Engaging ancient medical texts, inscriptions, ancient philosophy, early church fathers, and apocalypses, this book demonstrates that early Christian depictions of hell intensified and preserved ancient notions of gender and bodily normativity. Whereas heaven uses ancient categories of the body to construct identity, in hell the stakes are higher-the damned look like the bodies of living women and people with disabilities, and they are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, criminalizing those bodies on earth. Hell Hath No Fury uncovers the relationship between textual ... More

Engaging ancient medical texts, inscriptions, ancient philosophy, early church fathers, and apocalypses, this book demonstrates that early Christian depictions of hell intensified and preserved ancient notions of gender and bodily normativity. Whereas heaven uses ancient categories of the body to construct identity, in hell the stakes are higher-the damned look like the bodies of living women and people with disabilities, and they are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, criminalizing those bodies on earth. Hell Hath No Fury uncovers the relationship between textual violence and real world violence. This book examines that way that ancient understandings of the gender and the body influenced early Christian constructions of sin, showing that gender roles deemed some bodies more susceptible to sin. Early Christian understandings of gender and the body also figured highly in the punishments themselves, depicting the damned as female and disabled for eternity. This book also considers the way in which Mary’s composite characterization draws upon ancient notions of gender and the body to depict her as the ideal figure to descend to hell and minister to the damned. Avoiding reductionist understandings of ancient apocalyptic literature, gender, and the body, Hell Hath No Fury demonstrates that early Christian visions of hell traversed freely between worlds in order to negatively mark the damned, and in turn those who inhabited female, enslaved, or disabled bodies on earth.