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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
An overarching history of women in the Christian Church from antiquity to the Reformation, perfect for advanced undergraduates and seminary students alike
A History of Women in Christianity to 1600 presents a continuous narrative account of women’s engagement with the Christian tradition from its origins to the seventeenth century, synthesizing a diverse range of scholarship into a single, easily accessible volume. Locating significant individuals and events within their historical context, this well-balanced textbook offers an assessment of women’s contributions to the development of Christian doctrine while providing insights into how structural and environmental factors have shaped women’s experience of Christianity.
Written by a prominent scholar in the field, the book addresses complex discourses concerning women and gender in the Church, including topics often ignored in broad narratives of Christian history. Students will explore the ways women served in liturgical roles within the church, the experience of martyrdom for early Christian women, how the social and political roles of women changed after the fall of Rome, the importance of women in the re-evangelization of Western Europe, and more. Through twelve chapters, organized chronologically, this comprehensive text:
- Examines conceptions of sex and gender tracing back their roots to the Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman culture
- Provides a unique view of key women in the Church in the Middle Ages, including the rise of women’s monasticism and the impact of the Inquisition
- Compares and contrasts each of the major confessions of the Church during the Reformation
- Explores lesser-known figures from beyond the Western European tradition
A History of Women in Christianity to 1600 is an essential textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in Christian traditions, historical theology, religious studies, medieval history, Reformation history, and gender history, as well as an invaluable resource for seminary students and scholars in the field.
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Seitenzahl: 716
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
1 A History of Women in Christianity
References
2 Filling the Hungry with Good Things
Named Women in the Letters of Paul
Jews and God‐Fearing Women in Hellenistic Society
Women in the
Pax Romana
Pauline Paradoxes: Defining the Body of the Christian Community
The Pastoral Epistles
Thecla, an Early Christian Superhero
Prophecy and Secret Knowledge: Women in Gnosticism and Montanism
References
3 From Agnes to Sant'Agnese
The Third‐Century Crisis and the Transformation of the Empire
Martyrdom, Memory, and Place
Christiana sum
: Women, Martyrdom, and Christian Identity
Martyrdom as Christian Genre Literature
Deaconesses, Missionaries, and Martyrs in the Provinces
Saints and Legends
Maria orans
: Proclamation and Liturgy
The New Holy Places
Asceticism and the New Martyrs
Macrina and the Household Community
References
4 Romancing Stones
Wars and Rumors of Wars
A Woman Alone
Women in Community
The Virgin and the Widow
The Ascetic Patroness
Everyday Saints
A Family of Helenas: Theodosian Women
References
5 Bridgeheads in the Early Medieval Kingdoms
Rome Reunited? Theodora and Justinian
Presbyterae
and Deaconesses in the Early Medieval West
Women in the Early Medieval Archipelago
A Golden Age for Women?
Women and Early Medieval Monasticism
Women and Insular Christianity
Gregory the Great's Correspondents
Queens of the Franks
The Abbesses of
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
References
6 Charlemagne's Daughters
The Rise of the Carolingians
Charlemagne and the World of the Carolingian Court
King Solomon's Wives
Women and the Benedictine Reform in England
The Triumph of Orthodoxy: Women Saints in Byzantium
Ottonian Queens
Women and the Gregorian Reform
References
7 New Learning, Old Problems
Women and the Crusades
Clerical Identity and Lay Enthusiasm
The Empress and the Anglo‐Normans
Sunday Daughters
Nuns and Priests: Men and Women Together
The World of the Cloister: Herrad and Hildegard
Héloïse and Abelard
References
8 Clare and Company
The Boom‐Time and the Poor
The Perfect and the Inquisition
Embracing Poverty
The Confessor and the Religious Woman
Women and the Cistercians
Beguines and Penitents
References
9 The Political Visionary, 1300–1500
The Late Middle Ages: Crisis and Transformation
A Climate of Suspicion
Devotion in the Vernacular
The Angelic Speech of Bridget of Sweden
The Political Visionary: From Catherine of Siena to Joan of Arc
From Weeping to Preaching: Magdalene Spirituality
Sisters in a Common Life
References
10 Witness in Translation
Women and the Reformation
Women and the Town Councils
Reformation Magdalenes
Cuius regio: Royal Women and the Reformation
Italian
Spirituali
The King's Great Matter and the Queen's Religion
References
11 Women in the Catholic Reformation, 1500–1600
The Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation
The Virgin and the Magdalene
In the Shadow of Isabella: From the
Beatas
to Teresa of Avila
“People are people”: Caritas Pirckheimer
English Women and the Old Religion
Queen Mary
Recusant Women and the Jesuits
Mary and Martha: The New Catholic Orders
References
12 Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 The courtyard of the synagogue of Sardis.
Figure 2.2 The Babatha scroll, found in the Cave of Letters, Israel.
Figure 2.3 Agrippina the Younger and her son, the emperor Nero.
Figure 2.4 Fresco detail from the catacomb of SS. Marcellino e Pietro, Rome....
Figure 2.5 The Lady of Ephesus, Ephesus Archaeological Museum.
Figure 2.6 Thecla with wild beasts and angels, Nelson‐Atkins Museum of Art, ...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The skull of Agnes, Sant’Agnese in Agone, Rome.
Figure 3.2 The mausoleum of S. Costanza, Rome.
Figure 3.3 Mosaic, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.
Figure 3.4 Cathedral of St. Hripsime, Etchmiadzin.
Figure 3.5 The Orans of Kyiv, Saint Sophia Cathedral, Ukraine.
Figure 3.6 The church of the Kathisma.
Figure 3.7 Apse mosaic, S. Pudenziana, Rome.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Syncletica of Alexandria.
Figure 4.2 Mary of Egypt.
Figure 4.3 Shenoute of Sohag.
Figure 4.4 Melania the Elder.
Figure 4.5 The tomb of Monica, Sant’Agostino, Rome.
Figure 4.6 The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna.
Figure 4.7 The Trier Adventus Ivory, Trier Cathedral Treasury.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Theodora and her entourage, the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna....
Figure 5.2 Fresco of Cerula, catacombs of San Gennaro, Naples.
Figure 5.3 Tomb of Genovefa, Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris.
Figure 5.4 Madonna and Child, the Book of Kells, TCD MS 58, Dublin.
Figure 5.5
The Life of St. Radegund
, Bibliothèque municipale de Poitiers, MS...
Figure 5.6 The chemise of Balthild, Musée Alfred Bonno, Chelles.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 The Ragyndrudis Codex (
Codex Bonifatius II
), Fulda.
Figure 6.2 Mosaic from the chapel of San Zeno, S. Prassede, Rome.
Figure 6.3 Dhuoda,
Liber manualis
, Paris, BnF, ms. 12293.
Figure 6.4 The Lothair Crystal, the British Museum.
Figure 6.5 The Book of Nunnaminster, London, Harley MS 2965.
Figure 6.6 Icon of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, the British Museum.
Figure 6.7 The Golden Madonna of Essen, Essen Cathedral Treasury.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 The Melisende Psalter, British Library, Egerton MS 1139.
Figure 7.2 St. Winefride’s Well, Holywell.
Figure 7.3 Godstow Abbey, Oxford.
Figure 7.4 The St. Albans Psalter, Dombibliothek, Hildesheim Cathedral.
Figure 7.5 Herrad of Hohenburg,
Hortus deliciarum
, Engelhardt reconstruction...
Figure 7.6 Hildegard of Bingen, Rupertsberg Codex of the
Liber Scivias
.
Figure 7.7 The grave of Abelard and Héloïse, Père‐Lachaise, Paris.
Source:
P...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Tunic attributed to Francis of Assisi, Assisi.
Figure 8.2 Fresco of Clare and her companions, church of San Damiano, Assisi...
Figure 8.3 Elisabeth of Hungary, altarpiece by Pietro Nelli, Bonnefantenmuse...
Figure 8.4 The north rose window of Chartres Cathedral.
Figure 8.5 The Virgin and Christ with St. Anne, Archbishopric Museum, Olomou...
Figure 8.6 The beguinage at Bruges.
Figure 8.7 Gertrude the Great, nineteenth‐century Mexican retablo, El Paso M...
Figure 8.8 Angela of Foligno.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Danse Macabre, Holy Trinity Church, Hrastovlje.
Figure 9.2 Book of Hours of Simon de Varie, Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Figure 9.3 Prayer nut, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Figure 9.4 Catherine of Siena’s Orchard of Syon, published by Wynken de Word...
Figure 9.5 The grave of Catherine of Siena, S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome....
Figure 9.6 On‐site recreation of the anchorite’s cell, St. Julian’s Church, ...
Figure 9.7 Jean Fouquet, Melun Diptych, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp....
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Elizabeth I,
The Glass of a Sinful Soul
(1544), Bodleian Librari...
Figure 10.2 Katharina von Bora, portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Wartbur...
Figure 10.3 Argula von Grumbach, frontispiece of
Wie ain Christliche Frau de
...
Figure 10.4 The Reformation Wall, Geneva.
Figure 10.5 Renée de France, portrait by François Clouet, destroyed in World...
Figure 10.6 Vittoria Colonna, portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo, Museu Nacio...
Figure 10.7 The burning of Anne Askew at Smithfield.
Figure 10.8 Princess Elizabeth Tudor, portrait attributed to William Scrots,...
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Guido Reni, Chapel of the Annunciation, Rome.
Figure 11.2 Autograph letter of Teresa of Avila.
Figure 11.3 Caritas Pirckheimer and her chronicle of Nuremberg.
Figure 11.4 Mary Tudor, portrait by Antonis Mor, Museo del Prado.
Figure 11.5 Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, portrait.
Figure 11.6
Sant’Angela Merici pellegrina
by Giuseppe Fali.
Figure 11.7 Barbe Acarie.
Figure 11.8 The Christian martyrs of Nagasaki.
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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A History of Women in Christianity to 1600
Hannah Matis
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Matis, Hannah W., author. | Wiley-Blackwell (Firm), publisher.Title: A history of women in Christianity to 1600 / Hannah Matis.Description: Hoboken : Wiley-Blackwell, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2022031402 (print) | LCCN 2022031403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119756613 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119756620 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119756637 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Women in Christianity–History–Early church, ca. 30–600 | Women in Christianity–History–Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Women in Christianity–History–16th century.Classification: LCC BV639.W7 M335 2023 (print) | LCC BV639.W7 (ebook) | DDC 270.082–dc23/eng/20221110LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031402LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031403
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Michael Cook, An Idle Tale (2013), private collection
1A History of Women in Christianity: An Introduction
I argue below that the writing of history must come to terms gracefully with the incomplete, that it must be a conversation open to new voices, that its essential mode is a comic one. I suggest that the pleasure we find in research and in storytelling about the past is enhanced both by awareness that our own voices are provisional and by confidence in the revisions the future will bring.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
In the 1130s, a man wrote to the mother of his child with an early attempt at a history of women in Christianity. Women have a special and favored status in the church, he argues, “For if you turn the pages of the Old and New Testaments you will find that the greatest miracles of resurrection were shown only, or mostly, to women, and were performed for them.” The man was the scholar Abelard; the woman was the learned Héloïse, his lover and his wife (Abelard and Héloïse 2003, pp. 56–62). After the brutal assault and castration of Abelard instigated by Héloïse's uncle, however, whatever hopes they may have had of the marriage were in ruins. Both had taken monastic vows, Abelard had buried himself in his teaching, and they had not seen one another for a decade. When they did meet again, it was in the midst of moving Héloïse's community of nuns to Abelard's new experiment in monastic life, the oratory of the Paraclete, and it is entirely possible, even likely, that they had had no real time to speak about the past.
When Abelard publicized their story, however, in an open letter now known as the History of My Calamities, Héloïse wrote to him, ostensibly requesting an account of his welfare. Her first letters represent the distillation of 10 years of unresolved grief, sexual frustration, and despair. They are also a hopeless and impossible demand for her former husband, and their former life, to return. Abelard's reply, his small history of women in Christianity, is both an apologia for women's status within the church and an attempt to console his distraught partner in reform. But it also was an effort to manage the strength of Héloïse's emotions, even to control them, by her husband‐turned‐spiritual director. Certainly to Héloïse, Abelard's deliberately detached response felt like avoidance: she took monastic vows first, she bitterly reminded Abelard in her answering letter, but not because she was aware of a shred of religious vocation in herself at that time. She did it for him.
The exchange between Abelard and Héloïse, nearly nine hundred years ago, neatly encapsulates one of the chief dilemmas in writing a history of women in Christianity: to what extent is the creation of any narrative history of this kind just one more effort, however well‐intentioned, at the appeasement and control of women within and by a patriarchal religious tradition? Even if, or precisely insofar as, the history of women in Christianity is an uplifting story, to what extent does it remain, in the poet Audre Lorde's famous phrase, a master's tool which cannot dismantle the master's house? Even if one recognizes the extent to which Christianity, historically, has been not only an opiate, as Marx believed, but the refuge of the oppressed and a crucible for resilience and political resistance, has that also been true for women? What does one make of churches and religious spaces overwhelmingly inhabited, supported, and maintained by women, yet which deny women positions of leadership and authority and have often exploited women's faith, hope, and love? There are no straightforward answers to these questions, and it is not always clear that they can even be answered or addressed satisfactorily by a book of this kind, but they have framed and shaped this project from its conception and at every stage of its development (Murray 1979; Grant 1989; Douglas 2005; Hayes 2011; Turman 2013; Walker‐Barnes 2014; Jennings 2020; Pierce 2021).
On a very basic level, this book attempts to name the names of women in the Christian tradition – significant figures, but also, in some cases, the only names we have – and survey them in roughly chronological order, from the origins of Christianity through the Reformation, ending at the seventeenth century. It attempts, first and foremost, to situate women within the particularity of their regional and historical context. It aims thereby to give the reader a sense of the normative experience of the ordinary laywoman, from whom, not least, so many of us trace our biological descent. This also creates a baseline against which the achievements of the extraordinary individual might be better understood. Particular attention is given to those women who were able to write, but a historical survey of this kind is also able to be generously inclusive about non‐literate women, as well as those women in the church whose achievements were political, institutional, and administrative rather than more obviously “religious.” In the premodern world, “church” and “state” were not separate or even clearly defined categories, and certainly were not experienced as such by ordinary people; this book ends exactly when such modern definitions and distinctions were coming into being. As one enters the early modern period, both the quantity and the quality of historical sources changes. There are more glimpses of non‐aristocratic women who are neither royal nor canonized in the documentary record, and more non‐textual sources survive to illustrate the rhythms of women's daily lives. In the last two chapters in particular, therefore, I have had to be particularly selective about whom and what to include for the sake of clarity, at exactly the moment when a broader field of choice exists.
It is virtually impossible, of course, for a single book to be completely comprehensive, not least because new discoveries continue to be made into the present moment. It is equally impossible to give equal, and sometimes even sufficient, treatment to everyone. Necessarily this is a work of synthesis, building on the meticulous scholarship of recent years, some of it very recent indeed. In the last 20 years in particular, interest in, and the pace of research on, women in the Christian tradition has increased to an exponential degree. Nevertheless, within the academy, much of this work is comparative and thematic in nature, and is often divided between scholars of early and world Christianity, Late Antiquity, the European Middle Ages, and the early modern world. The differing perspectives of history and theology, the nature of historical periodization, the selective lens of confessional history, not mention the numerous languages of both primary and secondary sources and the cost and availability of academic books and articles beyond research libraries, have all contributed to a situation in which much of this scholarship is unknown in the wider church and difficult to navigate for the beginning student. Where possible, I have referred to translations in English of the primary sources discussed here, which in turn can direct the student to the best critical editions of the primary sources available in their original languages. With some exceptions, the secondary scholarship cited in these pages is, likewise, in English, not because this represents anything like an exhaustive account of what exists, but because this book is intended as an introductory resource.
Particularly in recent years, there have been several efforts to provide broad surveys of women in Christianity across the whole of its history, including treatments specifically of nuns and religious women (Kavanagh 1852; Tucker and Liefeld 1987; McNamara 1996; Malone 2001–2003 ; MacHaffie 2006; Pui‐lan 2010; Moore 2015; Tucker 2016; Muir 2019). There are also more specialized works which concentrate on women's religious experience within discreet historical periods (Parks et al. 2021; Cooper 2013; Cohick and Hughes 2017; Bitel and Lifshitz 2008; Dronke 1984; Stjerna 2009). Out of necessity, broad treatments must be selective; likewise, they often adopt a thematic approach to this material, which tends to flatten and decontextualize women's historical experience, particularly across wide swathes of time. On the other hand, surveys which distinguish between the ancient, medieval, and early modern world are always weakest at their edges, in times of disruption and transition; moreover, they often neglect the extent to which women adapted earlier models of devotion and forms of religious life to respond to immediate economic and social pressures. One era which has particularly suffered in both broad and topically focused surveys is the late European Middle Ages, often dismissed as decadent or chaotic, but which should be understood on its own terms as one of the most creative and transformational eras for women's vernacular devotion and in pioneering new forms of women's religious life. The influence of late medieval devotional practice was so pervasive it extended, in different ways, both to women evangelicals and to women in early modern Catholicism – praying in one's native language and praying the rosary, respectively – but this period should not be understood merely as a prelude to the Reformation.
In fact, many of the women named in this book are venerated across multiple Christian traditions. It is all the more important, therefore, to situate them firmly in the times and circumstances in which they lived. In creating a narrative chronological survey, I attempt to discern overarching themes and recurring problems within the history of Christianity which emerge through a focus on women's religious experience. The book concentrates on the premodern and early modern world, including the European Middle Ages, partly because this is my own area of expertise, but also because women's experience in the millennium before the Reformation has often been treated as monolithic in broad surveys of women in Christianity, and often as uniformly “Catholic” by Protestant scholars when such confessional boundaries did not yet exist. By surveying sequentially the first sixteen hundred years of women in the Christian tradition, it is my hope to give greater attention to more obscure figures in the tradition, but also to give the reader a clear sense of their sheer variety. Two well‐known visionary women reformers and theologians, Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, both western Europeans working in the Latin Christian tradition, were nevertheless working in different languages and within different socio‐political contexts, in very different religious communities and at very different moments in the life of the institutional church. The differences between Catherine of Siena and a fifteenth‐century Ethiopian saint like Krestos Sämra are, of course, exponentially greater.
Surveying the history of women in the premodern and early modern church, this book underscores the difficulty of imposing simple or static labels and definitions on women's religious experience. Far more often, the institutional certainties of later generations are projected anachronistically back upon a messy and ad hoc experimental reality. This is perhaps most clear in the cases of women saints who have been linked with, and to some extent coopted into, the histories of particular monastic orders, but general terms like “nuns” or “deaconesses” were always fluid, contested, and negotiated offices and identities rather than static known quantities, and were always dependent on contingent local factors. The history of the church is littered with efforts to order and regulate women's religious life, most of which were impracticable failures; an old joke runs that not even the Holy Spirit knows how many women's orders there actually are.
Beyond naming names, this book examines the complex and often contradictory discourses and traditions which have crystallized around women in Christianity. It is one of the principle arguments of this book that these discourses and traditions are, in fact, complex and contradictory, in the same way that the bible does not present a united and monolithic front to the world, but represents a patchwork of texts and a plurality of voices accumulated, like sedimentary rock, over long stretches of time (Barton 2019; Fentress‐Williams 2021; Schmid and Schröter 2021). An abiding tension exists between those traditional discourses invoked by church authorities to control and regulate women's religious practice, and those which empowered their religious experimentation. Frequently, both were operative simultaneously, as demonstrated in the conflicted and ambivalent response of many clergy toward women visionaries. Male theologians, historians, and writers have frequently used women rhetorically to “think with” over the course of the Christian tradition: to polarize, to motivate, to shame, and to titillate their readers, and occasionally, to act as models for ideal Christian practice. In these discourses, women are more often added “spice” than essential staple; they are rarely, if ever, described neutrally, and yet these ancient discourses established around women's religious experience, uncritically repeated, continue to shape practice into the present.
This book examines women's choices in historical context: the ways and means by which they engaged with their faith, what was realistically possible, what was allowed, and, more often than one might think, what women did in the teeth of opposition. This book describes the origins and the nature of the resistance that women encountered in the church more or less constantly, while recognizing as well that the most proscriptive and misogynistic legislation passed by both church and state often failed spectacularly to be enforced, and perhaps was only ever intended as rhetorical bluff in the first place. As the great proponent of women's ordination within the Orthodox tradition, Elisabeth Behr‐Sigel, once cautioned, “We must be very careful, however, not to give way to an unhealthy masochism and to caricature the teaching and practice of the church in the past as though it is nothing more than a sad story of the oppression of the weak by the strong and of women by men” (Behr‐Sigel 1991, p. 96, emphasis mine). Ultimately it is women's choices that most interest me, and these varied enormously over the course of the history of the church, depending on a woman's lifecycle, her social status, where she lived, the political climate of the time in both church and state, and the vagaries of illness and chance. It goes without saying that one need not approve of the choices that were made in order to attempt to understand them.
In these ways this book attempts to avoid what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story” (Adichie 2009). Women in the Christian church have always been engaged in complex processes of negotiation, for themselves and others, their roles multiple and intricate and their identities the result of ongoing, creative self‐fashioning and the navigation of networks of interpersonal relationships. Beyond their immediate families, some of the most important of these relationships were with the clergy. Clergy and ordained monks provided women with the sacraments, acted as confessors, supported or discouraged religious life and vocation, acted as the main line of defense in western Europe in protecting women from the inquisition, and were historically a religious woman's main point of access to the Christian theological tradition and to literacy generally. Much of what is known about religious women in the Christian tradition is refracted through the prism of the male clerical confessor, for better and for worse (Clark 1998). A woman's relationship with her confessor, teacher, or parish priest could range from the exploitative and manipulative to the symbiotic and constructive, and on occasion, as with Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, to the downright servile. Power dynamics did not work only in one direction.
With some significant exceptions, therefore, women's relationships with clergy were essential elements in their religious identity, but across the history of Christianity, precisely because of its importance, the relationship was not a static one. Clerical identity itself evolved, like women's own status, often in tandem or in contrast with secular and lay masculinity. So did the nature of ordination within the church. Many previous efforts at telling the history of women in Christianity have centered on the search for historical precedents for women's ordination and eucharistic ministry (Muir 2019; Kateusz 2019; Malone 2001–2003 ; Witt 2020). This is, of course, important, but it is also necessary to remember that ordination itself within the church, even sacramental ordination, does not have a simple or easy definition, applicable to all times and places, and particularly not in the premodern church. Inevitably, this book traces women's de facto participation in worship and liturgy, which is greater than some might suppose, or the exercise of their office in ways that were sometimes defined as ordained, such as an abbess's hearing of confession. However, it also emphasizes the importance of women, like Dante's Beatrice, as lay contemplatives within the Christian tradition, and as lay theologians whose insights have resonated in the later traditions and practice of the church. The hope remains that contemplation, within the Christian tradition and beyond, can be, not a quietist, but a profoundly liberating activity (Coakley 2002, 2013, 2015). This book does not argue for a woman's distinctive, essentialist, or complementarian religious vocation, and certainly not one connected to her motherhood or lack thereof. It does argue for the particular historical importance and contribution of widows throughout the history of the church, not only as a group of the most vulnerable in society, but also, if circumstances were favorable, as the single most autonomous subset of the female population, who often proved to be mature and competent administrators of, and donors to, churches and religious communities.
Any attempt to explore the history of women in Christianity encounters the same tensions and connections between individual and collective experience found also in the history of monasticism. Individual spiritual experiences, interspersed with long stretches of silence and solitude, are only comprehended as extraordinary and only impact the wider Christian tradition insofar as other people know about them – preferably literate people with standing in the church who are able to record their encounters with, and impressions of, a particular individual, and in such a manner that survives in the historical record. Needless to say, with so many cracks to slip through, many, if not most, religious women must have done so. History is incurably biased toward the written document, and another of the running arguments of this book will be how difficult, even well‐nigh impossible, it was for many women to find their place in the Christian tradition except through others' intervention. In a male‐dominated religious discourse, which in the European west was the particular preserve of the Latin‐literate and in the east of the Greek, it is usually only aristocratic women who had the resources and education to make themselves felt. Failing those opportunities, the monastic office and the psalter in particular was an essential mnemonic bridge to Latin literacy – or, at any rate, to degrees of it – for many, and it would be a mistake to underestimate how much women understood of the Christian tradition. Although women in the church would shape and redirect this religious discourse in many profound and subtle ways, and many may well have been more free within the church than they would have been outside of it, it should not be forgotten that women did not control the discourse and were never entirely at liberty within it.
The most obvious example of the nature of the dilemma this creates, for both the modern researcher and the reader, is the degree to which the history of women in the Christian tradition is inextricably bound together with the history of the saints. Hagiography, or the lives of the saints, self‐consciously encourages the reader toward imitation, to go and do likewise, and many women readers have been introduced to women in the Christian tradition with the understanding, explicit or implicit, that they should somehow be “like” the saints and martyrs – or better yet, like the Virgin Mary. This is a rather more complex business than people often realize. Even setting the martyrs to one side, many women in the hagiographical tradition engaged in practices of asceticism, such as extended or habitual periods of fasting, that to modern eyes look psychologically disordered, if not outright dangerous. Does the study of these women implicitly encourage these behaviors and practices, a question directly addressed by Bynum (1987)? On the other hand, dismissal of hagiography by previous generations of data‐driven historians has had knock‐on effects in marginalizing the study of religious women generally and in perpetuating essentialist stereotypes about the nature of women's piety in particular. From a more secular perspective, the dangers of attempting clinically to diagnose the state of a woman's mental health a thousand years and more in the past are manifold, not least because the descriptions in our sources are not themselves scientific, clinical, or objective, and were not meant to be. Precisely because, in the premodern church, asceticism was taken as a sign of authenticity, hagiography may often describe women's asceticism in rhetorical terms. And of course, what women themselves thought they were doing and what their confessors saw, or wanted to see, did not necessarily align.
On the one hand, it is very dangerous to lump together “female saints” as a monochrome and monolithic category, even if that is what many sources do (Newman 1997, p. xix). On the other hand, the discourses of the Christian tradition carried real weight, and perpetuated patterns of women's religious experience that could both hinder and help in a conservative society that looked to the past to guide the present. If women could establish precedents for themselves in certain roles, such as queens or reforming abbesses, it became that much easier for other women who followed to make similar choices. The empress Matilda, Hildegard, and Claire of Assisi all had their imitators. Ironically, this is true even if a woman's actual historical existence is questionable, as in the case of a semi‐legendary figure like Thecla or Bridget of Kildare. Women refer to one another and invoke each other, sometimes in surprising ways; this book also aims to show these spiritual lineages and connections where they can be seen to exist.
Particularly in the premodern world, of course, this influence was not only intellectual but was believed to extend powerfully into the spiritual realm. For royalty and the nobility, sanctity in the family was an important political card, often and deftly played. In a monastic context, a powerful and miracle‐working founding female saint offered an important precedent for an abbess's authority throughout the history of the foundation or of an order generally, for example, in the case of the Merovingian queen Radegund or the late medieval mystic Bridget of Sweden. When saints were believed to have geographical zones of influence, even a kind of spiritual jurisdiction, people often described visionary experiences in which they were in a female saint's presence or under her sometimes terrifying authority.
Likewise, many regarded women in a religious community as having particular influence or powers of intercessory prayer, while their religious vocation brought renown by extension to their families without and preserved and memorialized them within. The rhetoric, both in monastic vocations and in conventional marriage, is that such commitments must be entered into by women's free choice. In reality, many women either married or entered a religious community at the behest of their families, usually driven by economic necessity of one kind or another. In other words, even if one leaves out incidents of rape and sexual abuse – a dangerous if – women's virginity or lack thereof was rarely a simple matter of the exercise of a woman's free choice. Modern readers will be divided over whether devotion to the Virgin Mary empowered women to have a sense of self‐worth independent of their sexual market value or perpetuated damaging and realistically impracticable ideals of sexual purity, and the honest answer is surely a conflicted and contradictory mixture of the two (Warner 1976).
Throughout the history of Christianity, women show themselves to be aware of these religious and cultural discourses, many knowing how to present themselves and play to social expectations, even protecting themselves with them and flouting them simultaneously. It is an essential part of women's complex negotiation of their identity, for themselves and in their relationships with clergy and religious authority. As already noted, practices of asceticism and practical charity, but also different forms of visionary experience, must be understood in the context of these discourses and traditions. It is very difficult to do this without seeming to “debunk” or to cast doubt on the experiences of many religious women, who have often been dismissed or marginalized as less reliable witnesses in the first place (Lowe 2003). In many cases, for example, it is impossible to know whether, or to what degree, a holy woman's devoted and intimate care of lepers as described by her confessor is literally and historically true but modeled on an earlier saint's example, is depicted in a rhetorically stylized but essentially accurate manner, or is wildly exaggerated for dramatic and pious effect. At all times, modern readers must be aware that they are not the designated audience to whom many religious women are “performing.” Religious women are overwhelmingly concerned with the ancient and medieval equivalent of the church vestry, the internal politics of insular small towns and market guilds, the private and public opinions of their cousins, neighbors, siblings, parents, spouses and children, scribes and confessors, abbots, bishops, popes, inquisitors, government bureaucrats, kings and queens, and many other actors whose names are completely lost to modernity. Many are “difficult women,” problematic not only in their own time but also, and perhaps even more so, in our own, and influential precisely for that reason (Lewis 2020).
Whatever account is written here of women's experience within Christianity, it is incomplete, biased, contingent, and compiled through a methodology of often reading sources slightly against the grain of their authors' intentions. Nevertheless it would seem to add insult to injury to refuse to try to understand these women simply because they do not answer all of our questions in precisely the way that we in the modern world might want. To the general reader, the most urgent and pressing concern will, no doubt, be with the overall trajectory of the narrative presented here: will the status of women be seen to improve over time? According to some criteria, yes, but according to others, it is more difficult to judge. It would be dangerous to underestimate the sheer amount of continuity in gender roles existing across such a broad space of time, geography, and culture, in favor of cheap and easy optimism, privileged by race and class, that neglects the vast majority of women's experience (Bennett 2006, pp. 54–81). The book adopts what may seem a deliberately arbitrary chronology, with chapters breaking neatly at the turn of the century or half‐century. This is for the general reader's ease of navigation, not because centuries are particularly significant markers of change in and of themselves. Even such disruptive moments and movements as the Reformation will be seen not to “improve” the status of women so much as they transform the nature of certain choices possible to women, particularly women of a certain social class and education, in certain places. The research and writing for this project was largely completed during the coronavirus pandemic, which revealed, among many other things, the fragile nature of women's employment and socio‐economic equality even in the present day. The brunt of the pandemic's impact was felt most strongly in such professions as nursing and teaching, historically done by women generally and women's religious orders in particular, and which as a consequence remain chronically underpaid and under‐supported. Even in grim circumstances, however, hope should be understood not as a simplistic upward trajectory but as a duty to future generations, to make the world, however we find it, better (McCaulley 2020; Brown 2018, pp. 175–181; Glaude and Eddie 2020).
Women's religious experience consists, not of a select few moral exemplars from one narrow confessional stream, but in dizzying breadth and variety within the Christian tradition. Over the course of reading and researching for this project, there has not been a day when I was not surprised and delighted by something I encountered for the first time. I have been guided throughout this project by Caroline Walker Bynum's deceptively gentle invitation for history, even in dealing in such weighty matters as religion and gender, to be in the “comic” mode. “Comic” history is free to delight in incongruity, irony, and the unexpected, without being bound to the grim teleological inevitability of the “tragic.” As Bynum counsels, history is not necessarily “comic” in the sense of being funny, although it certainly can be, nor is it trivial or lacking in conscience. Comic history is, however, history with a sense of its own proportion. If the approach provided by this book helps readers to better access the work of other scholars, to introduce readers to more obscure names within the Christian tradition and to further and richer possibilities for learning, I will be well pleased. And no one will be happier than I if this book is swiftly made redundant.
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2Filling the Hungry with Good Things: Women in Christianity to 200
It is impossible to tell the story of Jesus and his followers without mentioning the women. According to the gospel accounts, it is Mary's consent which precedes Jesus's conception, while the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus is Mary Magdalene, called, in later medieval tradition, “the apostle to the apostles.” From the beginning of his ministry, Jesus had defined his mission in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “to preach good news to the poor,” the coming of the kingdom of God. This kingdom was to be characterized by healing, freedom from slavery, and cancellation of debts which traditionally belonged to the Jewish year of Jubilee. Jesus's ministry would be only one of several movements within Judaism at the time which sought the restoration of the fortunes of the Jewish people. In comparison with his contemporaries, a distinguishing feature of Jesus's teaching might be said to be his love of a good party, and a good wedding in particular (Levine 2014, pp. 14–15). In his parables he frequently refers to himself as a bridegroom, a narrative which defined the entire nature and history of the church which followed as an expectant bride. In the gospel accounts of Jesus's efforts to redefine the terms and boundaries of where, how, and to whom the kingdom of God would reveal itself, women were distinctive and essential participants in his message and his partners in dialogue.
The Old Testament had described certain women as being particular supporters of its prophets, as in the case of the widow from Sidon who gave her family's last meal to Elijah, and whose son Elijah raised from the dead (1 Kgs 17). Elijah's disciple and successor Elisha performed similar miracles for women who asked for his help (2 Kgs 4). The Ethiopian church in particular venerates the Queen of Sheba, there known as Makeda, who journeyed to meet Solomon and asked him pointed questions (2 Chron 9). In all, the Talmud recognizes seven women as prophets in their own right: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther (Levine and Brettler 2017, p. 340). In Luke's gospel, women proclaim Jesus's coming with similarly prophetic authority: Anna speaks from the Temple, while Mary's Magnificat strongly evokes the Old Testament song of Hannah over the birth of her son Samuel. In contrast with the bumbling figures of the disciples, women in the gospels are often described as intuitively grasping Jesus's power and significance, sometimes because they are in such desperate straits they seem to have little other choice (Arlandson 1997, pp. 120–150). The Syro‐Phoenician woman persists in the face of the disciples' resistance and even, ostensibly, Jesus's own, until her moral claim on him has been made sufficiently plain to everyone. The woman with the hemorrhage has run out of both money and doctors; the woman at the well seems to have run out of husbands. Like the widow from Sidon, many women in the gospels respond to Jesus's preaching with enormous generosity. Jesus's ministry was made possible through the financial support of Joanna, Susannah, Mary Magdalene, and Martha and Mary of Bethany. Women remain at the cross when the disciples have scattered, women tend and prepare Jesus's shattered body for burial, and women are first to the tomb (Fiorenza 1994, p. xliv).
At the same time, the gospel writers seem to be embarrassed by this aspect of the story they are manifestly telling. Women in the gospels come into focus for moments only, and even then they are, more often than not, nameless. The notoriously overlapping and conflicting accounts in the gospel writers of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the woman with the alabaster box have ensured that, while her deed may be remembered forever, her name was not (e.g. Matt 26; Mk 14–16; Lk 7–8; Jn 11–12, 19–20). According to the gospel of Matthew, because of a dream she had had, Pontius Pilate's wife tried to persuade her husband to release Jesus (Matt 27:19). Later called Procla in the Christian tradition, she remains unnamed in the gospel account. Women are certainly present among the crowd in Galilee who are described as witnesses to Jesus's resurrection; they are almost certainly members of the pairs of evangelists that Jesus sends out into the countryside, and which set the precedent for the male and female evangelistic teams which were often used in the early church (Lk 10:1–20). Certainly Mary, but probably other women as well were present in the early gatherings of the church in Jerusalem and at Pentecost. However, they are generally not named alongside the Twelve.
At the same time, we know precious little about many of the men whose names do appear in the gospels, later Christian traditions about them notwithstanding. In the gospels, the Twelve are frequently treated together as a single and undifferentiated group. The Acts of the Apostles is something of a misnomer: few of the Twelve even make an appearance (Lee 2011, p. 69). After his election, what more is known about Matthias? Any reader of the gospel accounts of Jesus's ministry is, therefore, presented with something of a paradox: within the Christian tradition, many of its most moving and poignant moral exempla belong to women whose names are unknown and about whom there are differing or conflicting traditions. On the other hand, little is known about the ostensible leaders of the early Christian community in Jerusalem from James onward, and even less about its everyday practices or governance.
Jesus ordained no one. Those whom he commissioned at the conclusion of the gospel of Matthew are not clearly named or identified in any kind of formal way (Witt 2020, p. 97). Although the title of apostle clearly implied close proximity to Jesus in early Christian accounts, it was clearly so loosely defined that Paul could make a later case for his own inclusion in the group. Junia – without question a woman's name – has often been “masculinized” as Junias, a name that does not appear anywhere in the classical tradition. Junia is described as Paul's relative and “prominent among the apostles,” but precisely because Paul assumes the general recognition of his readers, he unfortunately does not include many further details about her (Rom 16:7; Epp 2005; Pedersen 2006). Moreover, what relationship the apostolate had with the developing ministerial offices of the church is unclear; Philip, for example, was described both as an apostle and as a deacon alongside Stephen, and appointed as “one of the seven” to the Gentiles (Brinkhof 2018).
Named Women in the Letters of Paul
The earliest accounts of the Christian church found in Paul's letters already describe something of a fait accompli upon which Acts later elaborates: the expansion of the teachings of Jesus beyond their linguistic, religious, and cultural birthplace. The decision of the church in Jerusalem to admit uncircumcised Gentiles probably did not represent as significant a draw for women converts as has sometimes been argued. Moreover, it risks caricaturing Jewish practice as more misogynistic, and as more distinct from early Christian groups, than it actually was (Fiorenza 1994, pp. 205–226; Lieu 2016, pp. 115–128). From the beginning, Paul's letters assume that both Jews and Gentiles, men and women, were drawn to early Christian teachings, and he acknowledges the active participation, patronage, and even governance of small house churches by women.
The most extensive list of named individuals by Paul is that found at the conclusion of his letter to the Romans. In pride of place, Paul begins by recognizing Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, and probably the bearer of Paul's letter, “for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well” (Rom 16:1–2). He then greets Prisca (or Priscilla) and Aquila, “who work with me in Christ Jesus and risked their necks for my life,” describing the reach of a ministry to the Gentiles which included the discipling of the teacher Apollos and extended almost as widely as Paul's own (Rom 16:3–4; I Cor 16:19; Acts 18:26; 2 Tim 4:19). “Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you” (Rom 16:6). He then thanks Andronicus and Junia, “who were in Christ before I was” and who were imprisoned alongside Paul. It is at least a possibility that “Junia” is a Romanized version of “Joanna the wife of Chuza,” the wife of Herod's steward and the benefactor of Jesus's ministry, who is described in the gospel of Luke as being one of the women at the tomb (Rom 16:7; Luke 8:3, 24:10; Bauckham 2002, p. 104). “Those workers in the Lord, Tryphaena and Tryphosa,” Rufus and his mother, who is “a mother to me also,” “Philogus and Julia,” and “Nereus and his sister” are all greeted and recognized by Paul, and emphasize the interdependence of “brothers and sisters” within the Christian community (Rom 16:12–15).
In the same vein, in the letter to Philemon, Paul would greet his friend alongside Apphia “our sister,” before launching into a veritable rhetorical tour de force by which Paul claims full personhood for, and kinship with, that ultimate non‐person, a runaway slave (Philem 2; Ruden 2010, pp. 177–200). In the letter to Philippians, his somewhat exasperated fondness for Euodia and Syntyche is apparent. He reminds the broader community of their central importance within the church and that he and they have a shared history in which they “struggled beside me in the work of the gospel” (Phil 4:2–3). Paul clearly remained in communication with “Chloe's people” about the church in Corinth, and in the letter to the Colossians greeted Nympha “and the church in her house” (I Cor 1:11; Col 4:15). Whether or not Paul was the author of 2 Timothy, describing Timothy's own faith and vocation as an inheritance from his grandmother Lois and mother Eunice is in keeping with Paul's recognition of women in his letters (2 Tim 1:5; Acts 16:1). If 2 Timothy is pseudonymous, it is perhaps even clearer evidence that Paul's greetings to, and recognition of, individual women in leadership roles within his congregations were understood at the time to be telltale hallmarks of his writing.
To some extent, later New Testament books fill out the picture suggested by Paul's letters, and provide some historical context for the kind of woman who found herself drawn to early Christian teachings and the kind of role she often played within its early communities. As in Jesus's ministry, women financially supported, patronized, and hosted house churches. The “elect lady” of the Johannine epistles is clearly the head of one such community (2 Jn 1). In the book of Acts, Peter raised from the dead a woman named Tabitha, or Dorcas, who was known for her charity and particularly her ministry to widows. She is called a “disciple” (mathētria, the feminized form of mathētēs), a word that does not appear anywhere else in the New Testament (Acts 9:36–43; Lee 2011
