Women Healing/Healing Women begins with a search for women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period. Women healers were honoured in inscriptions and named by medical writers, and were familiar enough to be stereotyped in plays and other writings. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era is a world in which women functioned as healers but where healing becomes a contested site for gender relations. By the time the gospels are written the place of women as healers is effectively erased. The book uses the historical and cultural evidence to re-read the gospel texts and discover healers in a woman pouring out ointment, healed women bearing on their bodies the language describing Jesus, and even in women possessed by demons.

"A useful collection of fresh interpretations and analyses of an array of sources dealing with women and medicine in antiquity, and a useful resource especially for students in biblical studies who have little background in the medical world that surely informed early Christian communities and texts.'"

Source: The Bible and Critical Theory

"By combining feminist, postcolonial, and ecological perspectives with traditional multidisciplinary exegetical methodologies, Wainwright has produced an admirable contribution to the study of the place of women in healing in the ancient world.'"

Source: Review of Biblical Literature

"In this groundbreaking book, Wainwright...with immense skill and clarity 're-member(s) Jesus as healer within a movement that has healing as a core characteristic...'. The reader is invited into this healing movement, into the borderland to hear critically and anew the embodied voices of women healing/healing women and the co-agency of Earth healing.'"

Source: Colloquium