OK, I used a multi-disciplinary approach for history, and my total bibliography is more than 50 pages long (not sure off the top of my head), and most are historians / philologists / classicists. I used a lot more than one, but for New Testament I leaned toward the Yale school (social study of the NT) and I did notice that many historians came out of Chicago and Berlin.
For women I studied just about everything - ancient medicine, poetry, art, and classics. This body of evidence I used to interpret the traditions that are the history of women in philosophy - mostly accounts from ancient men but also some fragments from women themselves.
I created my own historical tools to reconstruct two models (I called them Sophia and Fortuna) who read sections of 1 Corinthians (basically the first four chapters and then when women are mentioned in the rest of the letter. I had to situate my reading within past and current scholarship on 1 Corinthians.
One of the last papers I wrote as an undergrad involved advocating for particular historiographical methods and a particular philosophy of history and historiography. I used the problem of Caesar's descriptions of the druids as an example of the merits to "my" approach (an approach I mainly stole from philsophers of history and historiography like Aviezer Tucker and Peter Kosso with a few additions). One novel part of my approach was an attempt to use neural networks, but after months of programming I realized I had almost no time to write the paper, let alone get into the bayesian analysis I wanted to use in any depth. At any rate, one of the only redeeming features of the final paper was a rather lengthy discussion of the philosophy of historiography from Herodotus to Ranke to Foucault and finally the new breed of "realistic realists" (historians who reject the notion that all historical writings are more or less constructions but also reject the positivism of the 19th century historians).
Also interesting to me is the notion of using communication theory (not just written an oral genres but registers) when analyzing epigraphical evidence, letters, and various types of literature.
I'm sure most of what you used for primary and secondary scholarship I know nothing about, but I hope you'll post an thread when your dissertation is published. I'd be particularly interested in what you were able to learn from archeology, as I'm almost completely unacquainted with archaeological studies/findings from that era and place. The literature and the studies on it I know a bit more about (I've read Diogenes Laertius, a fair amount of Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca).
Did you use Robin Lane Fox's
Pagans & Christians? Apart from the standard works on women in the classical world (including the book
Women in the Classical) by the big names (Foley, Fanthem, Lefkowitz), that's the only book I know which has a lot to say about your topic. If you happen to have on hand your reference list (or maybe just some secondary literature you found particularly useful) I'd be grateful if you would share.
