100 books like In Her Own Words

Hypatia was a pagan philosopher in Alexandria around AD 400.

As Maria Dzielska shows, she occupies a special place in western culture – her life, and more particularly her death in AD 415 at the hands of a Christian mob, became a metaphor for a clash of civilizations. In these terms, it signifies the death of the old Hellenic world of ideas and learning and the rise of a new Christian world based on faith.

Dzielska’s pithy book explores Hypatia the myth, as created in literature such as Charles Kingsley’s 1853 novel Hypatia or the New Foes with an Old Face, and presents and interprets the historical evidence for the real Hypatia. It’s a great read about a fascinating life. (Also watch the excellent 2009 film Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar!)

While researching the fifth century for my first novel, I found a trio of powerful women who became the protagonists in my historical novel series. Roman Princess Galla Placidia was taken hostage by the Goths when they sacked Rome in 410. She returned to court to rule during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire. Empress Placidia held the empire together against rebel generals and ravaging hordes of barbarians.

Her long life was filled with romance, danger, political intrigue, and inevitable loss. Her tale is chronicled in this “biographical essay” which is over 300 pages of readable scholarly work. This book is close to my heart because I had to physically go to the New York Public Library and take notes before I found a used print copy. Thank you NYPL!

Who knew that women were such powerful figures during the transition from the Roman Empire to the Byzantine era? Hollum did. He chronicles the lives and contributions of three generations of Theodosian empresses. This book was the major source of information on the main characters in the second and third books in my Theodosian Women series.

Read about the remarkable Empress Pulcheria. Granddaughter of Theodosian the Great, she outwitted a whole court of experienced men to become Augusta and Regent for her minor brother at the age of fifteen! She ruled by his side for most of his life and laid the foundations for the dawn of the Byzantine Empire. What had you accomplished by age fifteen?

This one is just for fun. I regularly pick up these modern collections of brief biographies of ancient warrior women, doomed queens, she captains, etc. I like to see if “my” characters are included and how they fare with a non-scholarly author. Also, I like to see if any catch my eye for further research and possibly(?) a novel.

Like its sister books, this one is written in a breezy modern style with a certain amount of snark. Leon gives two pages each to about one hundred women who lived from 2500 BC to AD 450 around the Mediterranean and the western Roman provinces. All are real women who made a difference and their names survived, but you’ve probably never heard of most of them. Check it out!

Dr. Watts, a prolific author on Roman history, gives a detailed survey of the lives and careers of some of the last prominent pagan intellectuals who lived from the time of Constantine's conversion to Christianity to Theodosius' outlawing of paganism. He shows the intellectual, social, and religious changes in the fourth century as the Roman world was transformed from a pagan to a Christian society. A fascinating story brilliantly told.

Hollander's wonderful book is a tribute to the power of music, which can transform ideas and myths into rhythms and feelings that immediately touch the heart. 

A fine poet himself, he relishes the quests of poets and musicians to turn mere words and notes into something divine, as if we could hearken to the gods (whether Christian or pagan). The analysis of particular works of art is always scholarly and penetrating; but more than that, it conveys a poet's love of what great artists have done.

This is a novel about Saint Patrick and the end of an age of magic in Great Britain. What made St. Patrick so effective, spreading his faith where others failed? Might it be that he was first tutored by the mysterious “people of the hollow hills,” north of Hadrian’s Wall? When Patrick went to Ireland, was his brand of Christianity infused with a pagan spirituality based on the wisdom gleaned from Mother Earth herself? Did he combine two systems of religion into a faith that was universal in scope and effectiveness? Did that spirituality manage to make its way to America, long before the voyages of Columbus? And is that the Christianity we so need to recapture today?   

This book was a revelation to me in first studying Dante. Here was an author taking Dante’s questions, and his answers to those questions, seriously. A brilliant Cambridge Italianist and a Dominican priest, Kenelm Foster is passionately engaged with the theology of Dante.

In this book, he provides his celebrated account of the ‘Two Dantes,’ one overly committed to paganism, the other devoted to Christianity. He also develops his comparison between Aquinas’s theory of implicit faith (according to which pagans may be saved) and Dante’s strange invention of a section of limbo in which virtuous pagans are, it seems, eternally damned. Although I do not hold now to all of Foster’s provocative assumptions or conclusions, I still find his mode of questioning Dante, and reading Dante historically and theologically, inspirational and exhilarating.  

Sensitively written with a solid basis in history, we meet – and in some cases come to love – Queen Bertha, Pope Gregory, Archbishop Augustine, and other key players. The hopes and fears that drive Augustine on his challenging mission to convert England and to bring the old-school Christian Britons in Wales back into the fold of the Roman Church, are vividly portrayed. We also encounter the harsh reality of life in the primitive, war-torn, pagan Land of Angels.

This book taught me a lot about a significant period in the history of Britain and inspired me to reflect on the prevailing incompatible Christian perspectives.

We live in a society that allows for only two possibilities: that there exists either one God or no God at all. What C.S. Lewis did for Christianity, this book does for modern Polytheism. It’s an intelligent and thoughtful read that opens up the mind and heart to new spiritual possibilities.