Writing Mothers

In April of this year, I wrote about Nadya Williams’s Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World, published near the end of 2023. As I mentioned then, Williams decided not long ago to give up her job as a college professor to devote herself to writing and homeschooling. (Her husband, the excellent historian Daniel K. Williams, was assuming a new academic position around that time.) If you follow the online site Current, you will already be familiar with her work.

Williams’s new book, just published by IVP Academic, is Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. Her experience as a historian of the classical world gives her a distinctive perspective on the much-debated subjects outlined in her title, as does her choice to become a “stay-at-home mom” (and a homeschooler to boot: the horror!). She moves without strain from the plight of widows in fourth-century B.C. Athens (she focuses on one in particular, a foreigner, lacking protectors) to our own time: “Modern America,” she observes, “has become a land of uprooted people.”

When Williams writes about “uprooted people,” she knows firsthand what she is talking about; she was still a girl when her family left Russia, settling in the U.S. only years later, after living in Israel for some time. I find her range, her balance, immensely cheering at a moment when there is so much huffing and puffing.

I do squirm a bit at occasional bromides and predictable prejudices (or so they seem to me). Chapter 9, for example, “Seeking the City of God,” includes a section headed “Writing Military History as an Act of Compassion.” Here, having noted that this subject commands a large audience, she asserts that “the kind of reading and writing that most armchair military historians want to do glorifies war,” continuing this theme with similarly sweeping assertions.

I must register dissent. Certainly I recognize the tendency that Williams is condemning! But as someone who has read a fair amount of military history over the years (I am far from being an expert) and who knows people who have read a good deal more, I just don’t think it is true that “armchair military historians” across the board are deeply invested in “glorifying” war. I agree entirely that “a denial of the reality of human suffering of both civilians and combatants is intellectually and spiritually dishonest.” But it is grotesque (to me) to apply such an indictment to writers and readers of military history in general.

Even so, the ground note of Williams’s book—“In Christ, every human life is precious, not because of anything a person might do or because of a person’s sociopolitical status or any other factor, but simply because a person exists”—is a challenge to us all. And the stories Williams tells to flesh out this truth and its burden for us—of Perpetua, for instance, martyred in A.D. 203—are as relevant today as they have ever been. We know Perpetua’s story from a journal she kept (very unusual for her time and place), and from there Williams jumps to the journal kept by a New England midwife, Martha Ballard, between 1775 and her death in 1812. (You may have heard of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s fascinating book A Midwife’s Tale.) Williams’s account of Perpetua and Ballard as “writing mothers who most likely never thought of themselves as writers first” exemplifies the distinctive appeal of her book:

If asked about their identity or primary occupation, their writing would never have come up in response. But write they did, led instinctively to tell a powerful story of which they were an anchoring part, even as they had no idea who—if anyone—would ever read their journals. It is through their writing alone that we know of them and their stories.

I finished this book, as I did Cultural Christians in the Early Church, thinking, “I hope Nadya Williams is already working on her next project!” I’ll bet she is—and I can’t wait to read it.

John Wilson is a contributing editor for the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at the Marginalia Review of Books.

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Image  from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.