Daughters of Hecate
Women and Magic in the Ancient World
Kimberly B. Stratton and Dayna S. Kalleres
Author Information
Kimberly B. Stratton, Associate Professor, Carleton University, and Dayna S. Kalleres, Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
Kimberly B. Stratton is an associate professor in the College of Humanities at Carleton University. She holds a B.A. in English and Religion from Barnard College, an M.T.S. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in the history of religions in late antiquity from Columbia University. She has also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research covers the fields of early Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and Greco-Roman religion, focusing on the dynamics of identity formation, discourse, and social construction at the intersection of those ancient cultures. Dayna S. Kalleres is an associate professor in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She did her Ph.D. in program for the History of Early Christianity at Brown University; prior to that, she received a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Classics at Indiana University. Her research covers the fields of Greco-Roman Religions and Early to late antique
Christianities; her focal interests include magic and religion, ritual studies, demonology and the urban sphere.
Contributors:
Kirsti Barrett Copeland, Ph.D. Princeton University, is currently Associate Dean in Undergraduate Advising and Research and Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University. Her research focuses on mining otherworldly visions for socio-cultural data. Her recent publications include "The Earthly Monastery and the Transformation of the Heavenly city in Late Antique Egypt" in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, ed. Ra'anan S. Boustan and Annette Y. Reed.
Nicola Denzey Lewis (Ph.D. Princeton, 1998) is Visiting Associate Professor of Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean at Brown University. With research interests in both Gnosticism and intellectual history and the social history of late antique Rome, she is the author of three books: The Bone Gatherers (Beacon, 2007), Introduction to "Gnosticism": Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds (Oxford, 2012); and Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Under Pitiless Skies (Brill, 2013).
Yaakov Elman is Herbert S. and Naomi Denenberg Professor of Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva University, and an associate of the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He has recently completed a monograph on changing elite cognitive styles in Ancient Near Eastern thought (Babylonian, biblical, Zoroastrian, rabbinic and Sasanian) from 2000 BCE-1000CE.
David Frankfurter is Professor of Religion and Aurelio Chair in the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. His publications have covered topics of magic, demonology, popular religion, apocalypticism, and Christianization in Roman and late antiquity and include Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton University Press, 1998) and Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton University Press, 2006).
Fritz Graf is Distinguished University Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University and director of its Epigraphy Center. He specializes in Greek and Roman religions and mythologies, Greek and Roman literature and its reception, and ancient epigraphy. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the topic of Greek religion, literature, and magic, including Magic in the Ancient World (Harvard 1997), Apollo (London 2008), and with Sarah Iles Johnston Ritual Texts for the Afterlife (London, 2
Dayna S. Kalleres is an Associate Professor at University of California, San Diego. Her publications delve into the issues ritual theory, Christian demonology and the relationship between magic and religion in late antiquity with a particular interest in the urban sphere and include City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014 forthcoming).
Rebecca Lesses teaches Jewish Studies at Ithaca College. Her research focus is on texts of ritual power and mysticism from Judaism in late antiquity, a topic covered in her 1998 publication, Ritual Practices to Gain Power: Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism and in a 2001 article, "Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists, and Demonesses in Late Antique Judaism," in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (June 2001), 343-375. She is currently working on a book on Jewish women and ritual power in late antiquity, titled Angels' Tongues and Witches' Curses: Jewish Women and Ritual Power in Late Antiquity.
AnneMarie Luijendijk is Associate Professor of Religion at Princeton University. As a historian of early Christianity, a scholar of the New Testament, and a papyrologist, she brings new voices, often marginal or obscure, to the fore and into conversation with the more dominant voices of history. She is the author of Greetings in the Lord. Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Harvard University Press, 2008) and of the forthcoming Forbidden Oracles. The Gospel of the Lots of Mary (Mohr Siebeck, 2013).
Elizabeth Ann Pollard is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University, where she teaches courses in Greco-Roman history, historiography of witchcraft, women in antiquity, and world history. She has published articles exploring images of witches in Roman art, Roman-Indian trade, and the impact of world historical models on traditional Greek and Roman history, the most recent of which is "Indian Spices and Roman 'Magic' in Imperial and Late Antique Indomediterranea," in the Journal of World History 24 (March 2013), 1-23. She is currently working on a book entitled Women and Witchcraft Accusation in the Roman World, which investigates the relationship between the representations and accusations of women's use of magic and the actual rituals that women conducted.
Annette Yoshiko Reed is M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Assistant Professor of
Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania. She is the author of Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism
and Christianity (2005), and the coeditor of four volumes, most recently
Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late
Antiquity (2013).
Pauline Ripat is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Winnipeg. She is the author of several articles and book chapters dealing with magic, divination, status, and communication in the Roman world, and is co-editor of Themes in Roman Society and Culture (OUP 2013).
Barbette Stanley Spaeth is Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for Pilgrimage Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her specialty is Roman religion, and she is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions (forthcoming in 2013) and author of The Roman Goddess (1996) and of articles in Rome and Religion: A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on the Imperial Cult (2011), and Sub Imagine Somni: Nighttime Phenomena in Greco-Roman Culture (2010). She is co-founder and past president of the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions, as well as past president of the Alumni/ae Association of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Kimberly B. Stratton (PhD Columbia University, 2002) is an Associate Professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University, in Ottawa. Her research covers the fields of early Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, as well as Greco-Roman culture and religion. Her book, Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World, won the Frank W. Beare Award from the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (2008). Recent articles on magic or other aspects of ancient religion appear in Biblical Interpretation, The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, and the Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West.
