1st Edition

Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ The Virgin and the Otherworldly Bridegroom in Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome

By Abbe Lind Walker Copyright 2020
188 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

188 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

188 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This volume argues that ancient Greek girls and early Christian virgins and their families made use of rhetorically similar traditions of marriage to an otherworldly bridegroom in order to handle the problem of a girl’s denied or disrupted transition into adulthood. In both ancient Greece and early Christian Rome, the standard female transition into adulthood was marked by marriage, sex,... Read more

Introduction  Part I: Virgin suicides  1. Loving death  2. Protecting the virgin bride  Part I Conclusion  Part II: Parents of the bride  3. Hades takes a bride  4. Recruiting brides of Christ  Part II Conclusion  Epilogue

Biography

Abbe Lind Walker is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Connecticut College, USA. Her research unites multiple strands of interest, including gender in antiquity, religions in the ancient Mediterranean, and the social and cultural history of classical Greece and late antique Rome. This is her first book.