This session explores the diverse and often overlooked dimensions of maternal experiences in religious contexts through three case studies spanning Moravian-Indigenous encounters, early Sufi practices, and grief in ancient Greece and Rome. These papers challenge normative constructions of motherhood by examining subversive maternal care, the reimagining of breastfeeding as a site of mystical piety, , and the care and grief surrounding infant death in Greece and Rome through the lens of maternal theory.
Drawing on German- and Indigenous-language sources from eighteenth-century Moravian archives, this paper argues that early Moravian theology made motherhood a central theological and ecclesiological category displaced biological maternity into a diffuse form of spiritual reproduction. Moravians figured the Holy Spirit as Mother and recognized female leaders as spiritual mothers, thereby relocating maternal authority from biological reproduction to communal spiritual care. In mission communities among Lenape and Mohican Christians, these formulations encountered Eastern Algonquian matrilineal kinship systems, generating forms of translation, friction, and appropriation. Indigenous women’s participation in institutions such as the Single Sisters’ Choirs further detached maternity from marriage and biological reproduction. Moravian missions thus emerge as sites where motherhood functioned as a contested technology of governance, intimacy, and communal belonging.
Can breastfeeding a child be seen as mystical practice? Early Sufi hagiographies often present infants as “distractions” from mystical piety. In this framework, Sufi women either avoided having children or “paused” their devotions until their children were self-sufficient. Drawing on feminist methodologies, this presentation argues that viewing breastfeeding as a distraction from God is rooted in a masculine-centered worldview. Because medieval Islamic legal, religious, and medical sources recommended a two-year lactation period free of sexual activity, I suggest this period could be one of intense religious focus for Sufi mothers. Beyond being freed of sexual obligations to their spouse, the belief that a woman’s character influenced the quality of her breastmilk, women might be extra scrupulous in mystical devotion during lactation. Finally, because a nursing baby is utterly dependent upon their mother, I argue that breastfeeding can be seen as a means to meditate upon one’s dependence upon God.
This paper reconsiders premature child death in ancient Greece and Rome by challenging the assumption that high infant mortality prevented deep parental attachment. Following Adrienne Rich, it distinguishes between motherhood as institution and mothering as embodied practice. Building on Sara Ruddick’s concept of “maternal thinking,” it argues that early death marked the collapse of an ongoing project of preservation and growth.
Placing material evidence at the center, the paper examines how vulnerability and loss were negotiated through objects, bodies, and ritual spaces. Funerary terracottas of nurses and pedagogues, burial assemblages, epigraphic monuments, and protective amulets reveal dense networks of caregiving practices. Drawing on Susan Sered’s analysis of women-centered religious domains, it situates childbirth, infant protection, and mourning within gendered spheres of ritual expertise embedded in lived religion.
Material practices of protection and commemoration demonstrate that ancient communities did not normalize infant death but ritually engaged its destabilizing force.