Miriam Midrash

The Archive

The Library

The scholarship this rests on. Each entry says what the work built and points you to it. If you have one evening, start with the two marked.

  • Cynthia Bourgeault

    • The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity . Shambhala, 2010.

    The contemplative tradition’s portrait of her: a teacher and companion in her own right, read from inside the practice of prayer.

  • Ann Graham Brock

    • Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority . Harvard Theological Studies 51, 2003.

    Early Christian texts tend to raise up Peter or Mary Magdalene, and rarely both. Brock reads that pattern as a contest over who could speak for the risen Jesus.

  • Kathleen E. Corley

    • Private Women, Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition . Hendrickson, 1993.

    Women at Greco-Roman meals, and the slander that followed any woman who reclined at table with men. It changes how you picture every supper in the gospels.

  • Eldon Jay Epp

    • Junia: The First Woman Apostle . Fortress Press, 2005.

    Romans 16:7 greets Junia, prominent among the apostles. For most of the twentieth century the standard Greek editions, and many English translations after them, turned her into a man named Junias. Epp traces how that happened, and how she came back.

  • Susan Haskins

    • Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor . 1993.

    Two thousand years of the Magdalene in scripture, art, and legend: the reputation that grew in the space where a woman used to be.

  • Katherine Ludwig Jansen

    • The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages . Princeton University Press, 2000.

    How medieval preachers built the penitent Magdalen, sermon by sermon, and what the people listening made of her.

  • Karen L. KingStart here

    • The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle . Polebridge Press, 2003.

    The standard English study of the Gospel of Mary: the surviving fragments, a translation, and a careful reading of what they say about Mary and about authority in the early churches.

  • Kate Manne

    • Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny . Oxford University Press, 2017.

    Manne separates the reasons from the enforcement. Sexism is the set of beliefs that makes the arrangement look natural; misogyny is the policing that corrects the women who step out of it. Episode 3 is built on that distinction.

  • Jane Schaberg

    • The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament . Continuum, 2002.

    A feminist reading of the Magdalene across the gospels, the apocrypha, and the legends, and of what the tradition did with its first witness.

  • Elisabeth Schüssler FiorenzaStart here

    • In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins . Crossroad, 1983.

    The book that made the women of the earliest Jesus movement a question scholars had to answer. Its title comes from Mark 14:9, where Jesus promises that what one woman did will be told in memory of her, in a story that never tells us her name.

Three more entries open with Season Two.

One more entry opens with Act Two.