Gender and Sacred Textures
Entanglements of Materiality, Embodiment, and Sacred Texts in Religious Identities
Edited by
Marianne Schleicher [+–]
Aarhus University
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Marianne Schleicher is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests lie in the intersection of Judaism, scripture, gender, and the history of religion.
This anthology asks how the handling, use, and embodied enactments of sacred texts regulate, entangle, occlude, tolerate, or even subvert religious and gendered identities. While many studies have looked at the semantic content of sacred texts to answer this question, the volume mends a knowledge gap by looking at the effects on gender that follow both from uses of sacred texts as directly accessible, material objects and from embodied enactments of sacred texts in indirect ways. To signify the embodied enactment of sacred texts, not directly at hand, Marianne Schleicher coins the term “sacred texture” in the introduction to extend sacred text studies to capture both the textuality of poetic and narrative expressions in oral cultures and how most lay people, often women, have expressed their religiosity through indirect uses of sacred texts through bodily enactments.
Among the insights this volume offers are how Old Norse women’s composition of oral sacred textures renders their gender fluid, how a sacred text in Numbers 5 is used to handle a woman and simultaneously bolsters the masculinities of the involved men, how Jewish women through centuries have been intelligible as such by enabling men’s direct access to sacred texts or by bodily enacting sacred textures themselves, how both Christian women and sacred texts should leave adornments behind to embody Jerome’s ascetic ideals, how four women in contemporary American Judaism write Esther scrolls according to halakhic rules to become intelligible as scribes despite their female gender, how American Evangelical women have compensated for the absence of a directly accessible Bible at work by bodily enacting fragments of the Bible, and how Muslim family members in Denmark bodily enact and navigate Qur’anic prescriptions on filial piety up against its prescriptions concerning the naked body.
Series: Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts
Table of Contents
Introduction
Aarhus University
Marianne Schleicher is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests lie in the intersection of Judaism, scripture, gender, and the history of religion.
Chapter 1
Aarhus University
The purpose of this chapter is to identify Old Norse sacred texts and contribute to insights into the entanglements between Old Norse women’s gender and their production and performance of sacred texts. By broadening the concept of text to include texture, the article proposes a definition that can identify some recorded Old Norse poetic speech acts as sacred textures. Empirically, the article analyses skaldic and eddic poetry composed by Old Norse women as a means to defend themselves and their communities against threats, and it examines how the production of sacred textures affected women’s gender. The article conjoins theoretical reflections by Paul Ricoeur, Émile Durkheim, Rudolf Otto, Judith Butler, Karen Barad, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, offering a platform for future analyses of sacred textures in other oral religious cultures.
Chapter 2
Aarhus University
The biblical text of Numbers 5:11–31 describes a ritual designed to determine the guilt or innocence of a woman suspected of adultery: she must drink a mixture of water, dirt, and the ink of written curses given to her by a priest. This article analyses how the ritualized use of a material sacred text as described in Numbers 5:11–31 – and the ways it interacts with the bodies of the people involved – impacts the biblical construction of gender identities. Using concepts introduced by R. W. Connell, I argue that the ritual makes use of a material sacred text to reinforce a hegemonic masculine identity for the Israelite priesthood, while encouraging the complicit masculinity of laymen and the subjugated feminine identity of women. In doing so, the ritual of Numbers 5:11–31 bolsters the hierarchy of gender identities constructed by the book of Numbers and the Pentateuch more broadly.
Chapter 3
Aarhus University
Marianne Schleicher is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research interests lie in the intersection of Judaism, scripture, gender, and the history of religion.
This chapter argues that the concept of “sacred texture” is a necessary supplement to standard understandings of sacred texts in Jewish religion to capture lay people’s, especially women’s, material-embodied acts as aspects of sacred text use. Such acts may include spoken or performed fragments or sequences from a sacred text that activate associations to it and thereby make the acts intelligible as representations of the sacred text, be it up close or at a distance. The article draws upon, but also expands perspectives on sacred texts as material objects (Malley, Watts, and Schleicher) by including theories by Halliday and Hasan, and Ricoeur on texture, by Deleuze and Guattari on processes of becoming, and by Butler on identity as something emerging from engagements in a culture’s iterative acts. The theoretical underpinnings beg the question of who has access when and where to which particular iterative acts that involve sacred texts and textures? The analysis begins with the Hebrew Bible to find out when texts were conceived as sacred in the first place and when and in what way access to them became regulated. The analysis continues into early Jewish sources, rabbinic literature, and Ashkenazic Jewish sources from the Middle Ages to reflect on Jewish women’s involvement with sacred texts and textures in ways that broaden our knowledge of how they made their religious identity intelligible.
Chapter 4
University of Zurich
In his letters to Roman aristocratic women about the proper use of scripture, Jerome dismissed purple makeup and any adornment of books with luxurious materials as wasteful distraction from the content of the text. He contrasts makeup and precious clothing with the textual correctness of his scholarly emended manuscripts and with corporal mortification and ascetic practices. Jerome’s dismissal of the materiality and sensuality of books goes hand in hand with a binary gender model that associates the philological work upon the text and the renunciation of its adornment with male scholarship. In order for women to become equal to men through the study of scripture, Jerome extols the performance of a textual asceticism that suppresses the makeup of books and of female bodies alike. His makeup criticism is part of a larger discourse that expresses a persistent fear of a sensual engagement with the materiality of scripture in binary gender stereotypes. A close reading of the purple metaphors employed by Jerome reveals their roots in the rhetorical appraisal of eloquence and poetic language precisely through the materiality of the text.
Chapter 5
College of William & Mary
Joanna Homrighausen (PhD, Religion, Duke University) studies the intersection of sacred text, lettering arts, and scribal craft, and teaches Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary. Her dissertation, Writing Esther, unpacks the materiality of the Esther scroll in Judaism and shows how Jews have used the written artefact to think through pivotal theological questions raised by the Book of Esther. Joanna is the author of two books.
This chapter focuses on how the material form of the Esther scroll and the ritualized practices of copying it reflect changes in how Jews remember the events of Purim. I demonstrate how Purim and writing intersect with contemporary changes in women’s roles in Jewish ritual, as well as new interpretations of the Book of Esther informed by feminist readings and heightened awareness of the relationship between gender and agency. I examine Esther scrolls made by contemporary female ritual scribes (soferot) who add their own creative marks to the scrolls they copy: Nava Levine-Coren, Avielah Barclay, Jen Taylor Friedman, and Rachel Jackson. These creative touches convey their readings of the biblical text, which magnify women’s perspective and agency.
Chapter 6
University of Kansas
Evangelical affiliated periodicals serve as an important source to document how evangelical women coped with the absence of material markers of evangelicalism once they entered secular workplaces in the United States during the 1980s. In these affiliated periodicals, women writers legitimize their entry into the workforce with parable writing and storytelling that exemplify to their female readers how they can exhibit their evangelical identity and engage in evangelization by embodying motifs and narratives from the Bible. Theoretically, the article leans on Judith Butler and Karen Barad’s understandings of performativity, which is why the article asks: what acts did evangelical women engage in, how did affiliated periodicals intra-act with and thus have an effect on the construction of evangelical women’s identity, and how did these acts relate to the Bible? These questions are directed at evangelical affiliated periodicals from the 1980s, especially Shirley Schreiner Taylor’s parable “God Protects His Sheep among the Wolves” from the February 1989 issue of Word and Work.
Chapter 7
Abir Mohamad Ismail
This chapter takes the practice of elderly care as a starting place to discuss how Muslim men and women “do” piety when doing elderly care in their everyday lives. It introduces and analyses central passages in the Qur’an and the Ḥadīths that deal with birr-al- wālidayn (filial piety), ‘awra (the intimate body parts that must be covered), and ‘ayb (shame/shamefulness) since they all appear as central concepts in the Islamic tradition of elderly care. With a focus on the embodied enactment of these concepts, the article turns to the analysis of two ethnographic cases to look at how Muslims “do” care for their elderly parents and at the same time strive to embody their sacred text, the Qur’an, and the Ḥadīths in everyday life. The article aims to show that “doing” elderly care enables a domain of pious doings that matters to how Muslim men and women perform and understand gender.
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781800505513
Price (Hardback)
£75.00 / $100.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781800505520
Price (Paperback)
£24.95 / $32.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781800505537
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Individual
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£75.00 / $100.00
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
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Publication
15/09/2025
Pages
224
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
scholars
Illustration
colour figures
