In twelve chapters of remarkably uniform length, Patricia Ranft of Central Michigan University discusses the role of women within the first millennium and a half of Christianity and challenges traditional misogynist interpretations of the pre- modern church. She argues in her introduction "that within Christianity there exists a strong and enduring tradition that maintains the spiritual equality of women," (xi) and provides a thorough catalogue of the presence of women within the Church without, however, engaging in an analysis of that presence. Instead, she extensively quotes Biblical, Patristic, and medieval hagiographic writings in support of her thesis that there is no basis to the argument that "Christianity was largely responsible for Western misogynism," (ix) and that before the modern era women had a great deal more spiritual equality with men than is so often assumed.
The first five chapters--perhaps the most useful part of this book--cover the first four centuries of the Church, with special attention paid to the fourth century. Chapter 1, "The Spiritual Nature of Women in Scripture and Early Christian Writings," discusses the Biblical basis for the spiritual equality of women, extensively citing both Scripture and early twentieth-century translations of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Chapter 2 briefly examines women's roles in early Christian communities and accounts of female martyrdom in the early church, especially that of St. Perpetua; chapter 3 assembles assessments of women's spiritual nature by fourth-century theologians, including Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and other Post-Nicene Fathers; and chapter 4 uses vitae, letters, and recorded sayings of women to attempt to reconstruct the lives and the asceticism of individual Christian women of the fourth century, including Marcella, Macrina, Melanie the Elder and Melanie the Younger. Here Ranft uses the work of Peter Brown and Carolyn Walker Bynum on the concept of the body, but the analysis that follows is sadly limited. Chapter 5 continues her discussion of women's roles in the development of Marian devotions in Late Antiquity, with special attention paid to Syraic sources, primarily the works of John of Ephesus.
The middle ages are covered in chapters 6-11. In her discussion of early medieval saints in chapter 6, she continues her special attention to Syraic sources to the detriment of the rest of the Eastern Christian tradition; in her account of western saints, she utilizes a limited number of Latin and Anglo-Saxon sources, marking the shift in this book from east to west: after the schism of 1054, Women and Spiritual Equality deals exclusively with western Christianity. Her account of the role of women in the medieval church utilizes a broad variety of sources ranging from vitae, sermons, and Dante's Divine Comedy to religious art and the work of women religious, including Beguine mystics and Hildegard of Bingen. It is also the least satisfactory part of this book, for as the number of sources increase, so do the sweeping over- generalizations of the role of women in the medieval Church. Chapter 12 briefly discusses Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Enlightenment opinions of women. Ranft states that the Protestant Reformation led to a re-examination of marriage and the monastic life, but both space and the paucity of written records after the dissolution of religious communities for women in the wake of the Reformation do not permit her to explore female spirituality in Protestant Europe, and she limits her account of the role of women within the Reformation to brief extracts from Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Erasmus. The Counter-Reformation, however, provides many examples of female piety and spiritual dignity, and Ranft provides her readers with relatively lengthy account of Teresa of Avila's mystical theology. She closes with brief accounts of women English Protestant martyrs and recusant Roman Catholics, followed by two paragraphs on Enlightenment views on the nature of women. A very brief epilogue (231-2) sums up her argument that there was an enduring tradition of women's spiritual equality within Christianity whilst simultaneously raising as many questions as she claims to have answered.
Ranft makes little effort to analyse the material she so extensively quotes: the nearly fifty pages of endnotes are littered with ibid, and with the notable exception of Peter Lombard, the vast majority of her citations to primary sources are to English translations, many of them very old indeed. Furthermore, she provides little guidance for her readers as to the reliability of these texts, which are taken at face value. Modern interpretations and recent scholarship are conspicuous by their absence; for example, chapter 8, "The High Middle Ages: Hermits and Scholars," would have been greatly improved if recent works on medieval monasticism by Constance Hoffman Berman, Brian Golding, Sally Thompson, and Bruce Venarde did not pass unnoticed. This may be intentional, for she states in her introduction that she wanted to let her readers encounter the evidence with as little editorial interference as possible, yet I believe that her argument would have been considerably strengthened had she engaged modern scholarship more comprehensively. I also noticed a small number of editorial lapses: e.g., on page 134, the name of Bernard of Tiron's biographer is misspelled "Gaufridi Grossi;" on page 262, Mary McLaughlin's 1975 article "Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women is cited as "Women" in note 67 and as "Dignity" in note 69; and the name of the editor of one of Ranft's own books is misspelled in the bibliography. (298)
This book is in many ways a continuation and expansion of themes that Ranft previously explored in her 1996 work Women and the Religious Life in Premodern Europe; themes that, given the focus on women spiritual directors in chapter 12, will no doubt be continued in her forthcoming A Woman's Way: The Forgotten History of Women's Spiritual Directors. Women and Spiritual Equality is not a work for specialists in the late antique and medieval church seeking a new interpretation of the role of women in the first fifteen Christian centuries. It was her intention in Women and Spiritual Equality "merely to document the presence of a tradition of women's spiritual equality throughout the centuries," (xii) and in this limited task she succeeds, providing a useful introductory work for beginning undergraduate students and that increasingly rara avis, the interested general reader.