Gender and Christian Religion

Church History, Sept, 2000 by Margaret Bendroth

Gender and Christian Religion. Edited By R. N. Swanson. Studies in Church History 34. Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1998. xxii 546 pp. $90.00 cloth.

The study of gender is, in many ways, the logical next step for women's history. The first women's historians sought out special, heroic women to include in old narratives, or they lauded various feminine "contributions" to important events of the past. Subsequent scholarship took an entirely different tack, focusing on the uniqueness of women's experience instead of trying to make it fit into a story line constructed mostly by men writing about other men. More recently, gender studies has promised to restore a healthy male-female dialectic often missing from analyses of "women's cultures"; by analyzing the social construction of femaleness as well as maleness across time and culture, historians have begun to question established interpretations and to create a new account of the past with both sexes in clear conceptual view.

As the thirty-two essays in this collection attest, a gendered reading of religious history provides some intriguing new avenues of exploration. The volume, composed of papers read at two recent meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society, deals with the problem of gender construction from a variety of perspectives. The table of contents follows a rough chronological order, beginning with gender imagery in accounts of early Christian martyrdom and ending with discussions of contemporary controversies surrounding homosexuality and church order among Australian Anglicans. The authors represent a variety of mostly British scholarly institutions and deal with primarily European and Protestant subjects, though a few of the later essays take up Third World topics. Given these constraints, the volume is by no means an exhaustive survey of Christianity; the relative geographic, denominational, and chronological balance, however, offers evidence of a wide scope of inquiry and a firm editorial hand.

If this volume has a central point, it is that the study of gender can complicate some established views of the past and affirm others with new nuance and power. But this is not a simple task. Surveying Christian history through the lens of gender requires attention to the rhetorical content of traditional texts, as well as to their relation to real practices in church life. Many of the essays also analyze the role of gendered experience in religious communities, and the extent to which Christianity intensified socially determined identities or allowed individuals to transcend them as brothers and sisters "in Christ."

The authors' uniform aversion to oversimplification means that few simple answers emerge from their collective effort. This volume offers few quick reference points or handy summaries of work in progress, and it will interest scholars in the field more than it will benefit casual readers. Still, taken as a whole, the essays clearly demonstrate the deep ambiguity within the Christian tradition toward embodied femininity as well as masculinity. This is of course hardly new news about Christianity, with its long history of monastic asceticism, clerical celibacy, and unapologetic misogyny. But, as the work of these authors suggests, sustained attention to gendered language and imagery can provide concrete instances of historical moments in which this ambivalence fundamentally shaped the meaning of Christian faith.

Indeed, certain historical periods emerge with special clarity. Readers will find few references to the traditional big events in Christian history--the Council of Nicea or the Reformation, for example. Although this volume does not make such an argument, the chronological clustering of essays of course suggests that the traditional periodizations of church history may need reformulation, at least in light of the inner history of gendered religious experience. Several essays, for example, focus on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, discussing a variety of misogynist texts. Although few of these texts appear in a completely different light, they are rendered more understandable by careful attention to social and linguistic context. Seventeenth-century English Puritans and Quakers also receive their due, at least in part because of their complex and ambivalent role in locating religion within the family. The later Victorians, with their pulsating rhetoric of muscular Christianity and feminine purity, also receive special attention, understandably so.

The editor's introduction attempts to group the essays by themes, though the juxtapositions are not always illuminating. Three essays, for example, deal with "concepts of gender"--one on second-century Christian martyrdom, one on Victorian "muscular Christianity," and one on the social-purity movement from the same period. Another group of essays on "misogyny" takes on Pope Innocent III, the thirteenth-century "Golden Legend," seventeenth-century conduct books, and church discipline in the turn-of-the-century Church of Scotland. Other categories are more self-evident, including a consideration of early medieval sources of Christian gender ideology and three different essays on gendered metaphors in Christian theology (for instance, the church as the "Bride of Christ"). Six essays deal with types of women's associations and two with domestic religion, though as this was the topic of Anthony Fletcher's presidential address for 1996-97, the paradigm of the godly family is an important theme for the entire volume. A final category includes "non-British" topics, including religious iconography in sixteenth-century Moldavia and Wallachia, Jamaican missions, and the Anglican church on Sarawak.