Recent attention to women's roles in the Civil War has uncovered several stories of women who dressed as men in order to fight in battle, such as Sarah Wakefield on the Union side. The Confederacy had female warriors as well. One Union soldier remembered how “Another She-Devil shot her way to our breastworks with two large revolvers dealing death to all in her path. She was shot several times with no apparent effect. When she ran out of ammunition, she pulled out the largest pig-sticker I ever seen . . . she stabbed three boys and was about to decapitate a fourth when the Lieutenant killed her.” The terrifying specter of such heroism may have affected the difficulty warrior women who survived faced in receiving antebellum pensions. However many cases may eventually be documented, the murderous intentions behind such a rampage were hardly confined to participation in battle. The northerner Gail Hamilton's “A Call to My Country-Women,” for example, complains that “stitching does not . . . hew traitors in pieces before the Lord” (Atlantic Monthly, March 1863, p. 346). And in a response to Hamilton's piece, an anonymous writer for the Loyal Publication Society declared that “many a Southern woman, during this war, has written to husband, brother or lover, to bring home with him 'a dead Yankee, pickled,' or 'a hand, or an ear, or a thumb, at least'” (New York: May 1863). While such extreme manifestations serve as commentary, they also situate the unease of fictional examples. Marion Harland's Sunnybank (1867) has southern women writing to their soldier boyfriends to ask for “rings, and charms, and watch-chains made of the bones of Federal soldiers slain in battle” which might then be “displayed exultingly by Southern ladies as trophies of their lovers' valor” (165).

When Margaret Bayard Smith wrote the words “let this book speak for me,” she offered a potent proposition (October 1, 1804, diary). With this declaration, she claimed meaning for her writing and significance for herself. Implicitly, she was asking, not asserting, and she was proposing that “this book” was to say what she felt she could not speak. The proposition was fraught with the complications of the post-Revolutionary era in which she lived and of her ambitions, which the age inspired. She employed different writing formats, diaries, letters, publications, to voice her intellect and feelings, as she sought to authenticate her experience to herself, to her children, and to others. Her claim was ultimately historical, for she meant, like others of her generation, to convey her life and her vision of American society to posterity. At her most ambitious, the “me” spoke for the nation (Baym, American Women Writers, 1-9, 11-45, 92-103, 214-39; Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, 28-9, 144-5; Gould, Covenant and Republic, 14-16, 61- 132). She offered in her writings an expansive definition of what it was to be an American. And in her silences can be found the silences in America's history.

Margaret Bayard Smith’s life spanned the transformative period of the new nation. Born during the Revolution (1778) outside of Philadelphia, she died in Washington, DC, in 1844. Her father was Colonel Jonathan Bayard, a prominent merchant, Patriot, legislator, and jurist in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; she grew up in the midst of a well-connected network of mercantile and landed elite families of the mid-Atlantic region.

Introduction: separate spheres

The notion of “the separate spheres” has been used for over a century to endow emerging cultural hierarchies with the obviousness of gender (male/ female) opposition: elite literature v. popular literature; high culture v. mass culture; professional and market culture v. domestic culture; business-place competition v. sentimental equality; public sphere rationality v. domestic feeling. These multiple, seemingly rigid definitions for various complementary and/or oppositional practices have long informed our study of nineteenthcentury women's literature and the historical contexts that shaped its concerns in the United States.

The logic of difference and even opposition supplied by the notion of “separate spheres” has funded a feminist focus on women’s lives, women’s politics and women’s literature since the 1960s. Reacting to historical and literary models that overwhelmingly deemed women’s lives irrelevant to larger historical matters, this newer generation of women academics historicized and theorized a “world of women” that allowed us to appreciate nineteenth-century women’s world, their domestic perspectives, their values, and their social and political subversiveness and opposition. Feminist historians returned to one of the most powerful early descriptions of United States democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and in particular, his celebration of “The Young [American] Woman as Wife” (1835, 1840).

The study of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry is undergoing a renaissance. Aside from Emily Dickinson, nineteenth-century female poets were largely forgotten until the archival investigations of the 1970s, when they were rediscovered and examined by several critics. Despite the already extensive effort to reprint women’s poems, write their critical biographies, pioneer new and more useful anthologies, and compile lengthy and inclusive encyclopedias, scholars have only begun to examine critical approaches to women’s poems and the assumptions they bring to bear on reading and teaching women’s writing. What do these anthologies tell us about nineteenthcentury American women’s writing? How should we judge their poetry?

In “Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets Revisited”(1998),Cheryl Walker contends that women’s writing contains more stylistic variety and vocal complexity than previously ascribed. In The Nightingale’s Burden (1982), she identifies several persistent types of poems: the “sanctuary” poem, in which the protagonist finds freedom in a shelter; the power fantasy; the “free bird” poem, in which the speaker identifies with a bird in flight and symbolically imagines freeing herself; and the marriage poem. Although her essay still identifies generic features in women’s poems, Walker advocates dividing women’s poetry into four temporal and stylistic categories: early national, romantic, realist, and modern. Early national poets, like Lydia Sigourney, appeal to piety and reason, praise decorum, and base their belief in human dignity on democracy.

When Rose Terry Cooke ended her 1884 biographical sketch of Harriet Beecher Stowe calling her “America's greatest woman,” many readers might still have agreed with her. Memories of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as the nearly forty other books and hundreds of articles Stowe produced during her long career, had not gone, though Stowe had largely stopped publishing after her last novel, Poganuc People (1878). Nor did those memories ever entirely die. Dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared continuously on the American stage until at least the 1930s, and the 1920s saw critics Constance Rourke and Vernon Parrington noting her importance in American literary history. From then on, Stowe has been gradually taking her place among the nineteenth-century authors who seem most worthy of study.

Particularly as the New Criticism gave way to reader-response criticism, feminist literary criticism, Marxist criticism, and cultural studies, Stowe became a natural choice for critics seeking interesting paradigms to study. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), probably the best-selling book of the century and certainly internationally famous, is a historical phenomenon impossible to ignore; its interpretation has ranged from protests against its racial stereotyping to admiration for its millennial evangelical feminism and its Balzacian scope.

RESURRECTION AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS

The preceding chapters of this volume have concentrated on Jesus of Nazareth as a first-century Jew - his background and beliefs, his words and works, his disputes and violent demise. Most contemporary Jesus books end here. And yet the striking fact is that without an event that occurred after his death, we would almost certainly have no information of any kind about Jesus of Nazareth. As a leading sceptic recently put it, ‘The story of Jesus after his death is also part of his life, since it is only because of this history that we still know anything about him’ (Lüdemann 2000:692).

Ironically, in the canonical sources the resurrection itself is nowhere described, never clearly defined, and quite diversely interpreted. Nevertheless, the New Testament writings unanimously agree on one thing: in some sense that was both inexplicable and yet unmistakable, Jesus was seen alive in personal encounters with his disciples soon after his death.

Our earliest written sources are Paul’s letters to Thessalonica and Galatia. They date from around ad 50, but evidently appeal to a conviction that is already common ground (1 Thess 1.10; 4.14; Gal 1.1). Writing to Corinth five years later, Paul quotes verbatim from a fuller creedal tradition that may well date from the first decade after the crucifixion: having been dead and buried, Jesus ‘was raised on the third day’ and then ‘appeared’ in succession to Cephas (i.e. Peter), the Twelve, an unspecified group of 500, then to Jesus’ brother James, and then to all the apostles together (1 Cor 15.3–7).

One of the most striking features of the history of the early church is the decision to include four gospels in the canon of Christian Scripture. The aim of this chapter is to explore the significance of the fourfold gospel for our knowledge of Jesus. The main argument will be that the four gospel texts bear witness in distinctive ways to the one gospel message at the heart of which is the one person, Jesus of Nazareth. That there are four gospels standing side by side in the canon, none of which has been subordinated to another, is an invitation to recognise that the truth about Jesus to which the gospels bear witness is irreducibly plural without being either incoherent or completely elastic. The fourfold gospel points to the profundity of Jesus' impact on his followers, the inexhaustibility of the truth about him, and the way in which knowledge of Jesus is necessarily self-involving.

Although Jesus of Nazareth is arguably the world’s most influential historical figure, there is no agreed understanding of his aims, message and legacy. If we paint with rather broad strokes, we may divide interpretations of him into two camps. On the one hand, while traditional Christianity has described Jesus with a variety of images, it has regularly and persistently confessed him in terms of his divine identity as Lord, Saviour of the World, Son of God and, in the words of the Nicene Creed, ‘very God of very God’. On the other hand, Jesus has also been characterised not so much as one to be revered and worshipped, but rather as one who taught a way of worshipping and following God. Under this rubric he has been thought of as mystic, moral teacher, religious visionary, political and social reformer, cultural critic and renewal movement leader.

Are these portrayals of Jesus mutually exclusive? If, for example, one understands Jesus primarily as a religious figure to whom worship and faith are directed, then is it also possible to speak of him as a prophet and teacher of a way of worship and faith? For some scholars who pursue historical reconstructions of Jesus, the goal of this quest is to strip away the creedal accretions and affirmations of faith that have shaped the gospels and subsequent Christian belief in order to discover the ‘genuine’ historical figure of Jesus beneath the layers of confession. Finding this Jesus at odds with the Christ of the church’s faith, they prefer him as an example of faith to be imitated or a teacher of truth and of a way of life to be admired. So, for example, Adolf von Harnack, a German scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asserted that ‘The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son’ (Harnack 1957:144).

From the very beginning, the Jesus Christ of Christian faith has been also the Jesus Christ of Christian hope: not only the one who preached and practised the kingdom of God, not only the one who was crucified, not only the one who was raised from death and exalted to participation in God’s sovereignty over all creation, but also the Christ who is to come. One of the earliest Christian prayers that have survived and certainly the earliest Christian prayer to Jesus Christ that has survived is the Aramaic prayer Maranatha, meaning ‘Our Lord, come’. It was so significant that it was evidently still used in its original Aramaic form in Paul’s Greek-speaking churches. Paul, writing in Greek, quotes it in Aramaic (1 Cor 16.22), and it survives, also in its Aramaic form in an otherwise Greek prayer, in the earliest eucharistic liturgy that has come down to us (Didache 10.6). Translated into Greek, it forms almost the last words in the Bible: ‘Amen, come, Lord Jesus!’, where it is a response to Jesus’ own promise, ‘Surely, I am coming soon’ (Rev 22.20). Even in the Gospel of John, despite its reputation for emphasising ‘realised’ at the expense of future eschatology (where ‘eschatology’, in the language of biblical scholars and modern theologians, refers to God’s final completion of his purpose in history), Jesus’ last words are: ‘until I come’ (John 21.23).

There are a number of reasons for giving an account of the history of the study of the historical Jesus. One is straightforwardly practical. By examining the history of the study of any subject, it is possible that desiderata in research will emerge more clearly. This is the aim of all those histories of research through which one customarily enters the body of a standard monograph. A related purpose emerges from the belief that by exposing the major faultlines in such study, one will be better able to grasp the nature and character of the problem under discussion. A third reason arises out of a desire to emphasise the historicity of the study of the subject itself. Motives for such a desire vary. Some have their roots in a certain 'pietas' towards the work of predecessors in the field. Scholarship is a collective enterprise, and academic predecessors are part of the collective.

Other motives are less obviously positive. An appreciation of the historicity of the study of a subject can be used to question the assumption that matters have somehow progressed. Such an approach takes one of two forms. One form involves the narrator of the history demonstrating the tendency for the same problems and, broadly speaking, the same solutions to recur. The implication here is polemical, encapsulating the appropriately biblical sentiment that ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, with perhaps an accompanying call for a new approach that will apparently lead the scholarly world out of the perceived impasse. The other form is found in histories of research in a postmodern or (perhaps more accurately) relativistic mode.

Why did Jesus have to die? This question is capable of multiple answers. For example, a Latin historian writing at the end of the reign of Tiberius likely would never have heard of Jesus or his execution; or if he had, he would probably have had no reason to mention it. Had he woven this crucifixion into his narrative, the most credible impetus would have been to illustrate the religio-political agitation that marked Roman-Jewish relations during this period, perhaps as an anecdote displaying how Rome dealt with those who threatened the pax romana. If reports of this incident were written up differently in the second century, or if already within the first century those who penned documents that would become our New Testament had relocated it from a footnote in the annals of history to its status as an epochmaking event, this is because Jesus' death had been set within different interpretative horizons.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the nature of the evidence available for discovering information about the 'historical Jesus' and how we might use that evidence. The phrase 'historical Jesus' is one that is potentially fraught with methodological problems (Meier 1991-94:1. 21-40). I am taking it here to mean (very crudely) Jesus during his earthly life in Palestine, without seeking to prejudge anything about the periods before or after that time. Any information we have about the historical Jesus will of course be limited by the nature of our sources. These give us Jesus as mediated through the eyes of others. Inevitably then one gets verbal portraits influenced by those who are relating them. To produce a 'real Jesus', untainted by the views of others and independent of the later pictures of him, is probably an impossible task. The 'historical Jesus' will in one sense only be 'the Jesus whom our sources enable us to reconstruct'. But that is one of the limitations within which all historical study must work.

The belief that Jesus is the Christ has been fundamental to Christian faith down the ages. So basic a belief is it that it has become incorporated into essential Christian vocabulary. Already within the New Testament what is initially a Jewish title and role, 'the Christ/Messiah', as commonly in the gospels, becomes a proper name, Jesus Christ, as commonly in the letters of Paul and in Christian usage subsequently; and the followers of Jesus have been known as 'Christians' since earliest times (Acts 11.26).

It is a belief that can also be seen to encapsulate what came to be the Christian conviction that the Bible should be composed of two testaments, the scriptures of Israel in conjunction with the apostolic writings of the early church. For Christians the Bible contains both an Old Testament, where the Jewish category of ‘Christ/Messiah’ is formulated and becomes an important category for expressing hope in God’s action especially through the house of David, and a New Testament where Jesus fulfils and transforms Israel’s existing categories. Thus, major issues of biblical interpretation as a whole centre on the affirmation that Jesus is the Christ.

In AD 325 the Council of Nicaea affirmed the divinity of Jesus in the creed of Nicaea. This led to the emergence, over fifty years later, of the Nicene Creed, which defines the faith of the Christian church world-wide. At the heart of both stands the affirmation that Jesus Christ is 'God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being [homoousios] with the Father, through whom all things were made . . .' The intention of both is clear. They wish to affirm with unambiguous clarity that Jesus is to be identified as God incarnate - God has not merely come in a human being but as human. What is less obvious is that the issue at stake here concerns the very possibility of Christian God-talk. Without this decisive affirmation, it is questionable not only whether the Christian church would have continued to exist, but whether its existence would have been warranted. The whole raison d'être of the church is the recognition that Jesus is not simply a good person, or an inspired prophet, or a person with spiritual insight but, rather, the very presence of God identifying with humanity and revealing himself to humanity in a reconciling act of pure and unanticipatable grace.

There are many 'images' of Jesus, whether verbal or visual. Each canonical gospel presents one such image, but the process of image-making does not stop there. There are non-canonical, 'apocryphal' images, and there are images of Jesus in theology and literature, high art and popular religious culture. These images derive from many times and places, and will always reflect something of their own time and place, within which they will meet a perceived need. Does this constant manufacture of images testify to Jesus' extraordinary impact on western and global cultures? Or is Jesus little more than a blank screen onto which individuals and cultures may project their own aspirations and fantasies? Is Jesus (like Mary, perhaps) the origin and pretext for an entire myth-making industry? And if so, is the 'real' Jesus of any significance? There was, no doubt, a first-century Jew of that name who came from Nazareth and was crucified in Jerusalem, but the 'reality' of Jesus' impact on history is simply the reality of the images: or so it might be argued. Perhaps even the two centuries of scholarly endeavour to get behind the images to the 'real', historical Jesus have merely produced a further profusion of images, similar in kind to the ones they sought to displace?