The lives of early Christian women are cleverly pieced together in this engaging history
According to Kate Cooper, "early Christianity was a movement built on stories". In Band of Angels she explores what these stories tell us about the women of the ancient world.
Drawing on the earliest Christian texts, Cooper examines what it would have been to live as a woman between the first and fifth centuries. Her book is as much an exercise in historical detective work as anything else, an act of reading between and behind the lines, rescuing these lost women from ancient sources, assessing their influence, and placing their lives in a broader social and historical context.
She explores in particular detail the exaltation of virginity and the role of the domestic space in the growth and spread of the church. Early Christians usually gathered in private homes, with families and communities praying together, and women were a vital part of this process.
While the story of Mary is given due weight, she also focuses on Thecla, a disciple of Paul, the martyred Perpetua of Carthage, and the empress Pulcheria. Cooper writes accessibly and engagingly, all the time making the reader acutely aware of the role that storytelling played in the early church, looking both at the people telling the stories and those to whom they were telling them, exploring the intentions behind the stories and the lessons they were meant to teach. The centrality of love to the early Christians is also brought to the fore; in a time when the old gods could be vengeful and life hard and short, to live in Christ was to live in love.
