Synopses & Reviews
As far as recorded history is concerned, women in the ancient world lived almost invisibly in a man's world. Piecing together their story from the few contemporary accounts that have survived requires painstaking detective work, but it can render both the past and the present in a new light. Following the lives of influential women across the first centuries of the church, tells the remarkable story of how a new way of understanding relationships took root in the ancient world.
Review
Advance praise for
Band of Angels:
“This remarkable book is the best sort of engaged history, looking at familiar texts in new ways, while also revealing unfamiliar personalities and sources covering five centuries of early Christian development. It offers reflection on the meanings for contemporary Christian Churches which emerge from the stories that it tells. It makes an elegant and enjoyable contribution to unravelling centuries of unwarranted assumptions about the role of women in ministry and Christian life.” -—Diarmaid MacCulloch, New York Times bestselling author of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
Review
"A distinguished ancient historians elegant study of the extraordinary women who helped lay the foundations of the early Christian church…Engaging reading for specialists and general readers alike." —Kirkus Reviews
Review
"I don't quite know another book like this one...One great gift of this book involves women's agency. Contrary to the worn-out canard that Roman women "were just property," Cooper explains how Roman law allowed widows and even daughters control over property and wide room for influence… Cooper has presented us with a wide-ranging, informative study. I admire her learning and her guidance, and she knows how to lead an audience. I am especially grateful that she chose to follow the lives of individual women rather than to build an abstract argument." —Huffington Post
Synopsis
In this inspiring new history of the early Christian movement, award-winning historian Kate Cooper reveals a vivid picture of the triumphs and hardships of the first mothers of the infant church.
About the Author
Kate Cooper is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester. Born in Washington, DC and educated at Princeton, Harvard, and Wesleyan universities, she is the author of
The Virgin and the Bride and
The Fall of the Roman Household. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.