Reimagining the Gender and Class Dynamics of Premodern Composition

Abstract

This article argues that recent scholarship on premodern composition can help to reconceptualize the presence of diverse people, including enslaved women, in scribal spaces. A brief historiographic section reviews how scholars have imagined normative Jews to be elite literate men, neglecting evidence of dictation to scribes, and thus excluded evidence of lower-class women especially from their imagining of the past. Applying Wendy Doniger’s rejection of the category of the singular male author in religious texts to Jewish texts, it proposes a heuristic tool to identify women’s presence and perspectives in ancient prose, liturgical, and ritual texts. Finally, it analyzes four incantation bowls as test-cases of this approach. For every text produced by a scribe, scholars ought to imagine a dynamic compositional environment with at least two people, and they can look for evidence of inclusion and exclusion of perspectives based on religious markers, class status, and gendered concerns.