BMCR 2008.09.04, Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women

Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers:  The Lost Worlds of Early Christian
Women.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 2007.  Pp. xxi, 290.  ISBN
9780807013083.  $27.95.

Reviewed by Caroline T. Schroeder, The University of the Pacific
(carrie <at> carrieschroeder.com)
Word count:  2352 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-09-04.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/09/20080904.html
-------------------------------

Table of Contents
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip076/2006039315.html)

The catacombs of ancient Rome were liminal spaces, places where the
boundaries between the living and the dead collapsed during family
burials and ritual commemorations.  During Christian late antiquity,
these places, and the bones they purported to hold, were deployed in
efforts to telescope a remembered Christian past with a desired
Christian present.  The Bone Gatherers brings to life these ancient
tombs, the women who patronized them, and the religious topography of
Rome, which increasingly depended on the tombs, the female bones they
contained, and the stories of their bone gatherers for the city's
religious and political identity.

The book examines the ways female patrons of the Christian catacombs
(the "bone gatherers" of the title) exerted religious, political,
social, and cultural influence on their city and on their faith
tradition.  In Denzey's account, the "bone gatherer" functioned almost
as an unofficial church office.  She documents the women who collected
the bodies and bones of the Christian dead and then constructed tombs,
commissioned art, and funded churches.  Their influence, however, was
incidentally and deliberately effaced over time.  Weaving together
insights from archaeology, art history, gender studies, classics, and
religious history, Denzey (hereafter D.) has produced an
interdisciplinary and unique monograph, analyzing specific catacombs,
the lives of women who commissioned them and buried their loved ones
inside, as well as the mythic and historical women interred within.  D.
also uses the subterranean chambers as prisms through which she
scrutinizes the intersection of religion and gender in Roman society.
Each chapter spirals out to the crowded streets of the city above --
the world of the living women of Rome.  In doing so, the book provides
(despite caveats to the contrary) a survey of daily life in terms of
gender dynamics and lived religion in Christian Rome from 250 to 350
CE.  The book is illustrated with thirteen black-and-white photographs
and one map.  (While I wished for more images, I understand the
financial limitations of humanities publishing today.  A list of
illustrations would have been useful and feasible, however.)  Each
chapter is consistently up-to-date on the latest research in early
Christian studies as well as women and gender studies of the period.

D. establishes the parameters and methodology of her work in the
Introduction. She claims to present not a "sweeping history" of early
Christian women or the burgeoning church in Rome but a series of "'case
studies' of forgotten women" who lived from 250-350 CE (xviii). The
Bone Gatherers is unabashedly feminist in the classic sense, in that it
seeks to tell "the story of these lost and forgotten women" (xvii).  D.
uses "visual, archaeological, and epigraphical sources" (xvi) in
conversation with literary, legal, and other historical sources to
reconstruct women's lives and self-representations.  She also
interrogates gender and power relations expressed in the evidence and
in previous scholarship.

Chapter One, "Death Takes a Bride" opens with the the 19th-century
discovery of a sarcophagus belonging to one Crepereia Tryphaena.
Within it remained the body of the young bride buried in her wedding
attire.  D. uses the corpse, its adornments, and the sarcophagus as a
window into wedding rituals and female mortality in Rome.  D.
reconstructs the likely life events of the dead Tryphaena by placing
her within a context illuminated by demographic data on marriage,
childbirth, and disease.  The emotional and psychological impact of
Tryphaena's passing is weighed through a reading of literary sources,
such as Cicero's correspondence with friends upon the demise of his
daughter Tullia and Pliny the Younger's letter to Marcellinus about the
death of the thirteen year-old Marcella.  Methodologically, this
chapter is typical of most of the others in the book, in that it moves
back and forth between the material objects that center the study,
broader historical context about issues that relate to these objects,
and the history of modern scholarship on the objects themselves.

Chapter Two, "Proba and the Piglet," turns to the Via Latina hypogeum,
specifically Cubiculum O, which contains both pagan and Christian
artistic motifs.  Contrary to other contemporary scholarship, D. argues
that the tomb's unnamed patron was a pagan woman (not a Christian man),
who commissioned the tomb for her Christian daughter.  D. provides the
patron with a pseudonym ("Proba") and supports her interpretation
through a detailed reading of the imagery in the cubiculum.  In doing
so, D. explores mother/daughter relationships, the phenomenon of
conversion to Christianity by pagan women, devotion to Ceres, the cult
of Demeter, comparable Christian iconography in other catacomb tombs,
and funerary rituals of sacrifice.

Chapter Three, "Waiting in the Afterlife," examines "Proba's" tomb in
neighboring Cubiculum N and the Priscilla Catacombs' famed Cubiculum of
the Velata (home to the fresco of a veiled Christian woman with hands
raised in prayer).  These women provide the opportunity for D. to
discuss Roman marriage, views of the afterlife, women in church
offices, and women's involvement in rhetoric and education.  As in the
previous chapter, D. challenges some standard readings of the art.  She
argues that the woman in the Velata fresco (likely the woman for whom
the tomb was created) is depicted neither at her marriage, nor her
baptism, nor her sanctification as a church virgin.  Rather, depicted
with a scroll and in the orans position, she commemorates her status
and identity as an educated and pious Christian rather than a
particular life-event.  D. impresses upon her readers, "the catacombs
came to represent women's sacred space" (82).  The Velata's tomb is not
merely the resting place for a famed fresco; it is one piece in a
network of feminine religious imagery commissioned by women who wished
to be remembered as devout, learned, and civically engaged.  "Proba's"
parallel pagan artistic programme draws on but alters the traditional
iconography of the drama of Alcestis; it too represents a culturally
educated woman's manipulation of literature in an expression of
self-identity.

Chapter 4, "Praying with Prisca," sifts through the traditions about
the person(s) after whom the Catacombs of Priscilla are named (Prisca
is a nickname for Priscilla).  In one thread of the narrative, the
legendary woman transforms from a church leader mentioned by Paul
(remembered for her authority in life) to a martyr (remembered for her
death).  D. finds links between the shifting legends about the founder
or founding corpse and the scholarly anxiety over the identities of the
people in the famous painting there known as the Fractio Panis.  Both
reflect a resistance to acknowledging female leadership in the early
Church.  The Fractio Panis depicts seven people at a table breaking
bread.  D. reviews the controversies over whether the figures are male,
female, or both, and whether they depict a funerary feast, the
Eucharist, a simple meal, or some combination thereof.  (D. herself
concludes that the people are likely all women.)  After examining some
of the other images in the same chamber, D. suggests that the room may
have been a martyrium, built to honor and house the bones of an early
female leader.  D. resists labeling her a priest, deacon, or other
church office-holder.

Chapter Five, "Petronella Goes to Paradise," explores the gendered
dimensions of the cult of the saints through an examination of a
painting of a Roman matron, Veneranda, with her patron saint
Petronella.  D. traces the evolution of Petronella's identity as the
apostle Peter's daughter, a virgin martyr, and finally (in modern
scholarship) one of a number of wealthy women engaged in Christian
patronage of Roman churches, relics, and other institutions.
Veneranda's choice of Petronella -- a saint whose name was not
contained on the male-dominated "official sanctioned list of martyrs"
-- is evidence that "memory traditions of 'unrecognized martyrs' such
as Petronella still lay in the hands of women" (146).

The final two chapters, entitled "The Silent Virgin and the Pale Child"
and "Damasus, Ear Tickler," document the ways in which the agency of
women as bone gatherers, patrons, and teachers was effaced from Roman
topography and memory.  They were replaced with women venerated for
their death (especially as virgin martyrs) or with male saints.
Chapter Six establishes the ways in which Christian officials
"discovered" or relocated from the catacombs saints' bones to populate
their above-ground basilicas with relics.  Thus the remains of
venerated holy women were moved from sacred space that had been
founded, patronized, and inhabited by women into a space controlled by
male church officials.  Simultaneously, the authorized narratives of
holy women narrowed, until, "By the middle of the fourth century, the
only action that might confer status on a woman was her rejection of a
sexual existence," preferably through death (174).  This despite the
fact that married Christian women continued to inhabit both city and
tombs.  In Chapter Seven, the erasure of the female bone gatherers and
other politically and socially influential Christian matrons is
completed by Damasus, in his bloody and contentious campaign to become
the sole bishop of Rome.  In promoting male saints over female ones,
Damasus embarked on a "masculinized reformulation" (179) of Christian
memory and devotion.  He also strived to ensure that the piety of the
average Christian woman and the veneration of female saints took place
through "complex rituals of access" controlled by the church (201).

The Epilogue turns to the Catacombs of Commodilla and a sixth-century
lay patron named Turturra, who commissioned the art in an underground
sanctuary. Her money and influence allowed her body to be buried near
the bones of martyrs and her image to be viewed by later Christians
amidst a depiction of the Holy Family.  For D., Turturra's powerful
self-image and simultaneous near-anonymity in Christian history
represent the endpoint of the gendered transformation of subterranean
and urban sacred space.

While D. draws upon scholarship on the specific tombs under discussion,
archaeologists and art historians may wish the book engaged more deeply
with research on the catacombs in general.  Surely some will disagree
with D.'s interpretations of the artistic programs, interpretations
which often cut against the grain of earlier work.  But the book, as
the title and subtitle suggest, is more about networks among the living
than objects below the earth.

D. excels in providing the social, historical, religious, and cultural
context for understanding the material culture at the kernel of the
book.  She masterfully uses material culture to shed light on world of
women otherwise often viewed "through a glass darkly" when using only
literary sources.  D. produces a richer account of women in Rome
because of it.  Much of the book provides an inspiring model for other
scholars.  At times, however, D.'s efforts to overcome the obstacles
imposed by the paucity of sources by, and even about, women are
frustrating. D's goal is "to make this book experiential," (author's
emphasis) which involves "experiencing and re-creating for readers what
late ancient Rome was like and what ancient women likely saw, thought,
felt, and lived" (xvi-xvii). Thus, D. often creatively imagines her
subjects acting in the world.  Chapter 2 opens with an account of
"Proba" entering the catacombs with a piglet for sacrifice.  D.
describes Proba's steps, thoughts, and challenges in building and
sanctifying her family's tomb.  It turns out, however, that the tomb's
patron may not have been a woman, and the episode of Proba's "problem"
with her pig (25) is historically inspired invention.  Asserting that
"there are no fictions in this book," D. describes this technique as
"engaging the imagination" through "something akin to feminist midrash"
-- academically and scholarly inspired recreations (xvi).  I admire
D.'s refusal to capitulate in the face of the quandary of how to
reconstruct ancient women's history.  D. explicitly chooses to
reimagine as fully as possible Roman women's lived experiences, and she
repudiates the notion that she must limit herself to examining only the
gendered discourses of the worlds of men.  Her methodology resists
binary classification; she chooses to conduct both social history and a
deconstruction of gender ideologies.  D.'s strategy, however, is
frustrating, for even a knowledgeable reader must thread carefully here
between the well-documented and the skillfully-imagined. The
less-informed reader (such as an undergraduate or beginning graduate
student) may need an experienced guide.

The book attempts to speak both to a specialized audience and to an
educated but non-academic audience.  The needs and expectations of the
two groups are at times in tension, and the book's efforts to reach
them results in obstacles for both readerships.  D.'s prose ranges from
a mesmerizing academic style to an overly familiar one.  I was
impressed with the scope and accuracy of the book's historical context,
its illumination of the material culture of death, and its recreation
of the daily lives of Roman women, but I found the informal writing
jarring and distracting.  On the other hand, I also wondered if the lay
reader would be overwhelmed with the scholarly data directed toward the
academic audience.  In some chapters I found myself hunting for D.'s
individual contributions to the field.  At times her original insights
are clear, but at others they are overwhelmed by historical and
historiographical contextualization.  This situation is exacerbated by
the method of documentation.  In a nod to her lay readers, D. is
sparing with endnotes; thus, those sections of the book which contain
original contributions often look and feel like the sections providing
historical context (sections which are accurate and exhaustive but are
more of a broad assessment of the field).  D. has done a tremendous
service, but some of her fresh contributions are partially hidden.

Any book that seeks to bridge traditional divides is risky.  The Bone
Gatherers joins material culture with document-based history, feminism
with academic inquiry, and a scholarly audience with a lay one.  The
criticisms raised in this review are the consequences of these risks,
but they are also consequences worth risking.  They do not undermine
the work; they are issues to consider while reading it.  For D. has
provided us with a book sorely needed and genuinely welcomed.

This study will prove valuable to those interested in Imperial Rome,
religion and material culture, Christianity, and gender studies. It may
appeal to an educated general audience.  Because of its substantial
historical framing in each chapter, it could be used in an advanced
undergraduate class on early Christianity, Roman history, or women's
history.