Women and Independent Religious Specialists in Second-Century Rome

Much of the work on women and Gnosticism in the past quarter-century has focused on ethereal or abstract expressions of “the female” or “the feminine” or, finally, “gender” more broadly as a category.¹ These studies have taken up and actively engaged the many fascinating elements of Nag Hammadi writings that bear upon questions of gender, from the startling discourses of the female speaker who identifies as the Thunder in Thunder, Perfect Mind, to the complexly layered portraits of Sophia, or of Eve in Hypostasis of the Archons. These remarkable textual meditations on “the feminine,” broadly construed, have nevertheless been unhelpful