Women Healing/Healing Women

'Women Healing/ Healing Women' begins with a search for women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period. Women healers were honoured in inscriptions and named by medical writers, and were familiar enough to be stereotyped in plays and other writings. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era is a world in which women functioned as healers but where healing becomes a contested site for gender relations. By the time the gospels are written the place of women as healers is effectively erased. The book uses the historical and cultural evidence to re-read the gospel texts and discover healers in a woman pouring out ointment, healed women bearing on their bodies the language describing Jesus, and even in women possessed by demons. Introduction; 1: Where Theory and Practice Meet: A Way toward Transformation; 2: Women Healing/Healing Women: A New Listening to Antiquity; 3: Pharmaka, Magica, Hygieia: When Reality and Stereotype Meet–What Lies Beyond?; 4: Telling Stories of Women Healing/Healing Women: The Gospel of Mark; 5: Re-telling Stories of Women Healing/Healing Women: The Gospel of Matthew; 6: Women Cured of Evil Spirits and Infirmities: The Gospel of Luke; Conclusion