The following is an abstract for this year’s annual meeting for the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, Texas. The presentation will take place in the unit dedicated to Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies; Christian Apocrypha.
BandofAngels.org: Accessing Women’s History through the Digital Humanities (S21-215)
Kate Cooper’s work Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women reminds us that the material reality of the past must always remain central and that the feminist political project cannot afford to lose its emphasis on embodied history. The Band of Angels project, appropriately named after the text, builds on this vision. We seek to provide an online resource to collect similar stories and broaden access to the stories and experiences of early Christian women like Thecla of Iconium. Like the Project Vox out of Duke University, the Band of Angels project aims to interrupt educational ‘habits’ that continue to exclude women. Many teachers and community leaders are interested in bringing women into the center of our understanding of early Christianity, but do not have easy access to resources that will help them to correct the record. The Band of Angels project intends to remove those obstacles by collecting and providing an online resource with links to primary sources, bibliographies, and useful web links, with extracts from Cooper’s book as an initial gateway.
