How do we understand the lives of women who lived in ancient times? Where do historians and scholars

go for evidence when there's relatively little available in written records? In this episode of the

Maxwell Institute podcast, we'll speak with Dr. Catherine Jines Taylor, a niblie postdoctoral fellow at the

Maxwell Institute, and Dr. Mark Ellison, an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young

University, to learn more about the lives of Christian women in antiquity, how to uncover or

unearth the religious lives of women, and discuss how the material record or historical stuff

reveals religious meaning and practice. The best way to support the Maxwell Institute podcast

is to rate, review, and subscribe to the show wherever you download your podcasts. We would also love for you to sign up for

our newsletter at my.b yu.edu slash monthly MI News. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more about

Dr. Taylor's research, you should listen to episode 101 of the Maxwell Institute podcast, where she

discusses Mary,

the mother of Jesus.

Catherine, Mark, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Now, this wonderful new volume that you two co-edited with Carolyn Ossick began as a symposium

sponsored by the Neill A Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU and included other

conversation partners. Originally, it was entitled Material Culture and Women's Religious

Experiencing in Antiquity and is soon to be published by Lexington Books, which is an academic

press. And the first question that came to mind for me was, what is material culture?

Material culture has a number of different definitions.

So we can look to physical artifacts, some from archaeological records, some from the art

historical record.

And these things can be defined as visual images, symbols, realia that we find in everyday

...