Nice surprises await the reader of this splendid collection. All nine essays in it are smart, interesting, well-written, and genuinely innovative--none merely fills space or covers a necessary subject. All are pitched in a persuasive but not pedantic tone. Each essay treats a different topic related to medieval Christianity and gender, ranging from late antique hagiography to fifteenth-century urban politics, yet the book's chapters actually form a coherent analysis of the nexus of gender, religion, and household in premodern Europe. In addition, the essays speak to each other as well as to a potentially broad audience of scholars, students, and non-specialist readers. And--mirabile dictu!--the volume's introductory matter, cleverly divided like the book itself into two sections (pre-1000 and post-1000), actually helps readers think through and beyond the essays rather than simply rehearsing their contents. The editors even kindly offer a list of the volume's seven main points. Bibliographies of primary and secondary sources are included for each essay, which is crucial in a collection crossing specialities. Finally, the book is neither too short nor too long, but perfect for classrooms.
The biggest surprise of the volume may be one that its writers also encountered during the 1990s when taking part in a series of European conferences on Women in the Christian Tradition from Late Antiquity to the Reformation. The conferees set out originally to investigate the andocentric nature of Christian doctrine and history. They expected to uncover evidence of women's exclusion from meaningful roles in Christianity. Instead, the more deeply conferees probed textual, visual, and material sources, the more evidence they found of women's diverse participation in religion. In fact, they had to alter the very definition of institutional Christianity to include the kinds and venues of gendered religious experience that they were uncovering. As a result, this book argues that much of late antique and medieval Christianity actually occurred in the household rather than in church or another officially designated sacred space. All the essays examine the influence of households on public institutions, ecclesiastical and secular, and the ways that church institutions and religious thinkers helped shape households. Together, the essays trace changes in Christian households across centuries and regions. Throughout the book, authors carefully maintain a focus on the women who managed, dwelt in, created, symbolized, and theorized about households.
Mulder-Bakker and Wogan-Browne open the book with an invocation of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere--a medieval church overwhelmed by Baroque trappings in whose courtyard tourists can still glimpse children and old ladies taking the sun. Below the visible church lurk ancient foundations of a Roman household, possibly the martyr Cecilia's own. Inside the sanctuary reposes the fragile, erotic statue of the saint, seemingly asleep with her hands languidly pointing. Pilgrims have trooped to see Cecilia for many centuries. Matrons as well as men have strewn her with their riches. But Cecilia was also a heroine of texts, the placeholder of a day in the Catholic calendar, and patroness of a community of religious women. Many other churches are named after her and many other girls were given her name. The house beneath a revised church housing a dynamic modern congregation that commemorates the ancient martyr who was a medieval saint and textual sign with many meanings perfectly represents the problems tackled in this collaborative book.
Nine high-quality essays follow, the best of them by Kate Cooper, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and the team of Sarah Rees Jones and Felicity Riddy. Cooper contributes two essays. The first treats experimental religious communities built in the fifth-century Holy Land by Melania the Younger, a rich Roman aristocrat and friend of Saint Jerome. Law and custom in the late empire were fluid enough that Melania could assemble a Christian household composed of ascetic friends, kinswomen, and slaves living off her own income and considerable personal property. Cooper, through her typically sensitive reading of hagiographical codes, shows how different versions of Melania's story reveal the development of monastic households away from this organic model to the standard, medieval model of single-sex monastic communities. Cooper's second essay deconstructs the metaphor of miles Christi, the solider of Christ, as applied to female heads of households and male political leaders. Cooper analyzes two conduct manuals from the sixth century--one for a Roman woman of senatorial rank and another aimed at a military official in Carthage-- to reveal how gendered models of secular and ecclesiastical authority responded to the same social and political impetuses.
Other essays in the first half of the book include Eva Synek's piece on gender hierarchies in ancient households. Synek focuses on the evolving powers of the male episcopate in late antiquity, showing how family organization influenced the development of Christian institutions. Judith Herren's essay leaves theoretical households for the dark corners of real houses in early medieval Byzantium. She shows how women's traditional roles as keepers of the hearth and its pagan divinities led directly to Christian women's special devotions to personal saintly icons. What is more, women's access to icons in domestic space helped grant them access to the grander icons in churches, despite other restrictions upon women's religious leadership and movements within relatively public sacred space. Finally, Birgit Sawyer surveys women's participation in the conversion of Scandinavia. Turning Christian was apparently both good and bad for women of the frozen north, particular as regards inheritance customs.
The second half of the book moves to the urban households of the later Middle Ages and the constantly reforming Christianity of the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. This half of the book begins with another invocation by Wogan-Browne and Mulder-Bakker: the mystic Saint Birgitta of Sweden's vision in 1346 of the Virgin Mary, in which the mother of God called Birgitta her daughter-in-law and charged her with housewifely oversight of all Christians. By Birgitta's time, households based on conjugal partnerships and nuclear families had become not only the basic economic and social units of European cities but the foundation of Christian ideologies. In these centuries, mothers and wives took on new importance as conduits of Christian values and worked with male clerics and political leaders to make good Christian government.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne reviews instructional treatises aimed by scholarly clerics at noble Anglo-Norman ladies, showing how writers and aristocratic patrons together determined the contents and promoted publication of these texts. Clerics composed religious treatises in the vernacular, justifying their choice of language and genre by their readers' lack of Latin and inability to grasp theology. Yet monastic leaders used these same treatises to instruct their male novices in ethics. Simple gender analyses of writers' motives or audience reception cannot begin to explain the collective authorship or complex gender agendas buried in the pages of these pious texts.
Two subsequent essays also treat the relation of gender and religious learning in overlapping secular and monastic households. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen's piece on the community of Cistercian women at Helfta shows how the nuns used ancient metaphors for the Christian household- -the oikonomia of all believers, composed of males and females, with a joint duty to maintain their household--to justify their practice of theology. Mulder-Bakker looks at the households of late medieval Brabant as sites of moral instruction. In an argument similar to that of Wogan-Browne, she shows how instructional treatises aimed at both female householders and male civic leaders emphasized a need to maintain peace and order among the citizens of expanding Flemish cities. Mulder-Bakker credits women of the newly dominant urban bourgeoisie with helping to shift control of city government from tribal nobilities to new and more cooperative elites.
The last essay in the volume, by Sarah Rees Jones and Felicity Riddy, begins with the court case of a shifty dealer in metals, tried in 1428 for lacing his lead with tin. The self-sorry, moralizing tone of the metal-dealer's defense suggests the main points of this essay: That ordinary households in fifteenth-century York were the source of emerging civic ideals of individual conscience, mutual support, and public good. The authors make their point by examining a book of hours produced for a York lady in the same period as the metal- dealer's trial, called the Bolton Hours of York. Through the close reading of a single mundane artifact, the authors to discern the themes, aims, and possible owner of the book, the saint most popular in her neighborhood, and even the political sympathies of householders in the street where she lived. In the process, Rees Jones and Riddy also undermine the dichotomies of private/public, domestic/civic, and female/male that have misdirected other historians.
This volume has three minor flaws, none of which are probably the authors' fault. First, the book lacks illustrations to support arguments such as that of Rees Jones and Riddy that rely on images for evidence. Second, even without pictures the book is very expensive. Finally, the editors make one false claim about this book. They write that the volume's "attention to the role of the household makes it impossible to see European Christianity as a single monolithic entity or process." Actually, this superb book does much more. It demonstrates that historians cannot responsibly study religion in the past without examining gender, nor can they recover the experience of European women without understanding the history of Christianity.