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Kraemer is a distinguished scholar who has produced a large body of work on ancient religion and gender. This study builds on previous books to explore women's religious practice in the Graeco-Roman and Jewish traditions. She argues that, gender-specific or not, religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. Women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged as long as it conformed to pervasive constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled and subordinated to masculinity.