Feminism in Literature | Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages - Jane Mcintosh Snyder (Essay Date 1989)

JANE MCINTOSH SNYDER (ESSAY DATE 1989)

SOURCE: Snyder, Jane McIntosh. "Women Philosophers of the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds." In The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome, pp. 99-121. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

In the following excerpt, Snyder recounts the life of the martyred Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher Hypatia.

Of all the women discussed [here] none—with the possible exception of Sappho—has enjoyed more enduring fame than Hypatia, the philosopher-mathematician who was murdered in Alexandria, Egypt, by a mob of antipagan Christians in 415 A.D. In the nineteenth century the figure of Hypatia was romanticized in Charles Kingsley's lengthy novel, Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face. Kingsley offers what no doubt tells us more about his own peculiar views of a woman scholar than about the real Hypatia. Here is the Kingsley...

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