#  Video: Ethical Scholarship: Gender, Religion, and Difference 

 





August 29, 2024

 

 

 

Each year the HDS Women's Studies in Religion Program brings scholars in gender from around the country to enrich the experience of HDS students. 2024 Orientation offered students the opportunity to hear from the 2024–25 WSRP visiting faculty, who shared their thoughts on the ethical responsibility of scholars to be engaged in the study of gender.

Speakers: S. Zahra Moballegh, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Islam; Wendy Mallette, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Theology; Ashley L. Bacchi, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Jewish History; Ghazal Asif Farrukhi, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Anthropology; Erminia Ardissino, Visiting Associate Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies and Literature; Moderated by Ann Braude, Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program.

This event took place on August 29, 2024.



 

  

 



 

 

 

ANN BRAUDE: It's great to see you and congratulations on having made it this far into the day of orientation. I know it's been a long, long day. It's such a pleasure to welcome this new group of research associates. And I haven't even had the chance to hear them speak yet. So you are going to be the very first people to do that here at the school.

The Women's Studies in Religion Program, as you all know, is one of the hallmarks of our school. I think a lot of people are attracted to HDS by the fact that you can study religion in a context of gender equality. And we've been working on that for quite a while at this point, which is not to say it's not an ongoing project. Women were only admitted to Harvard Divinity School in 1955, which means that for the majority of the school's history, it was an exclusively male institution. And never forget that.

It makes our work. It gives our work a particular importance, not just for what we do in our own classrooms, but what the impact that that has going out from here. This program has been in existence. It started in an incipient form in the 1970, really, as a result of student activism among the first large cohort of women that enrolled here as students. It was really part of the feminist ferment of the 1970s.

When women students complained that there were no women faculty and there were no women's writings on the syllabi and there were no women in the curriculum at all, the male faculty told them that there were no qualified women and that there were no appropriate texts that could be assigned. So the idea of this program was to address that problem, which I think we have.

You have on your seats a list of this year's research associates. If you turn that over, you will see all of the over 200 scholars who have been in the Women's Studies in Religion Program. And you will, I hope, see many names of authors who you read as undergrads and who you will be reading during your time at Harvard Divinity School.

The people I'm about to introduce you to are writing the books that you will be assigning to your students in the next generation. And then we hope and we have started to see some HDS students come back to be in the program after having been able to take the classes, read the texts, and then push the limits of the field even farther.

This program is always about pushing the limits of our knowledge about religion and gender. And there's always a new place to push. So these folks were brought here by the faculty because they are pushing those limits. And we hope that you will join that project.

So I don't think I introduced myself. Did I? I'm Ann Braude. I'm the director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program. Also a historian of the Religion of American Women, which means these people are both my subject matter and as well as my great privilege to work with during their year here at Harvard.

Each one of them is teaching a course, which you heard about earlier in the day. You also have a list of their courses. Half are fall term. Half are spring term. I'm going to just introduce each one of them with a sentence and then I'm going to ask each one of them to tell you about their project. So you'll get to hear from each of them about what they're going to be doing, the book that they're each working on, a book length project that we hope this year will really allow them to advance in an important way.

So I'm going to introduce them in alphabetical order, and then we're going to hear from them in reverse alphabetical order. So on my right is Erminia Ardissino, who is Professor Emerita in literary studies at the University of Turin in Italy and the author of numerous monographs and critical editions in early modern Italian literature. And her project this year is The Bible for Gender Inclusiveness, Defense of Women's Dignity and Social Participation in Early Modern Italy.

And second is Ghazal Asif, who comes to us from one of South Asia's premier universities known as LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan. She's here at Harvard, revising her award winning dissertation in anthropology on women in the Hindu minority in Pakistan.

Next is Ashley Bacchi. I'm sorry. I just massacred Ashley Bacchi, who is known as Bacchi because it's so much easier to say than Ashley. She teaches at Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, one of our sister institutions in Unitarian Universalist Studies in Oakland, California. And it's part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where Bacchi also did her doctorate in Jewish history and culture, and where her first book was awarded the prestigious Borscht-Rast Book Prize.

Wendy Mallette is working on her project on Lesbian Feminist Killjoys, Sin, Pessimism and Queer Histories. And Wendy is in the department of religion at the University of Oklahoma. And she's here as visiting assistant professor of Women's Studies and Theologies.

Finally, Zahra Moballegh was educated and then taught for years at the University of Tehran. Her first book, Faith as Reason, an Epistemological Approach to Feminist Theology, was the first book in the Persian language to be published about feminist philosophy and theology. And her project is Narrating for Love and Change, Reading Women's Stories in Search of a Feminist Qur'anic Narrator. And I'm going to pose a question to Zahra. And then I'm going to sit down. Zahra.

ZAHRA MOBALLEGH: Hi.

ANN BRAUDE: I have to take this with me. Your painstaking analysis of the stories of female characters in the Quran has shown you an unexpected feminist narrator in Quranic texts. Has this discovery changed your own philosophical outlook? And has it changed your view of the Quran? And finally, what significance do you want your readers to take from this finding?

ZAHRA MOBALLEGH: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon and thank you so much for this question, especially--

ANN BRAUDE: Get close to the microphone.

ZAHRA MOBALLEGH: Is it good now? Yeah. OK. Thank you very much for this question, especially because it challenges me to reconsider my own transformation in the journey that I have with this long research. This research began with a relatively straightforward question about how women are being represented and characterized in the Quranic narratives. But very readily it led me into a deeper layer of the text and into an important question about the text that is about who is telling these stories? And whose voice is being heard behind these stories? And why is she telling these stories?

I want to re-contextualize this question in the broader context of a historical and unresolved question about the authorship of the Quran. As you may know, this has a long history. Who has written the Quran? Is it the word of God? Or is it the speech of Prophet Muhammad? Or has it been written and edited many years after Prophet Muhammad by many different authors? And these question together would raise another question about is there any kind of structural and thematic coherency behind the text or if there is no coherence and consistency in the text?

So many of you may know, traditionally Muslim commentators and theologians believe that define God as a transcendent, sovereign being who is detached completely from our material world, who is detached from any kind of changes, motions, emotions, and moral values, and our legal systems. And at the same time, they believe that Quran is the word of the same God who is completely transcendent from our word.

But when we go back to the stories of women in the Quran, both these theological assumptions are challenged about the transcendent God and about the scripture as the words of this God. If we analyze the stories of women in Quran in terms of their narrative elements like the point of view of the narrator, the vocalization or the perceptual and dynamic verbs of the narratives, we would see that the narrator of these narratives is an emotional being, is like a human being. And she is completely struggling with what we are struggling with as human beings.

As like, for example, in one story you would see the narrator who falls in love with one of the heroines of the story. In another story, you would see the narrator is personified in a palm tree. Or in another story, the narrator is like a mother who embarrasses the heroine of the story or sheds tears for the heroine. In another story would see a narrator who is like a stoic philosopher whose moral assumptions are being challenged by a rebellious woman.

So when we go to the stories of women in the Quran, we would see a completely different image of a narrator who is telling these stories. And the primary act of this narrator is telling the stories. It's very important that we see that this narrator has chosen the speech act of telling stories of human beings as the way she wants to express herself, to resist against some structures of power, especially because we can consider that the stories of women in the Quran are full of silent parts.

And many of these silences should be expressed or explained for in terms of the structures of power that don't permit this narrator to say whatever she wants. And in some other cases, the silences can be explained for in terms of the invitations of this narrator to her audiences to reconstruct, to partake in the reconstructions of meaning.

So I want to say that one important thing is that I cannot say with enough confidence that if there is one narrator behind all of these stories. In some stories we can show or find indications that there is one narrator behind some stories. But we can't say that all stories are being told by one unique narrator.

And even we can't say that if this voice that is telling the stories is the same voice that is being heard in the rest of the text. But the thing that we can say with more confidence and more certainty is that the style of storytelling in these passages of the Quran would dramatically transform our understanding of the nature of the scripture and our understanding a divine being who is behind these texts.

So if we consider this re-imagination of the narrator of this text or the authorship of the text, we would see that instead of a transcendent, sovereign God who stand apart from the material and moral values, we see a storyteller that is suffering with her characters, who hopes, who loves, who feels pains and who struggles. And she's deeply human. She's fragile, she's going to death, and she's very compassionate. And I think that this compassion is one of her most important characteristics because, as I said, she has chosen the act of telling stories to express herself, to reveal herself.

So if we take this view about the text more seriously, then we would see that it fundamentally changes our understanding of theology and morality. Because if we think that the authorship of the Quran as the scripture of Islam has been written or produced by a narrator who is very compassionate, who is very human, then we would need a narrative theology to reconstruct the identity of this narrator. And this narrative theology would require a narrative approach to morality and to our legal systems and to the processes of policy making.

So for our today's, we think that we need to revise our concept, our political concepts of democracy, our concepts about the world order. Then we would need to revise our theological concepts and our theological systems. And I hope that these kinds of research, also the researches by my other friends here, would partake in the processes of revising our political and legal procedures and systems.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much. Next, I'm going to turn to Wendy.

WENDY MALLETTE: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. OK.

ANN BRAUDE: You OK?

WENDY MALLETTE: Yep.

ANN BRAUDE: OK, good because we want to hear about your research project. Your project is both a theological inquiry using queer theory to interrogate the relation of sin and sex, which it seems like that's enough to take on. But you have combined this with a historical investigation of the construction of a lesbian feminist past in queer collective memory.

And I would really love to know-- it's already a joke in this group that interdisciplinarity is both our strongest suit and our biggest problem. And I think your project really illustrates that. So I'd love to hear you talk about why you decided to join these approaches, if they ever come into tension, and what you've been able to learn by combining theology and history that you couldn't have learned from just taking one approach.

WENDY MALLETTE: Great. Thanks.

ANN BRAUDE: In five minutes or less.

WENDY MALLETTE: Yeah, for that question. It's going to be an ongoing one for me. It's what makes it such a great question. It's one that I'm hoping to be in conversation with you all about in classes and in HDS. So this will be a very partial answer. So I get questions a lot from queer Christian theologians who are often interested in the queer theory side of my project. But they tend to be rather allergic to the sin questions, quite understandably, that I'm asking due to the homophobic associations of sin.

Most theologians, unfortunately, are completely unfamiliar with lesbian feminism, while historians, on the other hand, are often very interested in the kind of lesbian feminist side of the project but rarely approach archival scholarship with a kind of theological and theoretical questions that I'm asking. And then most queer theorists have never thought about sin in any robust way. And they tend to be rather dismissive of lesbian feminism with this kind of stereotype as an anti-sex killjoy.

So for that reason, I like to describe lesbian feminism and sin following queer and Black feminist scholars as bad objects, which means objects that we as contemporary scholars often feel the need to distance our work in scholarship from to ensure that we are on the side of the good. So there's a sense in which these objects that we're studying take on a highly ethical quality that's presumed to correspond with whether we're imagined to be innocent or complicit.

So in turning to sin and lesbian feminism, my aim certainly isn't to redeem. I think that would be hopeless either category. But I do want scholars, right, to continue to challenge and historicize the ways that Christian ideas about sin, and in a really different way, lesbian feminism, have undeniably contributed to violent projects, including settler colonialism, mass incarceration. And so I instead take up lesbian feminism and sin to highlight the ways that certain fantasies of innocence underwrite this kind of violent tendency to disavow one's own guilt and scapegoat others.

And so I think the consequences of those fantasies of innocence can be seen in our contemporary moment in this kind of proliferation we're seeing ongoing of anti-critical race theory, now anti-DEI and anti-trans legislation. These are being passed. These laws are being passed in dozens of states across the US, including Oklahoma, where I've been working and teaching for the last two years.

So this legislation, for those of you that aren't familiar, has often been fueled by claims that school curricula make students, especially white and cis male students, or at least imagined, feel guilty about histories of racism, colonialism, sexism, and transphobia. And the bills take various forms, but almost all of them contain language about disavowing responsibility, guilt or complicity as an inherited from the past.

So I think in bringing together kind of theological analysis with historical analysis will be really crucial in both understanding and challenging these kinds of bills. So my project then is trying to stage a conversation between lesbian feminist histories, contemporary queer theory and Christian ideas about sin. And I'm bringing them together to challenge a certain optimism about sexuality. This optimism is really popular among queer Christian communities as well as queer politics more broadly to claim something like sex is good, sex is holy, sex is innocent.

And while assertions of the goodness of sex has been a really important strategy to respond to homophobic claims about sin, I worry that it takes this kind of single axis approach to sexuality that obscures the way that sex is inextricably tied to other forms of oppression. There's a little bit more. OK. All right.

So turning back to lesbian feminism. OK. So within queer studies today, the title of my book, Lesbian Feminist Killjoys, comes from the fact that lesbian feminism is widely dismissed as a movement that sought to be exclusively white, middle class, anti-sex killjoys. But in revisiting the archives of lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s through the 80s is kind of where I cut off.

I found myself drawn to their kind of pessimistic ideas about sexuality and found that rather than this monolithic approach to sexuality that they're often charged with, lesbian feminists, who I consider my project and that includes Beverly Smith, Andrea Dworkin, Pat Parker, and Jill Johnston. I only get four. I have to limit myself. But they've all theorized the way that sex is tied inextricably to structures like colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism and capitalism.

And so I think by focusing on their pessimism about sexuality allows me to challenge prevalent progress narratives within queer studies. A version of this says that queerness has superseded the limitations of a white lesbian feminist past. And my concern about those narratives is that they erase the contributions of several Black lesbian feminists, Smith and Parker being Black lesbian feminists. And then they tend to reduce the contributions and views of white lesbian feminists like Dworkin and Parker to their most anti-sex components.

And so I think in this, we can see how progress narratives carry this redemptive arc that allows us as contemporary scholars and people in the world to become the bearers of progress and goodness. And then marks racism and classism as simply a lingering remnant of the past. So I hope that by revisiting lesbian feminist histories alongside sin can help us to develop better ways to theorize questions of the inheritance of guilt as well as its ongoing complicity. So that's what I'm trying to do.

ANN BRAUDE: And we wish you all the luck in the world. Bacchi, you've written a previous book, taking a deep dive into the Sibylline Oracle in ancient Judaism. Now in your new project, you're zooming out geographically, temporally, and religiously to follow the powerful female voice of the Sibyl across time and space. Why is it important to explore the past for its resonance in the present and the future? In other words, why does a 21st century scholar need to know about the millennia long life of this iconic female prophet?

ASHLEY BACCHI: Thank you for the question. I think it's particularly important in this moment, especially with the recent nomination, this historic nomination of Vice President, Kamala Harris. We're already seeing a resurgence of these narratives of women in power as being disparate concepts.

On one side, we have a candidate who says things like, unfortunately or fortunately, women are subjugated to violation and by men in power. And that that's a timeless narrative. And on the other, we have this strong woman of color who could be our next president of the United States and would be the first. And so there's a narrative that also builds in that direction that this is something unique. And it is for this context.

But historically, we have had women in power, and particularly the ancient Mediterranean world has been co-opted by many white supremacist groups that have extremely sexist agendas that perpetrate an image of the Greek and Roman world as one that substantiates a lineage of cis white male domination. And many within those circles take that as a historical fact and don't question it. And that's not the case.

The ancient Mediterranean was a very diverse place. It was in no way a white Anglo-Saxon world. It's one that was dominated with what today would be categorized and viewed as people of color. So it's a very diverse world, so it doesn't fit into that narrative. What I think the Sybil is an opening to do and what I'm hoping that my book will do is open up an opportunity for those that are interested into seeing that complex and diverse, intersectional, ancient Mediterranean world.

And one that starts from the archaic Greek period when we first see her voice, this persona that then continues to be used as a persona, as a voice to speak truth to power against empire, to speak on issues such as slavery, such as poverty, such as rape, and other social justice issues. And whether or not the writers behind those voices were male or female doesn't matter because it was seen that that female voice of prophecy was a powerful voice that could reach people and bring some accountability.

And that voice continued in Greek traditions, in Roman traditions, in Jewish and Christian iterations, and then continued to be popular through the Renaissance period and beyond and was very much a part of the cultural imagination for many people in the Mediterranean. And then I'll argue in the book some ideas of why persona fell out of the cultural memory.

But there were still communities that continued to use this voice. And there's been some resurgence even now most recently in some modern operas coming out of Africa and some short stories. And science is also using the Sibyl as a reference point in some of as name for some of the new developments. And so there's ways in which the Sibyl still has resonance. But I'm hoping that my book will show how she can be reclaimed in secular as well as religious spaces and become another symbol that can be used in intersectional interdisciplinary dialogue.

And the hope is that the book could be used as a textbook, but also for anyone that's interested in learning about a strong female voice and will conclude with a chapter on how she might be evoked in various spaces today.

ANN BRAUDE: Great. Thank you so much. Ghazal, you're up next to tell us about Hindu Intimacies amidst Pakistan's Muslim state, which is based on your two years of fieldwork among the Hindu minority in the Muslim state of Pakistan. And you argue that the regulation of women's sexuality offers a new way to view the relation of minoritized citizens to the state.

Why do you think it's important to examine women's ostensibly private behavior and identities? And what do we learn when we place this in the larger context of state regulation of minority populations? Thank you.

GHAZAL FARRUKHI: Thank you, Ann, for this question. I'm just going to put this here. Thank you. So, I mean, this is, as we women's-- the question of women's private behavior and who is interested in controlling it, who is interested in having something to say about it is something that-- it's a question that keeps coming up over and over again in different forms, in different societies, including contemporary American society.

My interest is on South Asia. And in Pakistan, what has been happening is that the Hindu minority, and specifically the Hindu family, the Hindu wife and the daughter, have come under renewed government attention in Pakistan through a raft of laws since 2012 that are ostensibly aimed at-- I think one of the laws actually did say verbatim that they are interested in rescuing the Hindu mother and child from the Hindu patriarchy. So that's some that's actually in one of the preambles.

So what that means is that who Hindu women marry, who they worship, and how they form attachments has become very important to a state that at the same time has been very committed for a long time to keeping Hindus as minoritized legal subjects. And in this book that I'm hoping to work on this year, I'm interested in looking at these questions from a couple of different angles. The first big one to consider is the modern Islamic state, of which Pakistan is a very specific instantiation and how it regulates religious minorities, such as Hindus.

And so I have a little bit in-- I plan to have a little bit in the book on how colonial era British management of Hindu and Muslim sexuality-- and there's a lot of scholarship on this, including some scholars in different pockets of Harvard. I'm thinking of Durba Mitra, et cetera, who have written on this and how it intersects with contemporary legal reasoning in Pakistan around questions of religious conversion, age of consent to marriage.

And most importantly, the question that has become articulated in Pakistan is what sort of relationship an Islamic government should have with a male Hindu patriarch when seeking to govern and regulate Hindu families? As a result, what has happened is that-- or what I would argue-- is that Hindu women's religious and devotional lives work as a very specific form of this conundrum for the state. And the conundrum is that what is a government or a state like Pakistan supposed to do?

Does the government encourage persecuted minority citizens to convert to the majority religion, which is the intellectual wellspring for Pakistan's national founding mythologies? If doing so also means helping women demolish the paternal authority, which is partly upheld through the law?

And what I'm hoping to think about is, I'm thinking about this dilemma through a phenomenon, which in Pakistan is called forced marriages and conversions. But some of you might be familiar with a different term, more globally. It's known as something known as love Jihad, which is about-- it's one form of a debate on interfaith marriages.

What happens when Hindu women and Muslim-- can Hindu women and Muslim men marry? If they do, why is that automatically a question of conversion? Who is converting and what does that do to the Pakistani family? Which is because the Pakistani government understands family through religion, it cannot really conceive of interfaith marriages.

And so it needs to-- it immediately thinks this is a problem of conversion. And so that's one of the reasons that women's ostensibly private or intimate behavior has long been a very serious flashpoint for how religious others are supposed to organize their lives politically as minority citizens with families. So I think about conversion and what I also want to think about is what these questions and debates mean for Hindu women's devotional lives in Pakistan in general. And in such a fraught context, how do women find community through ritual practices, through long standing Sindhi Hindu religious traditions?

And because I'm an anthropologist by training, I turn to questions of lived religion through ethnography in the last section of my book. And I became very interested in how the effects of these state level issues are felt among women as they are trying to do otherwise fairly ordinary things like practicing your religion, creating neighborly communities or acting on desire, sexual or otherwise.

And so what I'm interested in how such activities become political and in examining such phenomenon from the bottom up, from the perspective of those impacted the most, instead of from the level of the state and all its power. So you know what? I mean, what I'm interested in doing is putting questions of gender and sexuality in South Asia in conversation with debates on religion, secularism and the state.

But I'm also trying to interrogate how Islamic and Hindu traditions can be put into productive conversation together to think through contemporary gender and political questions. Thank you.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much. That was so interesting. Don't you want to take all of these courses? I certainly do. I love my job. Our last presenter today is Erminia Ardissino. Erminia, your project is so provocative for me because before I was here-- and I've only been here for 26 years-- the Bible was such a provocation for the existence of this program. It does not go away. As much feminist theology as we have, as much feminist scholarship as we have, it disappears when it's about the Bible.

The Bible is so powerful and ever present. So I'm so eager to hear about your project and the case of early modern Italy, what it adds to this debate. And what I'm really wondering is how might we view the Bible differently after we learn about the fruits of your research in early modern Italian women's biblical criticism?

ERMINIA ARDISSINO: Thank you, Ann. You underlined the very problem of my research because I don't know if you are even only a little familiar with European--

ANN BRAUDE: Hang on. Hang on. How about this one?

ERMINIA ARDISSINO: Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. So I start again. Thank you.

ANN BRAUDE: Start again.

ERMINIA ARDISSINO: Now, if any--

ANN BRAUDE: Your voice is really powerful.

ERMINIA ARDISSINO: Yeah. You are a little bit familiar with European literature and art, you will know that Renaissance is a period when women are exalted in all ways in poems and art. But this did not correspond to the reality. Reality is that women were still condemned to the margins of society. But exactly in that period, they started to acquire a new consciousness, a new self-awareness about their dignity and their possibility to participate to the decision in society.

And this is, strangely enough, thanks to a profound reading of the Bible and with a profound interpretation of it. What obliged women to stay at the margins of the society was a lack of culture. They were not educated. They were not able to read and to write.

And so when they started to receive education-- that means in the 15th century with humanism-- they could have access directly to the Bible. So not receiving interpretation from others, but giving their own interpretation. And this interpretation is what helped them to get consciousness of their value, their dignity and their parity.

It started in the middle of the 15th century with Isotta Nogarola, a young woman that had a classical education. She could read Greek, Latin. And she had the chance to speak in a public discussion. We don't know very much about the date when it happened and where it happened, but we have the text of the discussion.

She discussed the question of who is more guilty of the original sin, Eve or Adam, with Ludovico Foscarini, well-educated, political men in Verona. And she defended Eve as not being guilty of original sin with a very careful reading of the first chapter of the Bible. And she supported the need of knowledge that Eve brought in approaching the tree of the apple that caused the original sin.

So after Isotta started a line that was mainly due to women in Venice, because in Venice they had the chance to have a good-- I mean for the time-- education. So I \[? since ?\] related Moderata Fonte wrote a work that has the title The Worth of Women, who is a synthesis of classical and Christian culture, in which she defends-- again, she discussed the Edenic episode. And she defends women as not being guilty of all the original sin.

And this line went up with Lucrezia Marinella that was the daughter of a physician who had an education in philosophy in medicine and alchemy. And she wrote a very documented book on the dignity of women. And she discussed the problem of the fact that women are in the margin of society due to misogynists.

For the first time, she connected this marginality with misogynist thinking. And all this approach to the Bible was in some way spread through Europe. And it moved to France, Germany, England, and permitted the birth of a new consciousness for women. I would give one more example, that of Domenica de Paradiso, a Florentine woman that defended her right to preach in church at the time seemed almost impossible.

But because Paul in the Corinthian letter says that women shouldn't talk in church, but she interpreted very smartly that she, yes, women are obliged to go home, ask their husband about what was said and discuss with him the question. But her spouse, Jesus, suggested her to preach. And so she preached. And we have her sermons at the time.

So the problem was really a hermeneutical problem in a century where the Bible was under discussion because, for example, in Italy, biblical translation was forbidden because translation means interpretation. So interpretation can lead to heresy. And that's why it was forbidden. But these women really gave the opportunity to have a different approach to Bible.

And this idea, this way of reading the Bible spread in Europe. We have a database of made by French scholars that it gives the information about Italian books in French libraries in Renaissance. And these books were present in French libraries. And so, as you probably know, the querelle des femmes was born in France. And probably the very root of the querelle des femmes, there is the interpretation given by women in Italy in the 16th century.

I may add one more example that is about Arcangela Tarabotti, a nun that had the courage to accuse families, civil power, and ecclesiastical power that obliged women to go to convent, to enter the convent because of family plans. And her book, Paternal Tyranny, was published in Holland, in Leiden, but had a large spread in Europe. And it shows and is entirely based on the discussion of biblical stories from the New and Old Testament.

My research will include also theater and art. I will discuss, for example, artistic products by Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola and also La Caccia that deals with biblical episodes that need interpretation because they reproduce this fact. OK. That's what I will be working here for this year. Thank you.

ANN BRAUDE: Thanks to all of you for really-- not just for your presentations today, but for all of the years of work that went into your pushing our knowledge further. We're really grateful. Each one of our scholars, in addition to offering a course, will also give a lecture on their research as it's progressing through the year.

And on that occasion you'll have the chance to really engage them in discussion or at the reception that we're all going to enjoy outside in just a few minutes. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your patience. And we'll see you in class.



 

 



 

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