The impetus for this book was the startling realization that within early Christianity, which is characterized by healing, no women are explicitly commissioned to heal. The work begins with a search for the women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period, finding them honoured in inscriptions, named by medical writers, and stereotyped by playwrights and other literateurs. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era, is a world in which women functioned as healers as well as healed and that healing was a site of contestation in relation to |