In this volume, Elif Hilal Karaman examines the lives of Ephesian women in their historical and social contexts, considering in particular their roles as mothers, wives, teachers, and individuals in the private and public spheres. She presents Greco-Roman and early Christian sources relevant to Ephesus and relating to women, including more than 300 Ephesian inscriptions, and analyses them comparatively. By doing this she illuminates the impact of early Christianity upon the roles of women. The evidence presented demonstrates the extent to which early Christian authors utilized Greco-Roman cultural elements to construct a social background for the nascent Christian communities for whom they wrote. Elif Hilal Karaman's work thus advocates for the interpretation of early Christian texts in conversation with local archaeological and literary evidence in order to develop more nuanced understandings of the social and historical contexts of these important works.

Born 1985; 2007 BA from Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey; 2009 MA and 2015 PhD from the University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; since 2016 Research Associate in the Department of History of Religions at the Faculty of Divinity, Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey.