her access to Christ. Mary is important both as Jesus’s biological mother as well as his faithful follower and spiritual mother of all Christians. By virtue of these roles, she has intercessory and even co-redemptive power.Henning’s work has two dominant strengths. First, she provides a close reading of texts that have been largely under analyzed, the apocalyptic tours of hell including the Marian narratives. Texts that were very influential for earlier generations of Christians need to be recovered for today, not only to understand with more clarity the theological thinking of previous generations but also to expose our own culture’s blind spots. This leads to the book’s second strength. By attending to the interchange between the narratives and real life, Henning further unsettles current concepts of “normal” bodies. Hell may not be as distant as some imagine, as she shows by cataloging ways that hell features in contemporary culture. Her epilogue suggests that reading this literature could open fresh and necessarily critical vistas to address the problems with regard to how societies treat disabilities, punishment/ incarceration, and medicine.At times Henning’s gender analysis seems overdetermined. In full agreement that female bodies were devalued in comparison with male ones, I wondered that if it is the case that women can display virtues of temperance and self-control, is it fitting to refer to those as “masculine virtues” (p. 79)? Is crying always effeminate (p. 92)? These are questions I ask in my own writing and analysis of ancient literature, seeking to find a balance between acknowledging the disadvantage of female bodies and reinforcing it. I would have liked to see more acknowledgment of Jesus’s own suffering as a way that the Christian tradition disturbed accepted gendered norms.Henning does that work well in the attention given to Mary. Mary has “the potential to be valued as weak, compromised, and disabled” and “still perform[s] an ancient notion of bodily difference as bodily suffering,” but she expands “the mold that could confine that body to insignificant social roles” (p. 20). Female bodies, which are normatively weak, can also exert power (pp. 116–18). As is the case in the Christian narrative, Mary’s story is the one that begins to loosen the strangling knots of a broken society.Hell Hath No Fury offers much for readers who desire to learn from an underappreciated era to live more justly in our own.