"After you read The Gendered Palimpsest, you'll never read early Christian literature in quite the same way again. Drawing on her skills in textual criticism, papyrology, social history, and gender studies, Kim Haines-Eitzen helps us to see ancient texts not simply as static words on a page, but as dynamic material productions perennially subject to human alteration. If you want to learn about the roles that women played in composing, copying, transmitting, owning, and reading books-and about the ways that controversial female figures in the early church were edited and censured by (male) scribes-this is the place to start."-- Stephen Davis, Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University "A lucid, elegant, illuminating tour of the textual and material evidence for ancient Christian women readers, authors, scribes, copyists, literary patrons and disseminators of books. With its fresh, text-critical perspective on representations of women's participation in ancient Christian book culture, and some of the plausible underlying social realities, Kim Haines-Eitzen's The Gendered Palimpsest renders more legible the previously obscured and overwritten ancient discourses about women, bodies and books."-- Ross S. Kraemer, Department of Religious Studies and Program in Judaic Studies, Brown University "Kim Haines-Eitzen's The Gendered Palimpsest is a marvelous study. The evidence she has collected to document women as scribes and readers will change both how we think about early Christian women and how we think about the role of books in early Christian communities.

Practical questions about who had access to the skills and materials to make books turn out to have surprising answers, and make for a lively story of women's contribution to the early Christian movement."-- Kate Cooper, Professor of Ancient History, University of Manchester.