RELI 415 - Women in the Christian Tradition

Author: Jane Schaberg
The controversy surrounding Dan Brown''s novel The Da Vinci Code has intensified interest in Mary Magdalene and Jane Schaberg provides an authoritative source for a deeper understanding and re-assessment of this popular figure. Within a progressive feminist framework, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene approaches Christian Testament sources through analysis of legend, archaeology, and gnostic/apocryphal traditions. This is the story of the suppression and distortion of a powerful woman leader - Schaberg presents Mary Magdalene as successor to Jesus in a challenging argument.

Edited by Edmondo Lupieri
An international team of twenty scholars under Edmondo F. Lupieri’s direction produced Mary Magdalene from the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond . While the historical figure of the Magdalene may be lost forever, the construction of her literary images and their transformations and adaptations over the centuries are a lively testimony to human creativity and faith. Different pictures of Mary travelled through time and space, from history to legend and mythology, crossed religious boundaries, going beyond the various Christianities, to become a “sign of contradiction” for many. This book describes a special case of biblical reception history, that of the New Testament figure of a woman whose presence at the side of Jesus has been disturbing for some, but proves to be inspiring for others.

Author: Robin G. Branch
Who is Phoebe? Introduced to Roman believers by the apostle Paul, Phoebe appears only in Romans 16:1–2. Paul describes her via three nouns (sister, servant, succourer, King James Version [KJV]) and encourages the saints in Rome to welcome her and assist her in whatever she may need. Scholars speculate it was she who carried Paul’s letter to Rome, delivered it orally numerous times, and explained it during the delivery. In a sense, she was Paul’s ambassador, the one speaking for him and introducing him to believers in Rome in churches he did not found. This article covers four major areas. It shows the importance of Paul’s three descriptive nouns and examines the significance of her role as letter-carrier and presenter. Paul warmly commends Phoebe to like-minded Roman believers. She is a woman he trusts, esteems, and acknowledges as a local leader in Cenchreae. However, many translations diminish the force of what this article argues was her influence in the first century. Paul’s introduction of Phoebe bears significance today in terms of women in leadership and the Christian practice of according rightful recognition to a fellow labourer in the Lord. However, this outstanding woman seems to have been undervalued for centuries. Consequently, this article boldly seeks to shed light on Phoebe, an extraordinary early believer, and to carry on Paul’s practice of honouring her.

Author: Joyce E. Salisbury
This is an encyclopedia entry on the person of Perpetua.

Author: Thomas Heffernan
One of the most widely read and studied texts composed in Late Antiquity is the prison diary of Vibia Perpetua, a young woman of the elite classes who was martyred in March of the year 202 or 203 C.E. in Carthage, as part of a civic celebration honoring Caesar Geta. She was well-married and had recently become the mother of a baby son, but despite her advantages, she refused to recant her faith when she was arrested with other recent converts to Christianity. Imprisoned with her was her pregnant slave Felicity. Perpetua's steadfastness in her belief led to her martyrdom in the amphitheater. A

Author: Gillian Clark
In Monica: An Ordinary Saint, Gillian Clark reconciles competing images of the life and legacy of Augustine's mother, arriving at a woman who was shrewd and enterprising, but also meek and gentle.

Author: Douglas Ryan Boin
Ever since Augustine narrated an account of his mother's death at Ostia, social historians have tried to adduce the identity of the person who erected Monica's tombstone, a copy of which is preserved in a ninth-century codex. Three members of the gens Anicii, all of whom were Augustine's contemporaries, have become usual suspects in the secondary literature. Throughout these debates the epitaph itself, a fragment of which was found in 1945, is frequently cited but rarely treated as a primary text. This article presents a new study of that epigraph and proposes that it was erected much later than previously suspected.

Author: SangDong Lee
Queen Margaret (1070–93) has been the subject of much historical research. Previous studies of the queen and later saint have been undertaken from several different perspectives, including the biographical, institutional and hagiographical. In addition, some scholars have focused on her piety and later cult. Although a saint's miracles were one of the significant elements affecting the development of a cult, far less interest has been shown in the geopolitical importance of the miracles attributed to St Margaret and the relationship between the miracles and the saint's cult. The intention of this paper is to examine the miracles attributed to St Margaret and to identify their characteristics within the context of their contribution to, and influence in, the development of her cult.

This is an encyclopedia entry on the person of Saint Margaret of Scotland.

Author: Honey Meconi
A Renaissance woman long before the Renaissance, the visionary Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) corresponded with Europe's elite, founded and led a noted women's religious community, and wrote on topics ranging from theology to natural history. Yet we know her best as Western music's most accomplished early composer, responsible for a wealth of musical creations for her fellow monastics. Honey Meconi draws on her own experience as a scholar and performer of Hildegard's music to explore the life and work of this foundational figure. Combining historical detail with musical analysis, Meconi delves into Hildegard's mastery of plainchant, her innovative musical drama, and her voluminous writings. Hildegard's distinctive musical style still excites modern listeners through wide-ranging, sinuous melodies set to her own evocative poetry. Together with her passionate religious texts, her music reveals a holistic understanding of the medieval world still relevant to today's readers.

Edited by George Ferzoco, Beverly Kienzle, and Debra Stoudt
This volume provides an introduction to Hildegard and her works, with a focus on the historical, literary, and religious context of the seer's writings and music. Its essays explore the cultural milieu that informs Hildegard's life and various compositions, and examine understudied aspects of the magistra's oeuvre, such as the interconnections among her works.
A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen builds on earlier studies and presents to an English-speaking audience various facets of the seer's historical persona and her cultural significance, so that the reader can grasp and appreciate the scope of the unparalleled life and contributions of Hildegard, who was declared to be a saint and a doctor of the Church in 2012.

Author: Giuliana Cavallini
From her earliest years, Catherine of Siena (1347-80) was gripped by the mystery of God incarnate. This was the beginning of a life-long love story, a life-long conversion in which Christ spoke to Catherine and she communicated the truth of his being to the world of her time. Creation itself, she says, is an act of love, and Christ is the bridge by which human beings come to realize their full humanity, their inmost nature, which is to love. Mystic, champion of the poor and Church reformer, Catherine was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970. She was unable to write until she was thirty, but she corresponded with Popes, Cardinals, scholars and civic authorities. She was a true daughter of the fourteenth century, famous in her own life time, and yet her thinking and her work seem entirely relevant in the political and ecclesial context of our own time. When Pope Paul VI was asked whether she should be considered a politician, his answer was yes, but in a thoroughly spiritual way; this, he said, is why 'the teaching of this singular woman politician is still meaningful and valuable'.

Edited by: Carolyn Muessig, George Ferzoco, Beverly Mayne Kienzle
This volume, written by experts on Catherine of Siena, considers her as a church reformer, peacemaker, preacher, author, holy woman, stigmatic, saint and politically astute person. The manuscript tradition of works by and about her are also studied.

Author: Marie Schilling Grogan
The Introduction to the Sources Chrétiennes edition also declared, "The style of the Exercises deserves study," but to date, while attention to the theology and spirituality of Gertrude's writings has increased, little scholarship has been directed to her aesthetic choices.6 The whole of the Spiritual Exercises will yield richly to this type of inquiry, but this paper hopes to make a contribution to such a larger project by undertaking a formal analysis of just this final exercise, using a literary critical perspective to explore the ways in which the dramatic form and style of Exercise Seven reinforce both its theology and its generically-dictated ambitions as a "spiritual exercise."

This is an encyclopedia entry on the person of Saint Gertrude the Great.

Author: P. Sheldrake
This article focuses on the 14th-century English visionary mystic and theological writer, Julian of Norwich. It suggests that the key to her mystical theology is that a true “knowledge” of God involves loving engagement with God rather than abstract intellectual enquiry. Julian’s reflections on God’s nature, in relation both to her visions of the crucified Christ and to God-as-Trinity, include an exploration of the image of God as mother. Most importantly, Julian struggled for many years to understand the ultimate meaning and purpose of her visions and what God revealed to her through them for the sake of all her fellow Christians. After a long period of challenging reflection and constantly questioning God, Julian is finally led to understand that God’s relationship with humankind is based on love and, indeed, that God’s ultimate meaning is love and only love.

Author: Peter Jonescu
Heythrop Journal, 2021-09, Vol.62 (5), p.840-850

Author: F. Thomas Luongo
In a text omitted from the canonical collection of Birgitta of Sweden's revelations collected and disseminated in the 1370s as the Liber celestis revelationumj Christ explains to Birgitta the relationship between divine inspiration and the human authors of revealed texts by way of a homely metaphor: he likens himself to a carpenter who takes wood and makes a beautiful image from it but then hands it on to others so that they might make it more beautiful by adding their own colors to it. The metaphor here -- coloring the image carved by Christ the carpenter -- seems mainly to mean verbal adornment, perhaps by elaboration or gloss. Female saints were expected to embrace penance and an exaggerated degree of humility, not the outspokenness for which Birgitta was so well known, and certainly not expected to commit their words to writing. Her visions were full of images, outlandish descriptions of things she saw or heard. This itself might have led to suspicious that Birgitta was too much involved in their creation--that they were purely a product of her imagination. The first wave of Revelations manuscripts set the canon of Birgitta's texts and their program of illustrations shaped decisively the Birgittine iconography in later manuscripts and printed books. This essay argues that the most important illustrations in these manuscripts work, in a way that has not previously been understood, as visual extensions of arguments for Birgitta's authority made by Alfonso in the Epistola solitarii.

Author: Luongo Thomas
In a text omitted from the canonical collection of Birgitta of Sweden's revelations collected and disseminated in the 1370s as the Liber celestis revelationumj Christ explains to Birgitta the relationship between divine inspiration and the human authors of revealed texts by way of a homely metaphor: he likens himself to a carpenter who takes wood and makes a beautiful image from it but then hands it on to others so that they might make it more beautiful by adding their own colors to it. The metaphor here -- coloring the image carved by Christ the carpenter -- seems mainly to mean verbal adornment, perhaps by elaboration or gloss. Female saints were expected to embrace penance and an exaggerated degree of humility, not the outspokenness for which Birgitta was so well known, and certainly not expected to commit their words to writing. Her visions were full of images, outlandish descriptions of things she saw or heard. This itself might have led to suspicious that Birgitta was too much involved in their creation--that they were purely a product of her imagination. The first wave of Revelations manuscripts set the canon of Birgitta's texts and their program of illustrations shaped decisively the Birgittine iconography in later manuscripts and printed books. This essay argues that the most important illustrations in these manuscripts work, in a way that has not previously been understood, as visual extensions of arguments for Birgitta's authority made by Alfonso in the Epistola solitarii.

Author: Amy McKenna
Through the ages women have had to fight to be taken seriously, have their work accepted, and be considered the equal of men intellectually and creatively. This book tips its hat to women such as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Sojourner Truth, and Princess Diana, who have made their mark and forever changed the world with their contributions. Theresa of Avila is one of the 100 women covered in this volume.

Author: Julia Kristeva
Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting her life. Traveling to Spain, Leclercq, Julia Kristeva's probing alter ego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion. One of Kristeva's most passionate and transporting works, Teresa, My Love interchanges biography, autobiography, analysis, dramatic dialogue, musical scores, and images of paintings and sculpture to engage the reader in Leclercq's-and Kristeva's-journey. Born in 1515, Teresa of Avila outwitted the Spanish Inquisition and was a key reformer of the Carmelite Order. Her experience of ecstasy, which she intimately described in her writings, released her from her body and led to a complete realization of her consciousness, a state Kristeva explores in relation to present-day political failures, religious fundamentalism, and cultural malaise. Incorporating notes from her own psychoanalytic practice, as well as literary and philosophical references, Kristeva builds a fascinating dual diagnosis of contemporary society and the individual psyche while sharing unprecedented insights into her own character.

Translator: E. Allison Peers
The definitive three-volume edition of St Teresa of Avila's prose and poetry, in Professor E. Allison Peers's justly celebrated translation.

Translator: E. Allison Peers
The definitive three-volume edition of St Teresa of Avila's prose and poetry, in Professor E. Allison Peers's justly celebrated translation.

Translator: E. Allison Peers
The definitive three-volume edition of St Teresa of Avila's prose and poetry, in Professor E. Allison Peers's justly celebrated translation.

Author: D. B. Kellogg
Christian Encounters, a series of biographies from Thomas Nelson, highlights important lives from all ages and areas of the Church. Anne's work serves as a document of the struggles of colonial life and is a testament to the plight of the women of the age. Her poetry showcased her intense devotion to being a good wife, mother, and Christian.

Author: Anne Bradstreet

Author: Giuseppina Iacona Lobo
Examining works by well-known figures of the English Revolution, including John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Fell Fox, Lucy Hutchinson, Thomas Hobbes, and King Charles I, Giuseppina Iacono Lobo presents the first comprehensive study of conscience during this crucial and turbulent period.

Author: Satish Sharma
Early feminist pioneers contributed much to the functioning and reform of society, including making women’s status and privileges equal to those of men. However, we still do not know enough about their efforts, strategies, sacrifices, and attainments. As such, through a focus on the lives and contributions of eight early female pioneers of England and America from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, this book helps to fill this gap. Among these women were religious and educational reformers, political activists, social advocates, abolitionists, feminists, community organizers, pacifists, internationalists, and historians. These women noticed many injustices done to their kind by men and society over the centuries and took brave actions at great personal costs to provide remedies. Their respective backgrounds and interests were different, but all of them desired more protection and the welfare of vulnerable populations nationally and internationally. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in many fields, and can also be adopted as a textbook in colleges and universities.

Author: Joy R. Bostic
African-American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth Century Religious Activism is an important book-length treatment of African-American female mysticism. The primary subjects of this book are three icons of black female spirituality and religious activism - Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Rebecca Cox Jackson.

Author: Carleton Mabee
Many Americans have long since forgotten that there ever was slavery along the Hudson River. Yet Sojourner Truth was born a slave near the Hudson River in Ulster County, New York, in the late 1700s. Called merely Isabella as a slave, once freed she adopted the name of Sojourner Truth and became a national figure in the struggle for the emancipation of both blacks and women in Civil War America. Despite the discrimination she suffered as both a black and a woman, Truth significantly shaped both her own life and the struggle for human rights in America. Through her fierce intelligence, her resourcefulness, and her eloquence, she became widely acknowledged as a remarkable figure during her life, and she has become one of the most heavily mythologized figures in American history. While some of the myths about Truth have served positive functions, they have also contributed to distortions about American history, specifically about the history of blacks and women

Author: Sojourer Truth
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the memoir of an African-American woman who struggled against the bondages of slavery in the early 1800s. It is one of the most famous slave narratives of all time and is one of the most important documents of slavery ever written. This is her story. This is her voice.Dictated to her friend Olive Gilbert and first published privately in 1850, this partial autobiography of the woman who became a pioneer in the struggles for racial and sexual equality is a lens into the little-known world of northern slavery and an inspiring account of a black woman striving for personal and political empowerment.Truth was born into slavery around 1797 but managed to escape with her infant daughter in 1826.

Author: Kerry S. Walters
"Harriet Tubman: A Life in American History is an indispensable resource for high school and college students about the life and times of anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman, who exemplifies how slaves took the initiative to free themselves and others."

Author: Niki Ahrens
"After escaping the horrors of slavery, Harriet Tubman devoted her life to helping others secure their freedom. Learn about the brave abolitionist's secret rescue missions, her courageous service in the Civil War, and more."

Author: Catherine O'Donnell
"A biography of Elizabeth Seton (1774-1821), a convert to Catholicism who founded the American Sisters of Charity and is the first native-born American citizen to become a Roman Catholic saint"

Author: Kathleen Sprows Cummings
What drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest, full of twists and turns over more than a century, to win an American saint? The absence of American names in the canon of the saints had left many of the faithful feeling spiritually unmoored. But while canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, it is never only about holiness, reveals Kathleen Sprows Cummings in this panoramic, passionate chronicle of American sanctity. Catholics had another reason for petitioning the Vatican to acknowledge an American holy hero. A home-grown saint would serve as a mediator between heaven and earth, yes, but also between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was also about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. Their fascinatingly diverse causes for canonization—from Kateri Tekakwitha and Elizabeth Ann Seton to many others that are failed, forgotten, or still under way—represented evolving national values as Catholics made themselves at home. Cummings's vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged.

Author: Matthew Avery Sutton
Matthew Sutton's definitive study of Aimee Semple McPherson reveals the woman, most often remembered as the hypocritical vamp in Sinclair Lewis's 'Elmer Gantry', as a trail-blazing pioneer.
From the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth Rock to Christian Coalition canvassers working for George W. Bush, Americans have long sought to integrate faith with politics. Few have been as successful as Hollywood evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. During the years between the two world wars, McPherson was the most flamboyant and controversial minister in the United States. She built an enormously successful and innovative megachurch, established a mass media empire, and produced spellbinding theatrical sermons that rivaled Tinseltown's spectacular shows. As McPherson's power grew, she moved beyond religion into the realm of politics, launching a national crusade to fight the teaching of evolution in the schools, defend Prohibition, and resurrect what she believed was the United States' Christian heritage.

Aimee Semple McPherson, née Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy, (born October 9, 1890, near Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada—died September 27, 1944, Oakland, California, U.S.) was a controversial American Pentecostal evangelist and early radio preacher whose International Church of the Foursquare Gospel brought her wealth, notoriety, and a following numbering in the tens of thousands.

Author: Jonathan D. Wells and Sheila R. Phipps
"Taken together, these nine essays contribute to the picture of women increasing their movement into political and economic life while all too often still maintaining their gendered place as determined by society. Their rich insights provide new ways to consider the meaning and role of gender in the post-Civil War South."

Lottie Moon was an American missionary who spent much of her life in China. She worked in villages, where she set up schools for children and taught women and girls about Christianity. She inspired many Baptists to become missionaries. Although her death aboard a ship has been described as the result of her sacrifice and protest of insufficient funding of missions, a 2011 book concluded instead that she became ill from a skin infection on her neck. Annual Christmas donations in her memory continue to fund missionary work, bringing in millions of dollars annually.

Author: Mark A. Noll
In seventeen narratives Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom introduce Christian leaders in Africa and Asia who had tenacious faith in the midst of deprivation, suffering and conflict. Spanning a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, their stories demonstrate the vitality of the Christian faith in a diversity of contexts.

Author: Steve Sun
The historical picture of Dora Yu, a prominent Chinese evangelist in the early 20th century.

Author: Vic Berecz
This is a fan site dedicated to Dlamini.

Author: Kimberly Dickson
Missiologists are beginning to understand that the spread of Christianity in Africa was largely due to Africans internalizing the gospel and spreading it in a culturally relevant and adept manner, often into regions where missionaries had not ventured. Women were critical to this work, as they converted to Christianity first and in much higher numbers than men. Paulina Dlamini provides one such example.

Edith Stein, original name of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Crossor, in Latin, Sancta Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, (born October 12, 1891, Breslau, Germany [now Wrocław, Poland]—died August 9/10, 1942, Auschwitz concentration camp; canonized October 11, 1998; feast day August 9) was a Roman Catholic convert from Judaism, Carmelite nun, philosopher, and spiritual writer who was executed by the Nazis because of her Jewish ancestry and who is regarded as a modern martyr. She was declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1998.

Author: Thomas Gricoski
From Edith Stein's comment that "being is the unfolding of meaning," the author contends that her understanding of the term is relational and thus resistant to both existentialism and essentialism. He tests his hypothesis against Stein's three modes of being (actual, essential, and mental) from both phenomenological and scholastic perspectives.

Author: Sarah R. Borden
Edith Stein was beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998 but is still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. She provides an example of a Christian thinker deeply engaged in the debates of her own day, and her work offers models and insights for addressing the questions of the twenty-first century.Sarah Borden presents an overview of St Edith Stein's life and thought, beginning with her biography. She then covers her early work in phenomenology, her political writings, her studies on women and women's education, as well her later turn to medieval metaphysics, and spiritual and religious matters.

Author: Donald Wallenfang
Nothing is more dangerous to be misunderstood than the question, "What is the human being?" In an era when this question is not only being misunderstood but even forgotten, wisdom delivered by the great thinkers and mystics of the past must be recovered. Edith Stein (1891-1942), a Jewish Carmelite mystical philosopher, offers great promise to resume asking the question of the human being. In Human and Divine Being, Donald Wallenfang offers a comprehensive summary of the theological anthropology of this heroic martyr to truth. Beginning with the theme of human vocation, Wallenfang leads the reader through a labyrinth of philosophical and theological vignettes: spiritual being, the human soul, material being, empathy, the logic of the cross, and the meaning of suffering. The question of the human being is asked in light of divine being by harnessing the fertile tension between the methods of phenomenology and metaphysics. Stein spurs us on to a rendezvous with the stream of "perennial philosophy" that has watered the landscape of thought since conscious time began. In the end, the meaning of human being is thrown into sharp relief against the darkness of all that is not authentically human.

‎Author: Rebecca Moore
Women in Christian Traditions offers a concise and accessible examination of the roles women have played in the construction and practice of Christian traditions, revealing the enormous debt that this major world religion owes to its female followers. It recovers forgotten and obscured moments in church history to help us to realize a richer and fuller understanding of Christianity. This text provides an overview of the complete sweep of Christian history through the lens of feminist scholarship. Yet it also departs from some of the assumptions of that scholarship, raising questions that challenge our thinking about how women have shaped beliefs and practices during two thousand years of church history. Did the emphasis on virginity in the early church empower Christian women? Did the emphasis on marriage during the Reformations of the sixteenth century improve their status? These questions and others have important implications for women in Christianity in particular, and for women in religion in general, since they go to the heart of the human condition.

‎Editors: Beverly M. Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker
For nearly two millennia, despite repeated prohibitions, Christian women have preached. Some have preached in official settings; others have found alternative routes for expression. Prophecy, teaching, writing, and song have all filled a broad definition of preaching. This anthology, with essays by an international group of scholars from several disciplines, investigates the diverse voices of Christian women who claimed the authority to preach and prophesy. The contributors examine the centuries of arguments, grounded in Pauline injunctions, against women's public speech and the different ways women from the early years of the church through the twentieth century have nonetheless exercised religious leadership in their communities. Some of them based their authority solely on divine inspiration; others were authorized by independent-minded communities; a few were even recognized by the church hierarchy. With its lively accounts of women preachers and prophets in the Christian tradition, this exceptionally well-documented collection will interest scholars and general readers alike.

‎Author: Hans Kung
For two years Küng guided a research project on Women and Christianity, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. For most of the religions of the world, women are a problem. From time immemorial they have been subordinate to men, second class in the family, politics and business with limited rights and even limited participation in worship. It is not only in Christianity that equal rights for women has been a scandalously neglected issue. By an examination of the history of women in Christianity, Kung points to the scandals of the past.

‎Author: Ulla Tervahauta
Women and knowledge are interconnected in several ways in late ancient and early Christian discourses, not least because wisdom (Sophia) and spiritual knowledge (Gnosis) were frequently personified as female entities. Ancient texts deal with idealized women and use feminine imagery to describe the divine but they also debate women’s access to and capacity of gaining knowledge. Combining rhetorical analysis with social historical approaches, the contributions in this book cover a wide array of source materials, drawing special attention to the so-called Gnostic texts. The fourteen essays, written by prominent experts of ancient Christianity, are dedicated to Professor Antti Marjanen (University of Helsinki).

‎Author: Patricia Cox Miller
From the fictional Thecla in the second century to the very real Olympias in the early fifth century, the history of women in early Christianity was as complex and rich as the religion itself. This comprehensive sourcebook brings together translations of a variety of ancient Christian texts that elucidate how women were perceived and portrayed in the Greek literature written in the second to the sixth centuries. The texts included in the volume have been generously excerpted, providing the modern reader with an in-depth view of the historical reality of early Christian women's lives as well as a nuanced perspective on the many ways in which women were understood in theological and ecclesiastical frameworks. Few documents written by early Christian women have been preserved; contemporary readers therefore do not have much direct access to these women's own perspectives on their lives and roles as Christians. Nevertheless, there are many kinds of texts that can be used both to reconstruct the history of actual women in early Christianity and to analyze the ancient ideologies and rhetoric that affected how they were perceived. This volume offers many different kinds of texts in order to present as complete a view as possible of early Christian women: documentary sources such as church orders and proceedings, popular narrative sources such as the novelistic apocryphal acts, biographies and lives of saints, and theological treatises on virginity and marriage.

Author: Jessie Gregory Lutz
Chinese Christian women before 1919 have been largely invisible in the records of China missions and Chinese Christianity. With few exceptions, we have known little about them either as individuals or as a group. In this volume, the contributors’ goal is to bring to light the life and work of these pioneer Chinese Christian women. The contributors have scoured a variety of sources in order to recreate the role of early Chinese women Christians in the church and in Chinese society, and also to illustrate how gender affected their understanding of Christianity and their career choices. How did the Chinese context alter their relations with the church and with both Christian and non-Christian communities? What was the legacy of pioneer Chinese Christian women? To provide context for this study, the work opens with an essay on women in imperial China, examining the ideal, the stereotypes, and the reality. Essays on Chinese Christian educators, doctors, nurses, and evangelists indicate the role of the missionaries and the church in making mobility and broadened horizons possible for women.

Author: Shelly Matthews
It has often been said that rich pagan women, much more so than men, were attracted both to early Judaism and Christianity. This book provides a new reading of sources from which this truism springs, focusing on two texts from the turn of the first century, Josephus's Antiquities and Luke's Acts. The book studies representation, analyzing the repeated portrayal of rich women as aiding and/or converting to early Judaism in its various forms. It also shows how these sources can be used in reconstructing women's history, thus engaging current feminist debates about the relationship of rhetorical presentation of women in texts to historical reality. Because many of these texts speak of high-standing women's conversion to Judaism and early Christianity, this book also engages in the current debate about whether early Judaism was a missionary religion. The author argues that focusing on these stories of women converts and adherents, which have been largely ignored in previous discussions of the missionary question, sets the missionary question in a new, more adequate framework. The first chapter elucidates a story in Josephus's Antiquities of the mishaps of two Roman matrons devoted to Isis and Jewish cults by considering the common Hellenistic topos linking high-standing women, promiscuity, and religious impropriety. The remaining chapters demonstrate that in spite of this topos, Josephus, Luke, and other religious apologists did tell stories of rich women's associations with their communities for positive rhetorical effect. In so doing, the book challenges the widespread assumption that women's association with "foreign" religious cults was always derided, questions scholarly arguments about public and private roles in antiquity, and invites reflection on issues of mission and conversion within the larger framework of Greco-Roman benefaction.

Editors: Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek
In a time when the ordination of women is an ongoing and passionate debate, the study of women's ministry in the early church is a timely and significant one. There is much evidence from documents, doctrine, and artifacts that supports the acceptance of women as presbyters and deacons in the early church. While this evidence has been published previously, it has never before appeared in one complete English-language collection. With this book, church historians Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek present fully translated literary, epigraphical, and canonical references to women in early church offices. Through these documents, Madigan and Osiek seek to understand who these women were and how they related to and were received by, the church through the sixth century. They chart women's participation in church office and their eventual exclusion from its leadership roles.

Author: Carole A. Myscofski
The Roman Catholic church played a dominant role in colonial Brazil, so that women’s lives in the colony were shaped and constrained by the Church’s ideals for pure women, as well as by parallel concepts in the Iberian honor code for women. Records left by Jesuit missionaries, Roman Catholic church officials, and Portuguese Inquisitors make clear that women’s daily lives and their opportunities for marriage, education, and religious practice were sharply circumscribed throughout the colonial period. Yet these same documents also provide evocative glimpses of the religious beliefs and practices that were especially cherished or independently developed by women for their own use, constituting a separate world for wives, mothers, concubines, nuns, and witches. Drawing on extensive original research in primary manuscript and printed sources from Brazilian libraries and archives, as well as secondary Brazilian historical works, Carole Myscofski proposes to write Brazilian women back into history, to understand how they lived their lives within the society created by the Portuguese imperial government and Luso-Catholic ecclesiastical institutions. Myscofski offers detailed explorations of the Catholic colonial views of the ideal woman, the patterns in women’s education, the religious views on marriage and sexuality, the history of women’s convents and retreat houses, and the development of magical practices among women in that era. One of the few wide-ranging histories of women in colonial Latin America, this book makes a crucial contribution to our knowledge of the early modern Atlantic World.

Authors: Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Claire Sorin
Contradictions are legion when it comes to women and spirituality. In Christian cultures, the worth of the female sex is highly ambivalent, since virginity and motherhood are construed respectively as badges of purity and fruitfulness.

Editors: Franca Ela Consolino and Judith Herrin
The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines images of the Virgin Mary as a means of tracing the spread of her cult and feast days from East to West
Exploration of the significance of classical culture for medieval women who composed poems for a Christian audience
Evaluation of art as a means of establishing devotional relationships not necessarily mediated by the voices of preachers or the reading of texts

Editors: Franca Ela Consolino and Judith Herrin
The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines the relationship between women and the Bible's reception in the centuries of the High and Late Middle Ages in Europe. Contributors bring a variety of new insights to questions of how women of the Bible were treated in literary, mystical, and doctrinal texts as well as in art and music. Though the Bible was used to legitimize the subordination of women to men and to exclude them from power, during this period women produced works of theology and biblical interpretation. Contributors include Gemma Avenoza, Marina Benedetti, Dinora Corsi, Maria Laura Giordano, Elisabeth Gössmann, Maria Leticia Sánchez Hernández, Hildegund Keul, Linda Maria Koldau, Martina Kreidler-Kos, Rita Librandi, Gary Macy, Constant J. Mews, Magda Motté, Rosa María Parrinello, María Isabel Toro Pascua, Claudia Poggi, Carmel Posa, Marina Santini, Valeria Ferrari Schiefer, Andrea Taschl-Erber, Adriana Valerio, and Paola Vitolo.

Author: Rebecca VanDoodewaard
Women are an essential element in church history. Just as Deborah, Esther, and the New Testament Marys helped shape Bible history, so the women of the Reformed church have helped to make its history great.
In Reformation Women, Rebecca Vandoodewaard introduces readers to twelve sixteenth-century women who are not as well known today as contemporaries like Katie Luther and Lady Jane Grey. Providing an example to Christians today of strong service to Christ and His church, these influential, godly women were devoted to Reformation truth, in many cases provided support for their husbands, practiced hospitality, and stewarded their intellectual abilities. Their strength and bravery will inspire you, and your understanding of church history will become richer as you learn how God used them to further the Reformation through their work and influence.

Author: Stephen J. Davis
Thecla, a disciple of the apostle Paul, became perhaps the most celebrated female saint and "martyr" among Christians in late antiquity. In the early church, Thecla's example was associated with the piety of women -- in particular, with women's ministry and travel. Devotion to Saint Thecla quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean world: her image was painted on walls of tombs, stamped on clay flasks and oil lamps, engraved on bronze crosses and wooden combs, and even woven into textile curtains. Bringing together literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence, often for the first time, Stephen Davis here reconstructs the cult of Saint Thecla in Asia Minor and Egypt -- the social practices, institutions, and artefacts that marked the lives of actual devotees. From this evidence the author shows how the cult of this female saint remained closely linked with communities of women as a source of empowerment and a cause of controversy.

Editors: Ross S. Kraemer and Mary Rose D'Angelo
This new collection of fourteen integrated, original essays by prominent scholars and experienced teachers provides a comprehensive and accessible entree to current research on women and the origins of Christianity. Engaging for both the interested reader and the specialist in religion, Women and Christian Origins is sensitive to feminist theory and attentive to distinctions between the (re)construction of women's history in early Christian churches and ancient constructions of gender difference

Author: Mirjam van Veen
Harlot, pious martyr, marriage breaker, obedient sister, prophetess, literate woman, agent of the devil, hypocrite. These are some qualifications of the image of Anabaptist/Mennonite women, from a wide array of perspectives. Over the ages they became both negative and positive stereotypes, created by either opponents or sympathizers, as a means of demonizing or promoting the dissident, radical free church movement. This volume explores the characteristics, backgrounds and effects of the collective perceptions of Anabaptist/Mennonite women, as well as their self-understanding, from the sixteenth into the nineteenth centuries, in a variety of case studies. This is not a gender study in the traditional sense. The theory of imagology sets the stage for the interpretation of the image of the European Mennonite sisters, acting within their religious, moral, cultural and social landscapes of Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and the Ukraine (tsarist Russia).

Author: Kirsi I. Stjerna
Women and the Reformation gathers historical materials and personal accounts to provide a comprehensive and accessible look at the status and contributions of women as leaders in the 16th century Protestant world.

Explores the new and expanded role as core participants in Christian life that women experienced during the Reformation
Examines diverse individual stories from women of the times, ranging from biographical sketches of the ex-nun Katharina von Bora Luther and Queen Jeanne d'Albret, to the prophetess Ursula Jost and the learned Olimpia Fulvia Morata
Brings together social history and theology to provide a groundbreaking volume on the theological effects that these women had on Christian life and spirituality
Accompanied by a website at www.blackwellpublishing.com/stjerna offering students access to the writings by the women featured in the book

Editors: Hermina Joldersma and Louis Grijp
Among the most moving writings of the Reformation in the sixteenth-century Low Countries are the final words of Anabaptists condemned to death for their faith. Through a series of circumstances we have a significant body of such writings by women: Anabaptists were the most severely persecuted among Protestant groups, Anabaptist women made up a comparatively high proportion of those martyred, and Anabaptists attached great importance to preserving the memory of the martyred, regardless of gender, through the written word.

As these women recount the details of arguments with their inquisitors, their feelings during turbulent months in prison, their love for their children, husbands, parents, and friends, their ecstasy at having been found worthy to die for their faith, one cannot help but be moved, and impressed, by their voices and their experiences. Their writings reveal them to be articulate and courageous individuals who show not only “manly courage” but the kind of personal courage which is rooted in a self-assurance uncommon for women, one based on taking personal responsibility for the most important matter in their lives, their own salvation.