Hell Hath No Fury

 

Just 20% of people believe in hell. Still, early Christian ideas about the underworld — and who is punished there — echo in society today, religious studies scholar Meghan Henning writes in her new book, Hell Hath No Fury.
 
“What’s important about hell is that it does not just describe punishment, it decides and prescribes who is culpable,” Henning said. “When we look at Christian texts about the afterlife, hell is not an equal opportunity punisher. Women are often tortured for crimes like adultery while their male counterparts are noticeably absent.”
 
Henning’s findings, in what is described as the first major book to examine ancient Christian literature on hell through the lenses of gender and disability studies, draw from relatively obscure texts that offered “tours of hell.” Popular among early Christians for their specific depictions of how people would be punished for sins — details lacking in the New Testament. In these texts, a saint or apostle, even the Virgin Mary, is guided through hell by someone who explains the sins and tortures they see.
 
“The punishments are meant to ‘fit the crimes,’” said Henning, associate professor of Christian origins. “Slanderers, for example, chew their tongues. Yet, we find clear double standards. In his most famous sermon, Jesus preached that men should avoid hell by plucking out their eyes rather than looking lustfully upon a woman. So it’s pretty remarkable that later Christian hells see chastity as the purview of women and women alone.”
 
Henning said that while the tortures in these tours of hell are imaginary, the depictions had a real impact by reinforcing the idea that people in authority have the right to make rules and decisions about women’s bodies.
 
“This is one of the first places that we see women’s bodies become communal and public property,” Henning said. “That legacy is still felt in modern society and decision making. Even a cursory glance at school dress codes remind us that we are not so far removed from a world in which women’s bodies are hypersexualized and policed. So while we might want to congratulate ourselves on how far we have come from these scenes of fiery torture that disproportionally affect women, the gendered stereotypes are not as remote as we might imagine.”
 
Hell Hath No Fury: New book examines early Christian ideas of afterlife. University of Dayton News, September  27, 2021.

 Yale University Press

In the opening of Netflix’s popular new show “My Unorthodox Life,” fashion mogul Julia Haart explains that she grew up thinking that dressing provocatively had eternal consequences:
 
“It was your mother’s responsibility to teach you modesty. … If any of your body parts were uncovered, there’s a very special form of hell that is reserved for both you and your mother. In this hell, your mother would dip your clothes in acid, put them on your body, and so throughout the day your body would decompose from the acid. And then the next morning it would start all over again, for thousands of years, or however many years hell lasts. When you learn this as a child, and everyone around you believes it, you believe it.”
 
Haart grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community she describes as “fundamentalist,” though critics have questioned how the show portrays it. In both Christianity and Judaism, views on the afterlife are diverse – and most Jews in the U.S. today put less emphasis on what happens after death than what happens now.
 
As a scholar of early Christianity whose work focuses on depictions of hell, I see this education as rooted in two millennia of ideas about gender, bodies, sin and punishment that influence our society today – particularly for women.
 
Some ancient Jewish and Christian depictions of the afterlife provide graphic depictions of sinners and their punishments. Many of these punishments are seen as “fitting” for the sin committed: They follow the ancient legal standard of “measure for measure” punishment, known as lex talionis.
 
Punishments for women, like the one that Haart describes, follow the norms of the ancient and medieval cultures that first created them, including drastically different expectations for men and women. In these texts, the “immoral” clothes that brought women to hell become the instruments of their own torment – threatening images used to keep them in their place.
 
‘Fitting’ the crime
 
Clothing is only the beginning. Women in hell hang by their breasts in several medieval Jewish texts known as the Isaiah fragments because they uncovered their hair, tore their veil or nursed their children in the marketplace “in order to attract the gaze of men.” In the Gedulat Moshe, a Jewish text written sometime around the 13th century that describes Moses visiting hell, he sees women who uncovered themselves hanged by their breasts and their hair.
 
These frightening visions were drawn from attitudes toward real women and were used to control them, as well. In a third-century rabbinic legal text, the Mishnah Sotah, a woman who has committed adultery is sentenced to have her breasts and hair uncovered. The public humiliation is considered “fitting,” because her body led to her sin.
 
But this idea of justice or retribution did not originate with the rabbis and is certainly not exclusive to Judaism. The punishments in these Jewish texts closely mirror the second-century Apocalypse of Peter, a Christian text that describes women hanging by their hair and neck because their intricate hairstyles seduced married men.
 
It is difficult to say whether it was Jews or Christians who first brought these gendered ideas about the body into their images of hell. But the earlier Christian visions of hell certainly elaborate on them more than medieval Jewish ones do. For example, only young women were punished for being unchaste in early Christian depictions of hell – even those like the Apocalypse of Paul, in which male and female sinners were punished equally for other sins.
 
In the earliest Christian descriptions of hell, women and men were both held accountable for parenting-related sins, such as abortion or abandoning an infant. After a few centuries, however, women alone were held responsible for having children and nurturing them. In one medieval account of hell, the Latin Vision of Ezra, women were not only responsible for parenting their own children but punished for failing to nurse orphaned infants. Their punishment? Hanging in fire while serpents suck their breasts.
 
These sins and punishments reflect several different but interwoven ancient ideas about the body: that women’s hair was a sexual organ, that female grooming is tied to adultery, that women’s main role is child rearing and that their bodies should not be seen in public.
 
Double standards today
 
Although these ideas were not included in the Jewish or Christian Bible, societies often used them to define religious crimes and control their bodies.
 
It is easy to look at these ancient hellscapes and dismiss them as long-ago. But ideas about women’s bodies being problematic and in need of control persist, with or without religion. And in “My Unorthodox Life,” Haart invites the audience to look at gender double standards in the fashion world up close.

 
Haart, who has left her Orthodox community, calls herself “very proud to be a Jew” and determined “to show people that there are all sorts of Jews.” Now CEO of Elite World Group, the parent company of a major modeling agency, she draws viewers’ attention to the industry’s sexual abuse, unequal standards for men and women, and its tendency to cater to male desire. She describes her mission as “cleaning up” modeling and “rooting out” its sexual abuse – a vow a former supermodel has recently called on her to uphold.
 
Though “My Unorthodox Life” has been mocked for its soap opera style, I believe it carries a serious message: Ideas about objectifying and controlling women’s bodies shape our society more than we’d like to admit – with or without religion.
 
How threats of hellfire helped keep ‘immodest’ women in their place – from the ancient world to ‘My Unorthodox Life’. By Meghan Henning. The Conversation, September 8, 2021. 

On Wednesday, a Texas law banning most abortions once cardiac activity can be detected in the embryo (in most cases at six weeks) went into effect. The law is highly controversial and means that Texas now joins Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio as one of a growing number of states with “heartbeat” laws. Texas is the only state, however, whose legislation has not been delayed by legal challenges. Part of the reason for this is that the new legislation bars state officials from enforcing it. Instead, it deputizes private citizens who can sue anyone who performs or “aids and abets” the performance of a termination. Uninterested civilians can win legal costs plus up to $10,000 if they win. The legislation has elicited strong reactions from those who support abortions rights and a women’s right to choose.
 
There are, additionally, legal observers concerned about the unusual manner in which abortion will be targeted. Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, has set up a “whistleblower” website where people can submit tips about those they believe have violated the legislation. A spokesperson for Texas Right to life told NPR that “These lawsuits are not against the women…[they]would be against the individuals making money off of the abortion, the abortion industry itself.” While many would contest whether or not the legislation is about women, it is striking that accountability is being assigned to third parties: doctors, nurses, volunteers, and even Uber drivers.
 
This is not the first time in history that culpability for abortion has shifted. Around the turn of the Common Era the Roman Emperor Augustus introduced moral legislation designed, among other things, to encourage marriage and childbearing among Roman elites. The legislation required citizens to marry and prohibited cross-class marriage. The descendants of senators were prohibited from marrying freedwomen (formerly enslaved women), dancers, actors, gladiators or sex workers. Those who were married were provided with incentives to procreate (exemptions from certain arduous duties) and adultery now became a public crime punishable by exile and fines. While none of this legislation targeted abortion or infant exposure, it created a context in which what we might call household or familial crimes could be legislated by the state. Moreover, these laws disproportionately affected women. An elite woman who had sex with anyone other than her husband could be punished for adultery.
 
An elite man was only guilty of adultery if he had sex with an elite woman to whom he wasn’t married; sex workers, enslaved and formerly enslaved people did not leave them open to this charge. Abortion was something of a non-issue. It only became problematic, medical historian Rebecca Flemming has written, when a woman used it “to obstruct a man’s acquisition of legitimate heirs.” In the same way, responsibility for procreation was women’s work. The first divorce, Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes, was performed on the grounds of infertility. If a couple could not get pregnant it was assumed to be the woman’s fault. When the Roman writer Juvenal speaks of “foul pools” where women went to acquire exposed babies to pass off as their husbands’, he may be offering us a glimpse of the desperate situation that faced women who could not get pregnant. In the first two centuries of the Common Era, Christianity followed suit. The earliest statements about abortion appear in the second century in a suite of texts about ethics and Christian lifestyle.
 
The Epistle of Barnabas 19.5 prohibits its audience from procuring an abortion or destroying a child after its birth (through infanticide or, potentially, infant exposure) but the addressees of the statement are everyone. Another second century text, the Didache, includes abortion in a genderless list similar to the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not commit sodomy; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use magic; thou shalt not use love potions; thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Once again, the list does not specify any one person as responsible for these sins. In her just published book Hell Hath No Fury (full disclosure, I endorsed this book), Dr. Meghan Henning charts the ways that culpability for sins shifted and changed course in the first millennium. The earliest descriptions of Christians being punished for household crimes, Henning shows, depicts both parents being punished for infant exposure. In the Apocalypse of Paul, she told me, both men and women are punished for procuring abortions. In the late second-century Apocalypse of Peter, however, only women are condemned for seeking terminations. The women whose children had been aborted are described as seated in a place of excrement and filth where a lake of putrid matter had filled and covered them up to their necks. Here, Henning says, we see the beginning of the gendering of household crimes as female. The distinction stuck. Over the next few centuries, the notion that women were exclusively responsible for adultery and abortion was further cemented in a variety of ancient sin catalogues and apocalypses. Henning told me that women’s responsibilities were even expanded such that they could be responsible for broader “childrearing” crimes.
 
Then medieval Latin Vision of Ezra not only condemns those who killed their children but also those who “did not give their breasts to orphans.” This radically reshapes the moral obligations of women to include caring for parentless children. Given that most ancient wet nurses were enslaved this text adds a layer of religious violence to the injustice already inflicted upon them those who had been trafficked. Now the exploitation and violation of women’s bodies was refashioned as a kind of moral duty. All women were obligated to allow their bodies to be used in this way, regardless of their lack of choice, autonomy, or health. The recent legislation in Texas aims to target abortion providers. It thus expands culpability for abortion to include medical doctors and anyone else involved in providing terminations. In religious contexts this has happened before. In 2009 a Brazilian doctor was excommunicated for performing an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim who was pregnant with twins. The girl’s mother and the medical team were also excommunicated. It is worth noting that the child herself was not. Given the religious and legal history governing the family, we might wonder why fathers are no longer a part of the religious or legal conversation. One imagines that a biological father might be liable to prosecution if he drove his partner to an abortion clinic but, otherwise, they are in the clear. Henning told me that our culture “continues to place the lion’s share of responsibility for procreation and parenthood on women.” This is one of the few places in society that men are invisible. “Ironically,” said Henning “the ancient Christian documents that hold everyone responsible for abortion also held the whole Christian community responsible for all imaginable for sin.” The biggest targets are the wealthy, who face damnation if they don’t share their resources.
 
A return to Christian morality, said Henning, implicates everyone: “Selectively reanimating ancient teachings about abortion in order to condemn women, is not a return to authentic Christian ethics, it is a misrepresentation of ancient teachings about collective responsibility and the common good.”
 
**This was first published in the Daily Beast on September 6th.
 
This is not the first time in history that culpability for abortion has shifted. By Candida Moss, University of Birmingham, September 2021.

Why are we obsessed with the reimagining of hell? And what influences our notions of the landscapes, geography, and bodies within the fiery inferno? A new book takes readers to the origins of hell and back.

 This year numerous reflections on the work of Dante Alighieri have marked the 700th anniversary of the author’s death, on September 14, 1321. Hell was already a hot topic within the zeitgeist. From shows like The Good Place and Lucifer to Kanye West’s new track “Heaven and Hell” and Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” popular media is just as fixated on hellscapes as Dante’s 14th-century audiences. But where did the visual and visceral design of hell that is embedded in the Western imagination even come from?
 
Its origins are the focus of a new work by religion scholar Meghan Henning. The book, Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature, dissects the genesis of the early Christian idea of hell within the period of the late Roman Empire and then traces its impact over centuries to arrive at how we visualize it today. 
 
It is not as if the underworld were a novel invention of Christianity. Ancient Near Eastern cultures developed ideas of heroic trips to the underworld glimpsed at in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, the bard describes Odysseus’s descent into the underworld. And descriptions of the underworld were not just available via oral poetry. Ancient visualizations are mentioned in the form of a mid-5th-century BCE painter named Polygnotus. The artist took it upon himself to mix variant mythical traditions of the space in his commission to envision Hades on the wall of a building at the sacred Greek site of Delphi in a work called the “Nekyia.” Virgil — who later served as the guide to Dante — famously has Aeneas travel to the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid. Mythic journeys by Orpheus, Heracles, and others to the underworld were a favorite motif among Greek and Etruscan ceramicists and later could be found in Roman mosaics.
 
 Henning is our Virgil on this tour to discover how hell went from the Greek underworld to a space for punishment pursuant to the Christian notion of sin. As she directs us to, we must inspect early Christian writings in order to trace intellectual and religious models for the Inferno, many of which would go on to influence perceptions today. “The Apocalypse of Paul,” a Greek text written for a Christian audience between 388 to 416 CE, is noted by Dante. Later translated into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Slavonic, it was a source of inspiration for many of the basic components later incorporated into the Divine Comedy. It is a part of a genre of literary apocalypses, like the “Book of Daniel” or the “Book of Revelation”. Apocalyptic literature was popular within earlier Jewish writing as well. In the short work, the apostle Paul is a tourist led by a young angel through the levels of heaven. The particular sinners and their punishments distributed throughout the variant levels are explained in didactic detail to the apostle — to chilling effect for the reader. 
 
Apocalypses like that of Paul and of another called the “Apocalypse of Peter” were often read aloud in early Christian churches within the late Roman Empire, as on Good Friday. While these texts were outside the biblical canon, they were still read and spoken about, in large part because they addressed a gaping void within the New Testament. They created a literary and didactic hellscape not provided by the likes of Matthew, Luke, or any of the other writings in the gospels. In filling in these lacunae, Henning notes, it is possible to see how these apocalypses were influenced by and sometimes justified legal punishments used in the Roman Mediterranean. Laws such as the Roman lex talionis — a law of retribution akin to an eye-for-an-eye —or punishments such as being punished by being thrown “ad bestias” (toward the beasts) in the amphitheater. Early Christians existed within a particular Roman socio-legal structure of slavery, misogyny, and retributive justice they often projected or mapped onto their notions of treatment in the afterlife.

 
The most potent parts of Hell Hath No Fury address ancient prejudices tied to the body and to gender. Henning points to how imagined bodies within hell connect directly to perceptions of real bodies in the present world — and their marginalization. Roman law and society were often cruel to non-normative bodies. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes that from Rome’s founding by Romulus in 753 BCE, all priests were required to be “without any bodily defects,” and other Roman authors noted the Vestal virgins similarly had to be physically pristine, in particular they could not have a speech impediment, be hearing impaired, or unable to speak. Those with mental health issues, called furiosi, and many other disabled persons in antiquity had limited legal redress and were often assigned legal guardians. The origins of the conservatorship imposed on Britney Spears, for instance, goes back to the misogyny and ableism of Roman law.
 
In early Christian visions of hell, the binary of righteous versus unrighteous persons is demonstrated through treatment of the body. Corporal treatment also reveals cultural constructions of masculinity and the ways in which bodies were policed in the Roman Mediterranean. It is from this cultural context that early Christian communities emerged: 
 
“The punishments themselves rely upon ancient notions of bodily difference in order to negatively mark the bodies of the unrighteous. The bodies of the damned are blind, mute, bloody, lacerated, or spewing forth worms …. In the tours of hell, I argue, the damned inhabit disabled, female, imprisoned bodies for all of eternity. Using bodily normativity as a way to depict eternal torment relies upon familiar imagery of the body to depict the afterlife.”
 
Scholars of early Christian martyrdom texts and saintly hagiographies have long seen the body as a central site for crafting identity. In early Christian visions of hell, the body is again the location for revealing the ostensibly “true” nature of an individual — but in the process lays bare the systems of slavery, patriarchy, and ableism that provided the scaffolding for early Christian doctrine.

 
Hell Hath No Fury provides fundamental clues as to why it seems that we cannot escape reincarnations of hell in either Dante or on Netflix. “We have a propensity to make hell on earth,” Henning notes. “Imaginary spaces and otherworldly beings are precisely what gives apocalyptic literature the ability to critique and transform real social spaces and figures in the contemporary world.” Early Christian descriptors of hell have cast a long shadow from antiquity to today. Henning retraces how the shades of this oft-overlooked literature pervade our contemporary notion of the afterlife. She also underscores how it has permeated our sensibilities surrounding notions of retribution and justice.
 
Scholars of the early 20th century largely ignored early Christian apocalyptic literature, writing it off as banal pop culture from the ancient world. Generations from now, scholars may want to reflect on this sidelining of apocalyptic texts when contextualizing the backlash surrounding Lil Nas X’s Montero album or seeking to explain people binge watching American Horror Story in the midst of a global pandemic. The present tension between the traditional, early Christian vision of hell and the inversion of this deeply flawed model in recent popular media is a product of a polarized society. But this questioning of the historical casting of “deviant bodies” within constructions of hell is an important way to interrogate how and why we continue to marginalize non-normative bodies today. Studies of hellscapes can be a valuable tool for recognizing and critiquing the inequity, ableism, and misogyny of the past and the present.
 
While only 56% of Americans now believe in hell, it remains a threat still invoked by preachers and adherents to Christianity. Recently there has been an uptick in those fundamentalists who believe even small sins deserve eternal damnation and who invoke early Christian hellscapes as a way of justifying and legitimizing their homophobia or attitudes towards premarital sex. This struggle over conceptions of hell unveils what studies of early Christian apocalyptic literature have long demonstrated: Our imagined hellscapes say more about the biases of the culture that constructs them than the actuality of an eternal inferno.
 
Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature by Meghan Henning is published by Yale University Press and is available via Bookshop.
 
Why the Hell We Are Obsessed with Hell. By Sarah E. Bond. Hyperallergic, October 6, 2021.

 

Professor Meghan Henning has found her niche studying stories about the one place no one wants

 

Across the pop culture landscape, eternal perdition is having a moment. Hadestown raked in eight Tony Awards including best musical, and The Good Place is NBC’s highest-rated comedy series. Meanwhile, over on Netflix, Lucifer is solving crime while running a nightclub in Los Angeles that looks pretty spectacular, if salacious opulence is your thing. Hell is hot right now.

 Honestly, it has never really cooled off. Satan, hell and the temptations that doom the damned are baked into our collective cultural consciousness through centuries of story, song and image. Meghan Henning, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, sometimes asks her students for their versions of what hell might look like in today’s contemporary world. “One of the students depicted hell as never being able to log off their phone and always seeing their friends doing things without them but never being able to message or communicate with them,” she said. “I thought it was really interesting, especially on a campus that emphasizes community and connection to one another.” Henning teaches her students — and us — that the details of our stories about hell have changed over the centuries, reflecting evolving anxieties and fears. Our explanations for how a soul gets condemned to hell are even more important, she said. Each what-not-to-do catalog is a rhetorical mirror that reflects how we think about what it means to live a moral life and how the meaning of morality has changed through time. Hell, in other words, teaches us what it means to be good.

  We tell and retell stories about hell and damnation a lot. Take, for example, how we speak to our desires with stories about the trade in souls. In a wellknown 1936 Stephen Vincent Benét story, attorney Daniel Webster fights the devil in a court battle on behalf of a New Hampshire farmer who sold his soul in exchange for seven years of good crop yields. In a Benétparodying 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Homer sues to undo a deal in which he swapped his soul for a doughnut. According to legend, Satan got Robert Johnson’s soul at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for music talent, but the bargaining didn’t go as well when the devil went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal, or so says the Charlie Daniels Band in its 1979 No. 1 country hit.

 Satan’s offers are always alluring. He cuts a charmingly roguish figure and has for centuries. Only the best-looking actors play him and his minions. He’s by far the most interesting figure in John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem Paradise Lost, giving us delicious lines that read freshly today, like “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This is a guy who’s fun to hang around with.

 Milton declares at the outset of Paradise Lost that he is writing about Satan and hell to “justify the ways of God to men.” This is the kind of statement of intent that deeply interests UD’s Henning, who studies what people, particularly early Christians, are trying to accomplish when they talk about hell. She loves talking about hell. She once told a podcast host that she could talk about hell all day.

 Henning is the author of a study of early Christian writings about hell. When people find out what she does, the first question they usually ask her is whether she thinks hell exists.

 Catholic theology is clear that it does. “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity,” reads the English version of the catechism available on the Vatican’s website. “Immediately after death, the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.’ The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God.”

 Recently, the Vatican’s communication’s office was forced to respond to comments attributed to Pope Francis last year by Eugenio Scalfari, the atheist founder of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica. He reported that the Pope told him that those who die in a state of mortal sin “are not punished. Those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and take their place among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. A hell doesn’t exist; the disappearance of sinning souls exists.” The Vatican described the quote as an inaccurate transcription of the Holy Father’s comments, and Vox noted that Scalfari boasts he neither records nor takes notes during interviews, instead reconstructing conversations from memory, when it reported on the incident.

 Henning, however, is a religious studies professor at a Catholic university rather than a Catholic theologian. Whether hell exists is not a question that concerns her in her academic work. To understand the questions she asks about hell, it helps to understand how she got interested in hell in the first place.

 Henning grew up as part of what she calls “an active faith community” in Ohio. When she was in high school, her grandfather developed terminal lung cancer, and her grandmother did “what all Italian grandmothers would do in this situation, which is make lots of food and not sleep,” she said.

 The not-sleeping caught up with her when she made a 4 a.m. grocery run, nodded off at the wheel on the way home and ran into a telephone pole. She lost a leg and was still in a coma when Henning’s grandfather died.

 Friends reached out to the family, but even as a teenager, Henning sensed that words offered to comfort sometimes had the opposite effect.

 “People would say to my mom things like, ‘Well, you know, when my mother was sick and in the hospital, I prayed for her and she got better, so maybe we just need to pray harder for your mom,’” she said. “These people were trying to help. They didn’t really think about the fact that they were implying to my family that what was happening to us was because we were not praying hard enough or we were not faithful enough.”

 For Henning, that was the beginning of thinking about how people can read the same religious texts yet understand radically different things. The hell piece entered later, in graduate school when her mind wandered in class one day and her eyes fell on a footnote. It said, in so many words, that parts of the New Testament that dealt with hell didn’t have much to do with the testament’s overarching theological message of grace, an interpretation that struck her as a bit too modern.

 “So that little daydream that I had in that seminar really got me down the path of thinking about, ‘OK, well, if I’m thinking about this from an ancient perspective, what would an ancient reader who hears this text that describes hell imagine?’’

 That question led to a dissertation at Emory University that became a book, Educating Early Christians Through the Rhetoric of Hell. As the title implies, her research doesn’t contemplate hell as a place but as a tool. For her, hell is a rhetorical hammer, and she wants to know what nail it’s hitting and why. To answer those questions, she reconstructed how early Christians would have understood their own writings.

 To understand hell like an early Christian reader, you have to forget everything you know about it as a modern one. There’s never been a Dante with his nine intricately catalogued circles of hell, never been a sermon like Jonathan Edward’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” detailing the horrifying anguish that awaits unconverted souls. In the cultural landscape occupied by early Christians, hell is a place more like Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the dying hours of Mardi Gras — a menacing yet curiosityarousing place to visit, but not anywhere you’d want to stay. The people you come across are worn-out and have nowhere else to go, and some of them are paying dearly for their earlier choices. If you can get away unscathed, you’ll have stories to tell.

 Early Christians got this idea from the culture around them, which was Roman with a heavy dose of nostalgia for ancient Greece. Stories about heroes descending into Hades were as normal as will-they-or-won’t-they plotlines in today’s romantic comedies. The ancient archetype we know today occurs in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Bronze Age epic that tells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year struggle to get home after the Trojan War.

 The Hades that Homer describes would have been more recognizable to early Christians than many of our modern conceptions of hell. When Odysseus gets to the land of the dead, he sees all kinds of people, including many well-known ones. There’s his mother, Anticleia, and an unburied former crew member named Elpenorn. The blind prophet Tiresias drops by to give advice. Warriors’ wives and daughters stop to chat, as do Achilles, Agamemnon and the mother of Oedipus, Epicaste. Odysseus also spots Tantalus being tortured by thirst as he stands in a pool of unreachable water, Sisyphus heedlessly pushing his rock uphill, and others enduring eternal torment for various offenses against the gods.
 
The elements of Homer’s telling — the descent, the encounters with wellknown characters, the suffering — were familiar structures for early Christians, according to Henning.
 
“The myth of the descent into Hades was popular and widely referenced,” she said. “When an ancient person would hear someone say, ‘You know, I went on this journey to the underworld,’ or ‘I went on a trip to Hades,’ the idea of such a thing would be familiar enough that, instead of asking ‘Really? Is that a real place?’ or ‘What was there?’ the person would ask instead, ‘Well, who did you see?’”
 
One reason for the saturation of these stories in the culture of antiquity is that they were widely used to help teach morality. What one saw and who one met in an underworld had “an ethical orientation, aimed at providing instructions for how people ought to conduct themselves in their mortal lives,” Henning writes in her book.
 
Afterlife stories about punishment, in particular, were commonly used to teach students about the rhetorical concept of ekphrasis, or the use of visual imagery conveyed with words to move an audience, so students throughout antiquity were familiar with the form. In Plato’s Republic, the visual descriptions of suffering underscore the importance of living a life of moderation. Roman satirist Lucian flips social hierarchy in his underworld, with kings and governors “either selling salt fish on account of their neediness or teaching the alphabet, and getting abused and hit over the head by all comers,” Henning notes in a footnote.
 
That highly visual language — “selling salt fish,” “getting abused and hit over the head” — creates vivid descriptions with a moral purpose: to warn to the rich and powerful about how they ought to be living their lives. Plutarch, in another of Henning’s examples, details the colors of the wounds of those suffering in the afterlife and attributes them to particular sins. “Drab brown … comes of meanness and greed,” for example, “while if spite and envy are present, they give out this livid green.”

 
Homer. Plato. Lucian. Plutarch. These storytellers have a sort of “All Along the Watchtower” effect going on. The original version of the song comes from Bob Dylan, but then Jimi Hendrix took it and made it his own. Decades later, U2 gave it a shot on their album Rattle and Hum, and plenty more have continued reworking it. Likewise, when the early Christians write about hell, they’re riffing on something already out there, not coming up with something completely new.
 
These examples from Homer and the rest offer a sense of the rhetorical practices in which early Christians are participating when they write their gospels, epistles and other texts. Homer is Dylan, Plato is Hendrix and, as the New Testament writers dip their reeds in ink, they are U2’s lead singer Bono clearing his throat. They’ve got a structure for how to think about the afterlife and what awaits the damned. Now’s their turn to rock the hell story in a way that explains how they believe Jesus has called them to live.
 
Though Henning offers examples from throughout the New Testament of how they do this, she devotes an entire chapter of her book to Matthew’s Gospel. It is rife with imagery of punishments — eternal fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth, outer darkness and more — that illustrate what awaits those who do not follow the path to righteousness laid out by Jesus.
 
“In Matthew, the vivid depictions of ‘hell’ functioned in much the same way that it did for the Greek readers of The Odyssey, as a tool for broad ethical and cultural education,” Henning writes.
 
On the flip side, the virtues on which Matthew focuses prove to be exceptionally influential on early Christians, particularly his account of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which begins “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” commands love of one’s enemy, warns against piety and wealth-seeking, and gives us the “Do unto others” golden rule.
 
As more early Christians wrote new texts, including the epistles of the New Testament and works such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Latin Vision of Ezra, they picked up on and elaborated Matthew’s themes. They used the “tried and true [hell] rhetoric of empire” to present “their own distinctive values,” Henning writes, often describing “the punishment of those who do not care for ‘the other’” and using new hell stories to “[draw] upon the Sermon of the Mount as an ethical core that could bring cohesion to early Christian communities.” This theme emerged at a critical time for early Christians, when they were still in the early stages of identity formation and deciding which texts and messages would be their exemplars.

 Two thousand or so years later, we’re still talking about hell. But Henning will tell you we’re creating hell stories not only in different ways today, but for different reasons.

 “Unfortunately, what I think has happened is that we’ve picked up on the rhetoric — which is really kind of a trick from the Greco-Roman world — and we have not brought with it any of the ethical content,” she said. “The real focus of hell in the New Testament and early Christian texts is really on care for the other and love of the neighbor. But when we depict hell in modern media, we’ve actually pivoted away from that and have focused more on the rhetoric itself and the violent imagery.’’

 This turn away from using hell depictions to focus an audience on virtues is not just secular. Henning cites the example of so-called “hell houses,” a phenomenon of evangelical Christianity in America whose purpose is straight out of Jonathan Edward’s 1741 sermon to encourage religious conversion. These houses feature depictions of gruesome punishments linked to sins that “usu- ally include abortion, homosexuality, consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs, suicide, pre-marital sex, and other sins that are of primary concern to evangelical Christians.” In this catalog of transgressions, “the early Christian emphasis on the virtues presented in the Sermon on the Mount is all but lost.”

 Although Henning’s study of hell is driven by academic curiosity rather than the religious concerns of a theologian, she laments the loss of what she calls the “pedagogical savvy” of the early Christians as they created vivid hells in service of a broader message of concern with the marginalized in our world.

 Henning works to reclaim their teachings in The Road to Hell, a course she and communication professor Joseph Valenzano III designed and teach together.

 Henning said that when they start teaching hell, their students “want to quickly go to the entertainment value,” she said. This impulse reflects their experience with depictions of hell in popular culture, including ultra-violent ones such as the Saw horror movie franchise, which, she said, “uses the same kind of measure-for-measure punishment stuff that early Christian depictions of hell do, but intensifies it. … It’s even grosser than you could imagine.”

 When Henning assigns her students to analyze modern depictions of hell, they typically will train their critical lenses on comparatively less disturbing depictions of the afterlife, such as in Stranger Things or American Horror Story — even Harry Potter.

“The image when Harry dies for a short period of time and he’s in this void — students actually compare that to different ancient depictions of a kind of neutral afterlife, like Greek and Roman depictions of Hades that don’t have punishment or Hebrew Bible notions of Sheol,” she said.

 Henning really likes NBC’s The Good Place, which she describes as an especially nuanced exception to the violence that pervades contemporary hell depictions. In it, Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell) believes she is in heaven by mistake. But — spoiler alert — her crippling doubts are a form of psychological torture being inflicted on her in a ver- sion of hell constructed by a demon architect (played by Ted Danson) who is trying to freshen up the whole agony paradigm. The show creates a world in which these and other characters are forced to reflect on what is just, what is unjust and how justice should be restored. Somewhere, sometime soon, if it isn’t already happening, a graduate student ought to be typing up a dissertation on The Good Place as an embodiment of 21st-century American anxiety about unearned privilege.

 We don’t need to rely on hell stories for communicating about what it means to live virtuously, Henning points out.

 “I think that we have a lot more rhetorical tools at our disposal than ancient Chris Christians did,” she said. “I think the question is, ‘What are the best rhetorical tools in our world, and how can we maximally use them to do that good work in the world?’”

 Social media, for all its faults, offers a good example. Henning — who also has a strong interest in disability studies, which she attributes to seeing her grandmother cope with the loss of her leg after her car accident — has watched as disability activists use social media campaigns to create new ethical boundaries for how media companies serve customers who need, for example, closed captioning services. Activists no longer require hellinspired storytelling to get the public to pay attention or change its ways.

 Early Christians might easily recognize the rhetorical point we’re making in one specific way we talk about hell today. Type a Google search for recent news that includes the word “hell,” and you’ll turn up the usual stories about airline “travel hell” or “the neighbor from hell.” But sprinkled among the usual suspects will be stories that describe one circumstance or another as “hell on Earth.” It might be the fate of a community victimized by war, the last days of an abused child, a pocket of indescribably deep poverty in a distant country or nearby place, or some other dire, desperate situation.

 No matter the lamentable particulars, one shared element defines these stories as hellscapes: the undeserved torment of blameless innocents. Here, the usual hell story is turned inside-out. These are not hells where the wicked are being punished. These are hells that confront us with the moral urgency of caring for the most marginalized and vulnerable who suffer among us today. In these stories at least, hell still calls us to follow the early Christians’ message about how we ought to live.

 The Lesson from Hell. By Matthew Dewald.  University of Dayton Magazine, Autumn 2019. 

It’s that time of the year when hell is used as a common theme for entertainment and hell-themed haunted houses and horror movies pop up all over the country.
 
Although many of us now associate hell with Christianity, the idea of an afterlife existed much earlier. Greeks and Romans, for example, used the concept of Hades, an underworld where the dead lived, both as a way of understanding death and as a moral tool.
 
However, in the present times, the use of this rhetoric has radically changed.
 
Rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome
 
The earliest Greek and Roman depictions of Hades in the epics did not focus on punishment, but described a dark shadowy place of dead people.
 
In Book 11 of the Greek epic the “Odyssey,” Odysseus travels to the realm of the dead, encountering countless familiar faces, including his own mother.
 
Near the end of Odysseus’ tour, he encounters a few souls being punished for their misdeeds, including Tantalus, who was sentenced eternally to have food and drink just out of reach. It is this punishment from which the word “tantalize” originated.
 
Hundreds of years later, the Roman poet Virgil, in his epic poem “Aeneid,” describes a similar journey of a Trojan, Aeneas, to an underworld, where many individuals receive rewards and punishments.
 
This ancient curriculum was used for teaching everything from politics to economics to virtue, to students across the Roman empire, for hundreds of years.
 
In later literature, these early traditions around punishment persuaded readers to behave ethically in life so that they could avoid punishment after death. For example, Plato describes the journey of a man named Er, who watches as souls ascend to a place of reward, and descend to a place of punishment. Lucian, an ancient second century A.D. satirist takes this one step further in depicting Hades as a place where the rich turned into donkeys and had to bear the burdens of the poor on their backs for 250 years.
 
For Lucian this comedic depiction of the rich in hell was a way to critique excess and economic inequality in his own world.
 
Early Christians
 
By the time the New Testament gospels were written in the first century A.D., Jews and early Christians were moving away from the idea that all of the dead go to the same place.
 
In the Gospel of Matthew, the story of Jesus is told with frequent mentions of “the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” As I describe in my book, many of the images of judgment and punishment that Matthew uses represent the early development of a Christian notion of hell.
 
The Gospel of Luke does not discuss final judgment as frequently, but it does contain a memorable representation of hell. The Gospel describes Lazarus, a poor man who had lived his life hungry and covered with sores, at the gate of a rich man, who disregards his pleas. After death, however, the poor man is taken to heaven. Meanwhile, it is the turn of the rich man to be in agony as he suffers in the flames of hell and cries out for Lazarus to give him some water.
For the marginalized other
 
Matthew and Luke are not simply offering audiences a fright fest. Like Plato and later Lucian, these New Testament authors recognized that images of damnation would capture the attention of their audience and persuade them to behave according to the ethical norms of each gospel.
 
Later Christian reflections on hell picked up and expanded this emphasis. Examples can be seen in the later apocalypses of Peter and Paul – stories that use strange imagery to depict future times and otherworldly spaces. These apocalypses included punishments for those who did not prepare meals for others, care for the poor or care for the widows in their midst.
 
Although these stories about hell were not ultimately included in the Bible, they were extremely popular in the ancient church, and were used regularly in worship.
 
A major idea in Matthew was that love for one’s neighbor was central to following Jesus. Later depictions of hell built upon this emphasis, inspiring people to care for the “least of these” in their community.
 
Damnation then and now
 
In the contemporary world, the notion of hell is used to scare people into becoming Christians, with an emphasis on personal sins rather than a failure to care for the poor or hungry.
 
In the United States, as religion scholar Katherine Gin Lum has argued, the threat of hell was a powerful tool in the age of nation-building. In the early Republic, as she explains, “fear of the sovereign could be replaced by fear of God.”
 
As the ideology of republicanism developed, with its emphasis on individual rights and political choice, the way that the rhetoric of hell worked also shifted. Instead of motivating people to choose behaviors that promoted social cohesion, hell was used by evangelical preachers to get individuals to repent for their sins.
 
Even though people still read Matthew and Luke, it is this individualistic emphasis, I argue, that continues to inform our modern understanding of hell. It is evident in the hell-themed Halloween attractions with their focus on gore and personal shortcomings.
 
These depictions are unlikely to portray the consequences for people who have neglected to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, cloth the naked, care for the sick or visit those in prison.
 
The fears around hell, in the current times, play only on the ancient rhetoric of eternal punishment.
 
 
Why the Christian idea of hell no longer persuades people to care for the poor. By Meghan Henning. The Conversation, October 23, 2018.
 

Leah DeVun on Premodern Nonbinarity

 

The contemporary New York-based artist and historian Leah DeVun’s artwork, scholarship, and curation focus on the history of gender and sexuality, science and technology, the history of premodern Europe, the history of science and medicine, archives and collectives, and contemporary feminist and LGBT politics and histories. DeVun is currently an associate professor at Rutgers University, where they teach in the departments of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They are also the author of two co-edited volumes and books: Trans*historicities, a special issue of the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press, 2018), and Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time (Columbia University Press, 2009). DeVun’s reviews and essays have been featured in publications such as Radical History Review, Wired, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Spot among others. In their latest work, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021), DeVun reconstructs the contradictory yet complex cultural landscape of premodern Europe as navigated by individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories.

 
M. BUNA: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, the nonbinary figure, whether called an “androgyne” or a “hermaphrodite,” was used as an analytical tool to create orders and outline what stood outside them. By refusing to accept binary modes of sex and gender as natural or even unchangeable based on their assigned positive or negative value, seductive possibilities (and politics) can come into being. Could you expand on the role played by premodern nonbinarity in conceiving such alternatives?
 
Leah DeVun: My book argues that sex categorization in premodern Europe was a social process that determined who belonged inside of the category of humanity and, for that reason, who was entitled to ethical protections from violence and death. Much of my book centers on how, from the 12th to the 14th century, Christian Europeans used accusations of nonbinary sex (the charge that a person or community was something other than simply male or female) to stigmatize populations, justify violence against them, and facilitate their wholesale removal from a territory. And yet, ideas about nonbinary sex over this long period weren’t monolithic, and they weren’t static. Other thinkers in premodern Europe identified nonbinary sex with angels and heaven, Adam and Eve, and Jesus — some of the most idealized figures in European history. The “Jesus hermaphrodite,” a way of depicting Jesus in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a perfect balance of male and female traits, suggested that transgressing binary gender categories could lead to physical and spiritual transformation for humans. A deep history of nonbinary gender helps us see that sex categories beyond male and female have been with us for a very long time, and they weren’t always just something to be corrected or rejected. Images of nonbinary gender as perfect, aspirational, and transformational go to one of the main points of my book: that the preference for sexual binarism (the idea that only male and female are legitimate and real sexes) is a historically situated phenomenon that waxes and wanes, not a natural or inevitable division of humankind.
 
MB : When documenting the ascendancy of the binary model, you draw attention to the patriarchal doctrines legitimated by it. Medieval authors saw androgyny less as a gender equality issue than as a different validation of the same hegemonic masculinity. How did sexual and gender difference become primary concerns once humanity was speculated upon and rendered instrumental in privileging some bodies over others?
 
LD : My approach partly comes from my desire to intervene in transphobic arguments in the very place where many of them are perceived to originate: in early Christian tradition. Conservative Christians now sometimes hold up the biblical story of Adam and Eve as evidence that God intended humans to come in just male and female sexes, but not all past authorities read the Bible this way. Some Jewish and early Christian thinkers imagined that God first created humans with an “androgynous” or undifferentiated sex, before later splitting humans into binary-sexed men and women. To these thinkers, the original and ideal state of humanity, as it was intended by God, was nonbinary-sexed. While some religious authorities tried to stamp out this theory, others continued to repeat the nonbinary creation story, and we find this story cropping up again and again for roughly a thousand years. But this theory of androgynous creation didn’t aim to elevate women or put the sexes on equal footing. The general goal was to transcend sexual difference, often by absorbing the female into the male and producing a kind of male-inflected androgyny. So even in conversations that idealized androgyny and sexual undifferentiation, we can still find gender hierarchy, and when we find it, maleness is positioned above femaleness. I argue that these stories about creation are important because they were a past way of making sense of the origins and value of doctrines like marriage and patriarchy. When premodern Europeans theorized sex, gender, and difference, they did it by talking about Adam and Eve, or heaven and hell, or what happened to bodies after death and resurrection. But these conversations were always grounds for serious theorizations of embodiment and difference, and they became the means to privilege some bodies over others.

 
MB : Always produced by particular circumstances, the monster transgresses the strictures of binaries. But once the monster got equated with the hermaphrodite in medieval European culture, a new geography informed by colonial and racist thinking drew its maps. What were the ambiguous spaces occupied by the nonbinary figure in such exclusionary cartography?
 
LD : Premodern European Christians tended to imagine Asia and Africa as populated with exotic, monstrous populations whose bodies and cultural practices transgressed European social and sexual rules. We can see an example of this on the Hereford Map, a 14th-century English map of the world, which pictured Ethiopia as a barren, uncivilized place inhabited by monsters, including monsters with nonbinary-sexed anatomies and gender nonconforming practices. These projections of monstrosity and gender nonconformity onto Africa certainly anticipate later colonial and racist imaginaries in Europe. But an absolute distinction between Europe/non-Europe and binary/nonbinary was never so simple. To give just one example, after describing mythic societies of gender-switching “androgynes” living in Africa or Asia, some medieval European writers immediately reflected on intersex people who lived in their own communities, writing about how they should be integrated into binary social categories. Far from relegating nonbinary sex to a safely distant margin outside Europe, these texts emphasized that Europe could also include such variations. The texts reveal complex and open-ended ways of thinking about nonbinary sex, allowing Europeans to see parallels between themselves and their Asian and African counterparts, as well as to identify the so-called “other” of nonbinary sex within themselves. But it’s also important to note that, in these writings, intersex individuals in Europe were expected to fit within binary gender roles, and to avoid violating legal and ritual rules surrounding gender inversion and same-sex sexuality, while imaginary African and Asian “androgynes” flouted such rules. Stories about foreign gender inversion and sexual rule-breaking were no doubt escapist and semi-pornographic entertainment for European audiences, but these writings were serious too, making clear which gender and sexual practices were considered proper to civilized humans. Because Europeans expressed uncertainty about the human status of monstrous peoples abroad, those regions identified with monsters, especially Africa and Asia, became associated with inhumanity in the eyes of Europeans.
 
MB : Departing from the monster narrative and softening boundaries between human and nonhuman species, medieval bestiaries used the allegedly negative qualities of nonbinary anatomies and practices as cautionary tale about threats to the former. For what reasons did “hermaphroditizing” become a sharp instrument in dehumanizing non-Christianity within the pages of these moralizing compendiums?
 
LD : In response to increased social and political contacts with Muslims and Jews (and in the wake of Christian military expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, now often called “the crusades”), medieval Christians tried to distinguish themselves much more clearly from non-Christians. They pointed to alleged physical and gendered differences between themselves and Jews and Muslims, whom they painted as both lesser and external to their own community. Especially during the 12th to 14th centuries, some very widespread Christian texts depicted Jews or Muslims as “hermaphrodites” who could transition back and forth between male and female sex. English bestiaries (animal catalogs), for instance, pictured sex-changing and demonic-looking “Jewish” hyenas with both male and female genitals. These figures were shown eating the flesh of vulnerable (presumably Christian) human bodies. Despite the massacres of Jews in nearby towns and the expulsions of Jewish communities that had recently occurred or were soon to occur in England, these texts argued that it was Christians who were under attack by nonbinary-sexed Jewish aggressors.
 
MB : Legal and naturalist discourses of the 13th and 14th centuries weren’t based on a clear-cut distinction between sexing the human body and gendering it. In what ways did the medieval approach diverge from the one advanced by modern gender scholarship?
 
LD : Today, we tend to talk about sex and gender as different modes of classification, one focused on “biology” and the other focused on social practice or an internal sense of self, and these may or may not line up within an individual. This sex/gender distinction is helpful for explaining transgender, i.e., one’s social gender diverges from one’s biological sex assigned at birth. But the premodern thinkers I write about didn’t have a firm distinction between sexing and gendering the body. They collapsed sex and gender (and to some extent sexuality) into a single form of difference that they called sexus (Latin for “sex”). For them, what made men and women different from each other was a combination of physiological and anatomical features that also revealed and determined men and women’s different social roles. When authorities tried to sort intersex individuals into a male or female category, they used gendered social characteristics to determine a person’s biological category (did this person like “male” pursuits like riding horses and wielding swords, or “female” ones like sewing? did this person prefer to have sex “as a man” or “as a woman”?). “Biological” sex was in these cases determined by a person’s social role, and there was no real ontological distinction between the two. Of course, queer and feminist scholars have argued much the same about our own modern world, showing us that what we think of as scientific, biological signs of sex reflect cultural gendered biases rather than any objective truth about the body. So what we see in the premodern period doesn’t diverge completely from how the sex/gender distinction operates in our own time.
 
MB : In Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, Aren Z. Aizura writes about contemporary gender reassignment surgeries as “transnational entrepreneurialisms of the self.” When you write about medieval Western European surgeons “correcting” nonbinary bodies without paying any attention to the individual’s own personal sense of self, you argue that such examples should also be read “through the modern analytic of transgender.” Why do you think the transgender category would be useful in the examination of medieval sex/gender/sexual crossings?
 
LD : One of the big surprises of my research was that premodern Europeans advocated performing surgeries on intersex individuals and other people whose anatomies challenged male-female binaries. I write about how Christian medical authorities, beginning in the 13th century, argued that humans could only be born as male or female, rather than as one of several nonbinary sexes on a spectrum of sexual difference, which a number of thinkers had previously argued was possible. Those with nonbinary bodies (including intersex people) were to be surgically “corrected” to reshape them into standard men or women, which nature had supposedly intended to produce. These surgeries are not really comparable to modern-day gender-affirming surgeries chosen by trans people. They more closely resemble the normalizing surgeries that are still performed on intersex infants in the United States (despite decades of advocacy against them by intersex activists and allies), which try to fit diverse bodies into the constraints of binary forms. So why think of these medieval phenomena as part of transgender history? I argue that placing these ideas and practices within not only intersex but also transgender history helps to direct our attention toward the centrality of transition to premodern thinking about nonbinary sex.
 
Authors consistently focused on what they imagined to be the threatening possibility of gender-crossing by nonbinary bodies. Lawyers, clerics, and medical authorities were often less concerned about the specific shapes of bodies, but rather that their possessors might transition back and forth between male and female gender roles, or take both an active (penetrator) and passive (penetrated) role in sexual intercourse. Nearly all of the polemics against nonbinary sex emphasize that it’s gender-crossing and deviant sexuality (and deviant because of its gender inversion, i.e., men acting like women, or women acting like men) that are their main concerns. Much of the rhetoric we see is focused on trying to prevent gender transition by fixing people into stable gendered and sexual roles by whatever legal or medical means were available. But Aizura’s book is really helpful for thinking about other aspects of the medieval sexual worldview, even if not its trans entrepreneurial agency. As Aizura writes, modern transgender biographies often use tropes of travel, and geographic metaphors (including Orientalist fantasies) appear regularly in contemporary narratives of gender transition. These ideas about spatiality and mobility have strong parallels in how medieval European thinkers thought about gender through geography, for instance, in their projections of nonbinary-gendered fantasies onto Africa and Asia (both of which they considered “the East”). Medieval sources were already making creative use of the intersection of gender and spatial mobility, and travel and mapping were important ways for thinking about gender transition during this much earlier period.
 
MB :  In studying how historical contexts shaped sex and gender binaries together with efforts to manipulate bodies accordingly, your critical chronology of sexual difference is also underscored by who qualifies to be a proper human even to this day. Why should your work be engaged with and by whom?
 
LD :  Even now, we can see how gender plays a central role in legitimizing personhood, granting only the full range of human privileges (including the ability to do what you want with your body, or being able to avoid having things you don’t want done to your body) to individuals who fit into accepted categories, while withholding it from those whose bodies or gendered practices are considered unnatural or unacceptable. Looking at a long history is especially crucial now because we (and I include members of the trans and queer community) tend to view debates about gender nonconformity as relatively new, and their newness is precisely what’s threatening to “traditional gender,” as argued by transphobes. My work challenges this assumption of newness by showing that nonbinary people and practices have existed for millennia: they weren’t rare and they weren’t always viewed negatively. Beyond this, societies in the distant past thought deeply about systems of sex and gender, and they debated them, just as we do now. We can’t locate an earlier period of “traditional” gender before nonbinary people and categories complicated things. This can help us to put our current moment in some historical perspective. Beyond this, past ideas about nonbinary sex shouldn’t only be relevant to LGBTQ people now.
 
Ideas about nonbinary sex and gender were a part of how premodern people defined themselves as Christian, European, male, female, or human. These are not marginal or trivial concerns, and we need to understand nonbinary history to appreciate how these foundational categories developed. By understanding history, we can see how some earlier ideas and practices anticipate our own, which can give us a better understanding of why we think and do some of the things we do now. But sometimes the past introduces us to radically different cultures, and I think that helps us to imagine radically different futures for ourselves too. In our own time, when we’re facing transphobic “bathroom bills,” unwanted medical procedures forced on intersex people, and bans on offering medical care to trans children, transformative politics are urgent and necessary. While ancient and medieval categories and concerns aren’t the same as the ones we have now, I hope my book and the relationship it suggests between past and present can help support liberatory politics. I hope it can be accessible both inside and outside of the classroom, and I hope it can expand our archive and timeline for the history of gender marginalized people, while also fueling efforts to reduce harm against them now.
 
 
The Shape of Premodern Nonbinarity: A Conversation with Leah DeVun. Los Angeles Review of Books , August 28, 2021.

Liam Miller  sat down with Leah DeVun to discuss her book, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia UP, 2021). We talk about how widespread thinking and writing about non-binary individuals was during the first centuries of the CE and again in the C12th-14th, plus the way non-binary bodies actually shaped the way a host of categories and boundaries (not just gender) were demarcated. We talk in detail about the shift in the C12th/13th and the way non-binary sex shaped the project of establishing a non-human other, justifying violence towards Jews and Muslims, and determining who could live in a Christian territory. We also talk about the figures of "Adam androgyne" and the "Jesus hermaphrodite", and how they function as "anchors of eschatological time." Finally, Leah discusses how this study can inform our present, not only by showing that the consideration of non-binary, trans*, and intersex bodies are not novel to our period, but how this consideration cuts through claims of 'natural and immutable' in our own day.

The Shape of Sex,  Leah DeVun.  Interview Liam Miller.  Love –Rinse/Repeat.  August 16, 2021

The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, it reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex. In doing so, it shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.
 
NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about?
 
Leah DeVun: The Shape of Sex is about sex and gender beyond the male-female binary in Christian Europe from about 200-1400 CE. I look at the cultural world that was navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary, as well as how thinkers used ideas about nonbinary sex to make distinctions between not only men and women, but also humans and animals, Europeans and non-Europeans, and Christians and non-Christians. These distinctions allowed thinkers – lawyers, clerics, physicians, poets, alchemists, and others — to define what it meant to be human, and to make claims about who should be accepted as a member of the human community.
 
In our own time, when ideas about sex and gender are the subject of so much controversy, I argue that looking to the distant past can give us perspectives on present-day categories like intersex, transgender, and nonbinary gender. While ancient and medieval categories aren’t the same as modern ones, a deep history shows us that sexual binarism isn’t a timeless or natural division of humankind, and that history can help us to imagine different worlds in the future.
 
NOTCHES: Your book begins with Adam and Eve, who are often cited by defenders of ‘traditional’ ideas about sex and gender. But your research suggests that early Christians sometimes saw the first humans as androgynous figures. How did this idea emerge, and how far was it accepted?
 
DeVun: Conservative Christians now often hold up the story of Adam and Eve as clear proof that God intended humans to come in just male and female sexes, but people haven’t always read Genesis that way. A number of Jewish and early Christian thinkers interpreted the language of Genesis (which seemed to at least some of them to describe two different, and difficult to reconcile, creation stories) as showing that God first created humans with an “androgynous” or undifferentiated sex, before later splitting humans into binary-sexed men and women. To these early readers, the original and ideal state of humanity — as it was intended by God — was nonbinary sexed. While some religious authorities tried to stamp out this theory, others continued to find a nonbinary creation story compelling, and we find this interpretation repeated over and over again for roughly a thousand years.
 
This history is good reminder that sex categories beyond male and female aren’t new: they’ve been with us for a very long time. It also shows us that nonbinary sex wasn’t always viewed negatively, or as something to be erased or corrected. Nonbinary sex could be associated with Adam and Eve — and also with Jesus, angels, and the resurrection. Nonbinary sex could be presented as something ideal, pure, or transformative.
 
NOTCHES: You identify a shift in attitudes from the twelfth century onwards, with nonbinary individuals and identities presented in increasingly negative terms. Why did this happen, and how did it relate to fears about/ prejudices against other groups?

 
DeVun: Two important things happened – and they both came from greater Christian European contact with the Muslim political and intellectual worlds during the time of the Christian holy wars (aka the Crusades). First, during that time, “naturalist” (what we might call early scientific) writings from the Muslim world became increasingly accessible in Western Europe. These writings included ancient Greek medical and philosophical ideas, as well as indigenous ones from Muslim intellectuals. Once these works were translated from Arabic into Latin, educated Western Europeans could read them, and their contents became extremely important and trendy. They eventually shaped how certain influential Western European medical and surgical writers thought about sex and the human body. These newly available ideas – especially those associated with the Greek philosopher Aristotle — tended to advocate for a binary model of sex, that is, they argued that all humans were one of two sexes – male or female — with nothing in between. The embrace of this claim by educated Europeans constituted an important change because we can identify a number of “spectrum”-based medical texts from before this period that argued that humans came in multiple sexes between male and female. While the “spectrum” model continued to hold some sway, the binary model became the dominant way of thinking about sex among certain circles for centuries thereafter. Western European surgeons began to argue that humans could not be born as something other than male or female, and some of them argued that intersex individuals should be surgically “corrected” with operations that would reshape their bodies into what surgeons thought men and women should look like.
 
Second, during this same time period, Christians in parts of Western Europe began to distinguish themselves much more clearly from Jews and Muslims, including through rhetoric designed to disparage non-Christians. During this period, we see a number of Christian images depicting Jews or Muslims as “hermaphrodites” who could allegedly change back and forth between male and female sex. These texts were intended to insult Jews and Muslims and to link their supposed nonbinary sex to foreignness, sexual sin, and proximity to animals. And this wasn’t just a matter of words. These images were related to Crusading propaganda and to polemics encouraging violence against Jews. Of course, Crusaders tried to violently eject Muslims from what they viewed as the Christian holy land, English Christians massacred Jews in English towns, and Jewish communities were ultimately expelled from Christian kingdoms. What we see is a brutal erasure of nonbinary sex (both real and imagined) from individual bodies and the wider community.
 
NOTCHES: You write, in relation to one of your case studies, that ‘we know far more about Berengaria’s anatomy than she ever likely would have wanted, [but] we know nothing of her own perspective.’ What challenges do histories of this kind- incredibly intimate, yet also very sketchily documented- pose to the historian? How do you feel about the ethics of writing such histories?

 
DeVun: The medieval archive, of course (and not uniquely), limits what we can know about marginalized subjects in history, including people with nonbinary bodies or gender practices. Berengaria, a central figure in my book, is never allowed to speak in the archival record. Instead, we read others’ descriptions of Berengaria’s supposed failures as a wife and a mother; we read about Berengaria’s body as it was subjected to an extremely invasive examination to determine whether or not she was “really” female (I use female pronouns in the book because they’re the only ones we have in the record, and I don’t want to impose further categories on Berengaria). Berengaria’s silence in the text is in such poignant contrast to the enormous amount of speech generated by legal, medical, and religious authorities about nonbinary sex during her lifetime, speech that was little concerned with the real lived experiences of people like Berengaria. As far as I can find, no other records about Berengaria exist apart from this very painful, very explicit one, with which I begin my book. It’s a difficult record to read, and I was torn about including the full text in the book because it exposes her body – but it’s the only record like it that we have, and my judgement is that it’s important to engage with such records while acknowledging the ethical problems they create. What happened to Berengaria was likely a terrible experience for her, and I don’t think it’s better to occlude its details. People ask me: what happened to Berengaria? What was the rest of her story? The answer is that we can’t know. We can’t recover what Berengaria thought or wanted for herself. And since I don’t want to presume to speak for her, what I can do is try to address the silence of that record by writing this book – a work that reconstructs the world that she lived in and that imagines what her story might have been.
 
NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sex and gender, and why did you decide to write this book?
 
DeVun: I actually started off as a premed student when I was an undergraduate student – I loved biology and chemistry and I thought I’d be a doctor. But as I moved forward in school, what I found was that I was more interested in the ideas behind medical and scientific developments — the histories and social contexts that surrounded them – than I was in clinical practice. My history and art history classes were my favorite ones, and I started to imagine a career that could combine my interests in science and medicine and history, and one that could also contribute something to the issues of social justice that we were already becoming important to me. At the time, I was doing community outreach for the Northwest AIDS Foundation and for Youthcare, a homeless youth shelter in Seattle, and most of the homeless teens I worked with were queer or trans. I became acutely aware of how the distribution of political and medical power affected the survival of marginalized people, and over time I began to turn my mind toward a deep history of these issues.
 
Beyond all of this, when I started working on this book, my partner, who is transgender, had “top surgery,” and so questions about identity, bodies, and classification — questions that I’ve struggled with myself – rose to the fore of my thinking. I’ve been strongly invested in the movements for racial justice and for queer and trans liberation over many years, and our recent challenges and possibilities have made me think even more urgently about how history can support our efforts in the present.
 
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
 
DeVun: I’d like my book to show students that nonbinary figures weren’t rare in history; they weren’t trivial or marginal; and they shouldn’t be only of interest to trans, intersex, and nonbinary people now. Ideas about nonbinary sex and gender were a part of how premodern people defined themselves as Christian, European, male, female, or human. If we leave these nonbinary ideas and people out of our standard histories, then we can’t see a full picture of how any of these other categories developed either.
 
The primary sources of my final chapter are a good teaching example. These images and texts show Jesus as a physical fusion of male and female qualities. Some of the most striking images appear in late medieval and early Renaissance alchemical manuscripts, but we can find feminized or nonbinary-sexed Jesus imagery in church sculpture and in a range of devotional texts (many available in translation). They show us how nonbinary sex could be a way of thinking about divinity, time, and transformation, as well as gender. The idea that a variety of thinkers imagined Jesus – an inarguably central figure – as something other than simply male is usually a big surprise for students!
 
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today? What relevance does it have to contemporary discussions about nonbinary experiences and identities?
 
DeVun: I think people assume that heated debates about gender nonconformity are relatively new. Part of what I try to do in my book is to show that our current conversations have parallels in the distant past, and that the past can be revealing and important to us in many ways. First, what we might think is obvious about sex or gender today wasn’t necessarily so for our predecessors. We can see that common-sense understandings of sex and gender change over time, and hence our current understandings aren’t fixed, and they’re likely to continue to change (and can be pushed to change). On the flip side, the ways that past societies resemble our own are important too. We can find people who transgressed sex and gender categories even a thousand years ago. They show us that nonbinary bodies and practices have a history. For today’s gender-marginalized communities, this history can offer a meaningful sense of kinship across time. And because history is a legitimating force, it can give us the power to assert that these communities must have place in our future, too.
 
NOTCHES: What are you working on now that this book is published?
 
DeVun: My first book was about prophecy and medicine during the time of the Black Death. Given my experience this year in New York City, one of the areas worst hit by the covid-19 crisis in the U.S., I can’t help but turn my mind to plagues and our social and medical responses to them. I’m not sure where I’ll go with this yet, but I’m eager to get back into the physical archives and to work through new ideas in conversations that happen in person.
 

The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Notches,  April 20, 2021.

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, where she teaches women's and gender history. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2004. Her first book, "Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages," was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. She has also published several essays in journals and edited collections, some of which have been on apocalypticism, the resurrection, alchemy, and hermaphroditism. Her research interests lie in the history of science and the history of gender, sex, and sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe. She also studies the legacy of this history in the modern world. Her current project is "Enter Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Demands of Difference," which examines the history of sex difference by looking at how scientists, lawyers, and religious thinkers, among others, have conceived of sex — particularly through their approaches to people with atypical anatomies — in the past and present.
 
She has won numerous awards and has been awarded several fellowships and research grants, including, most recently, an External Faculty Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Leah DeVun on Hermaphroditism. Interview Robert Harrison.  Entitled Opinions, May 9, 2012

 

Leah DeVun website

Columbia University Press

De Gruyter