Kate Cooper (1) (1960–)

The Virgin and the Bride reassesses a series of literary sources, both pagan and Christian, to see how a change in dominant modes of authority (from civic to religious) and the rise of asceticism in late antiquity changed representations of femaleness, virginity, and marriage. Cooper argues that we should read texts about virgins, and especially virgin martyrs, in Late Antiquity less as arguments about virginity than as discussions of authority, with male writers appropriating the female body as a rhetorical tool. It's an interesting thesis, one which offers some interesting new ways of looking at the surviving sources, and I appreciated the reminder that the Christian texts which have come down to us are not necessarily representative of the mainstream of Late Antique Christian opinion. However, as a whole the book just clunked for me—Cooper's prose never rises above the serviceable—and she definitely seems more a literary scholar than a historian. I felt at times that she was constructing her argument within a sort of generic 'Rome' than within specific contexts—would this hold true in third century Rome? fourth century Carthage? sixth century Constantinople?—more a theoretical work than a historical one.… (meer)