Dr Sara Parks (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia)

When it comes to ancient women’s lived experience, all we have are fragments. A scrap of a handwritten letter from mother to daughter, preserved two millennia in a fortuitously arid microclimate. A tiny metal amulet worn around the neck, bearing a rolled-up incantation to protect the wearer from menstrual pain. One or two verses, ignored by readers of the canonical gospels, implying that a woman may have personally bankrolled the earliest Jesus movement. Evidence for ancient women is virtually inaccessible compared to evidence for (elite) ancient men, but it is there if we are just willing to dig a little. Biologist Merlin Sheldrake talks about the methods for studying fungi being fundamentally different from those for studying animals and plants: “Microbial lives … buried in soil, were not accessible like the bristling charismatic aboveground world of the large. Imagination was required. There was no way around it” (Entangled Lives, 2020). A hermeneutic of imagination is exactly what Dr Sara Parks, historian of women and gender in antiquity, says is required when seeking to uncover the history of ancient women. Almost everything about them is lost, and what does reach down to us is heavily filtered through the perspectives of the few elite men that had access to textual production. Yet tantalising clues remain. Between the lines of texts are slippages that offer glimpses of women’s realities. By combining manuscripts with artefacts, we find that ancient women could be savvy in business, brutal in military expansion, fluid in gender, commanding religious leaders, and exquisite authors. Bring your historical imagination and join Sara Parks in a tour of lost stories of ancient women.