Kim Haines-Eitzen's Gendered Palimpsest explores the “layered histories” both of women's involvement in the production of early Christian texts and of early Christian textual traditions concerning women. Haines-Eitzen tackles these ambitious subjects in two sections: in part 1, she charts women's place in early Christian book culture as authors, scribes, book-lenders, patrons, and exemplary readers (women “and” books, as she writes); and in part 2, she marshals evidence for instability in early Christian texts concerning women, particularly at points relating to sexuality, virginity, and embodiment (women “in” books). Throughout, Haines-Eitzen hews to the guiding metaphor of the palimpsest, understood not simply in terms of the scribal reuse of parchment or papyri, but as the layering of stories and ideas concerning women, writing, reading, and representation.

Haines-Eitzen begins her exploration of the twinned histories of women and books and women in books with the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, one of the most significant early biblical manuscripts, and one that—at least by the seventeenth century—was thought to have been the work of a female scribe, Thecla. But Alexandrinus is interesting quite apart from its possible ties to Thecla, as Haines-Eitzen shows. The manuscript is one of only two containing 1 Clement in the original Greek, and the earliest by some six centuries (the other, Codex Hierosolymitanus, dates to the eleventh century). 1 Clement was written during the late first or early second century as a letter of advice for Christians in Corinth; among other things, it offers guidance for the proper behavior of Christian wives, advising them to “make manifest the gentleness of their tongues” by their voice according to the reading in Alexandrinus, and by their silence according to Hierosolymitanus. The difference in meaning produced by a variant in the Greek consisting of “just three letters” (4) is enormous: were women to be silent within early Christianity, or to speak?

This question is interesting, but rather more interesting, as Haines-Eitzen demonstrates, is the variant itself, and the interpretive questions that it raises. Was the difference of three letters the result of scribal “negligence” or “audacity,” to borrow from Origen's characterization of textual variants? If it was intentional, what are we to make of the striking correlation between the tradition associating Alexandrinus with a female scribe, and the “voice” that the manuscript gives women in its version of 1 Clement? The correlation is certainly suggestive, although, as Haines-Eitzen cautions, scribal intentionality is difficult to prove.

Haines-Eitzen's discussion of Codex Alexandrinus, its advocacy of women's voice, and its traditional association with a female scribe, offers a powerful introduction to the two major themes of the book, which are then largely treated separately. Part 1 opens with a chapter presenting evidence for the involvement of early Christian women in the production of texts, recounting the well-known examples of Perpetua, Egeria, Jerome's female friends (Marcella, Paula, and Eustochium), and various holy women (among them Macrina, Caesarea, and Melania the Younger) in order to establish that “women were … involved in the many and various stages of the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christian literature” (37). Chapter 2 tackles representations of women as readers, noting that such representations appear primarily in ascetic contexts (a fact that may not be entirely surprising, since unmarried Christian women—whether widows or virgins—were more likely to have leisure and opportunity to read than were matrons). For Haines-Eitzen, the reading of ascetic women suggests an association between the book and the body: reading became a way to feed a body that refused food, and the book a means to safeguard chastity. The third chapter interrogates the assumption that early Christian women were the primary readers of texts characterized as “religious romance”—the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Challenging gendered assumptions concerning “women's literature” (and its presumed ties to “popular” literature), Haines-Eitzen investigates the earliest extant papyrus and parchment fragments of the Acts, concluding that “there is nothing to suggest a gendered readership” (57).

Part 2 turns to what Haines-Eitzen describes as “sexual/textual politics,” examining textual variants across a range of genres to unveil moments of anxiety and tension in early Christianity—many of which, as she demonstrates, had to do with the body, and above all with the bodies of women. Chapter 4 investigates textual variants relating to biblical women, chiefly Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, but also Mary and Martha, the woman taken in adultery (known from a notoriously unstable text, as Jennifer Knust has shown), the wives or women of Thessalonica, and Junia (or Junias?), the female (or male?) apostle. Copying texts relating to these women was, as Haines-Eitzen shows, not simply a passive act but a work of interpretation. Chapter 5 shows how textual variants relating to one woman—Thecla—worked to foreclose possibilities for eroticism and gender transgression. Similar themes emerge in chapter 6, which explores textual variants in transmitted versions of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, many of which cluster around moments of potential eroticism, among them the nakedness of candidates for baptism, or the exchange of the Christian kiss.

This is a book that will be welcomed by scholars of book history, theology, women's history, and early Christianity. The topics that Haines-Eitzen addresses are timely and the evidence that she marshals, particularly in Part 2, is fresh and exciting. Her argument concerning the importance of textual variants as witnesses to early Christian thought and culture is compelling. As she shows, variants cluster around points of conflict, debate, uncertainty, and anxiety within early Christian society, much of which is concerned with women and their bodies. Given the book's rich and productive engagement with the textual sources, some further attention to social context would have been welcome to help readers assess for themselves the potential significance of textual variants within early Christian debates about women (and men), the body, and sexuality. Such attention might also have helped bridge the gap between part 1 and part 2—which Haines-Eitzen implies is the result of her unwillingness to allow either “representation” or “reality” to dominate. Of course, since most of the women writers, readers, and patrons whom Haines-Eitzen discusses in part 1 are known primarily through the reports of male friends and observers, representation and reality cannot be so neatly separated, but rather bleed into each other from the very outset of the book. A final comment has to do with the positioning and title of the book: Gendered Palimpsests. Unlike the metaphor of the palimpsest, which Haines-Eitzen explains at the book's outset, it is never clear what is meant by “gender” in this context. What emerges is an assumed association of gender with women and the body, a discursive technique that leaves women bearing the full burden of gender and reinscribes the presumed “maleness” of early Christianity and of early Christian book culture. Men, of course, are gendered too.