I WAS MOWING THE LAWN when my husband walked out into the backyard. I couldn’t hear his words over the roar of the mower, but I could see his face. I knew it was bad. I let go of the mower handle, and it began to putter out.
“The elders just met,” he said, holding his phone toward me. “They called to tell me that they will not reconsider their position on women.”
I had almost reached him, newly cut grass dusting my ankles and shoes. I was expecting bad news, given his face, but I wasn’t expecting this. We had decided to speak out and had asked the elders to allow a woman to teach high school Sunday school. We were optimistic, knowing at least two of the four elders were supportive. I had allowed myself to hope.
It proved a vain hope.
I don’t remember what I replied. I am not even sure I got words out. But my husband understood me. “If we force this,” he said, “I will lose my job.” The silence around us grew louder.
Did we really want to go down this path?
I could hear my children inside the house. Then just six and twelve, they were blissfully ignorant. This church was their home. It was filled with their friends. It was all they had ever known.
Did we really want to go down this path?
Almost twenty years my husband and I had been married and had served in ministry together, the bulk of which had been at this church. It was our home too. It was filled with our best friends. The women and men who had prayed with us as I finished my dissertation and interviewed for jobs; celebrated with us at the birth of our son; supported us as we waited five long years for the birth of our daughter; laughed with us over inside jokes about margarita machines and empty Starbucks gift cards.
Did we really want to do this?
I finally nodded, letting him know that I understood. Then I wiped the sweat off my face and went back to mowing. The familiar rumble of the mower focused my racing thoughts. I tried to concentrate only on the grass in front of me.
But of course I couldn’t.
I was angry. I was tired. I was scared.
And for some strange reason, all I could think about was Margery Kempe.
Why Margery Kempe Matters
My husband and I were about to make a very difficult decision, and all I could think about was a fifteenth-century woman. (Any of my students reading this will surely laugh.)
I couldn’t get her off my mind for two reasons. First, I was teaching a graduate seminar on medieval sermons that semester, and I had just reread her book in preparation. That certainly explains why she was on my mind.
But the second reason was that Kempe was helping answer my most burning question: Did I really want to challenge complementarian teachings about women at our church?
She certainly wasn’t the only factor I was considering (far from it). But because I am a medieval historian and because I knew the story of Margery Kempe, I knew my answer to this question was yes, I wanted to try.
One day in 1417, Margery Kempe was arrested in the medieval English town of York. Her extravagant worship style, which included disrupting services with crying and sobbing, together with her tendency to debate theology with clergy and even preach to local people, meant that she was often a person of suspicion. This time she found herself facing the second most important ecclesiastical figure in medieval England, the archbishop of York. The archbishop knew Margery was traveling around the countryside without her husband; he knew she was acting like a religious teacher without any training; and he knew she had been disrupting local church services with her ecstatic worship.
His words to her were harsh and clear: “I hear it said that you are a very wicked woman.”1
At this moment in the story, conventional wisdom about the medieval church would tell us that medieval women were subject to masculine authority. Conventional wisdom tells us that because women could not be priests, they could not preach. It tells us that women were always subordinate to the men in their lives—husbands, fathers, brothers. Conventional wisdom about medieval Christianity tells us that Margery was an aberration. She was also a very likely candidate for being burned at the stake as a heretic.
But conventional wisdom isn’t always true. When the archbishop of York confronted this middle-aged woman, she stood her ground in a room full of masculine authority. When the archbishop called her a “very wicked woman,” she fought back, responding directly: “Sir, I also hear it said that you are a wicked man. And if you are as wicked as people say, you will never get to heaven, unless you amend while you are here.”2
Do you hear what she said?
Margery Kempe told the second most important ecclesiastical figure in medieval England that he wasn’t going to heaven unless he repented.
She also used the Word of God to defend her right as a woman to teach about God. She preached from the Bible to a room full of male priests—including the archbishop of York—defending her right to do so as a woman. Quoting from Luke 11, she explained, “For God Almighty does not forbid, sir, that we should speak of him. And also the Gospel mentions that, when the woman had heard our Lord preach, she came before him and said in a loud voice, ‘Blessed be the womb that bore you, and the teats that gave thee suck.’ Then our Lord replied to her, ‘In truth, so are they blessed who hear the word of God and keep it.’ And therefore, sir, I think that the Gospel gives me leave to speak of God.”3
When Margery stopped speaking, a priest, horrified by her condemnation of the archbishop, ran to get his copy of the Pauline epistles. He read aloud one of the “women be silent” passages—either 1 Corinthians 14 or 1 Timothy 2—proclaiming that “no woman should preach.”4
It didn’t work.
“I do not preach, sir,” she said. “I do not go into any pulpit. I use only conversation and good words, and that I will do while I live.”5 For this medieval woman, Paul didn’t apply. She could teach the Word of God, even as an ordinary woman, because, she argued, Jesus endorsed it.
We have to admire her nerve. Margery Kempe not only argued with the archbishop of York; she also taught him theological truths. She defended her right to speak the Word of God, and she accused the archbishop of being a wicked man, going on to tell a story of a gross bear who eats beautiful pear blossoms and publicly defecates them in the face of a priest. When confronted with Scripture that demanded her silence as a woman, Margery explained how that Scripture did not apply to her. When the archbishop demanded that she leave immediately, she argued with him until he accepted her terms. Finally, in frustration, he paid a man five shillings to escort her from the room. Her friends met her back in the city, rejoicing, as the text reads, because God “had given her—uneducated as she was—the wit and wisdom to answer so many learned men without shame or blame, thanks be to God.”6 Indeed, the archbishop admitted that he had examined her and found no fault with her faith. He even wrote a letter endorsing that she was not a heretic, which he gave to her to carry on her travels.
Some scholars have argued that Margery Kempe’s position as a well-off woman with a politically important father protected her (John Brunham was mayor of Bishop’s Lynn, her hometown, and a member of Parliament). Class trumps sex, and Margery gets away with more than she should have in her time. This is absolutely correct. How Margery achieves a chaste marriage provides a good example (in book 11 of her text). According to the medieval church, husbands and wives both owe the “conjugal debt” (sex).7 One cannot withhold sex from the other. Margery, in pursuit of a holy life (and perhaps also motivated by her previous fourteen pregnancies), wants to be free of the conjugal debt. Her husband bargains with her, asking in part that she pay off his financial debts. Margery has more money than he does, and she controls it herself (which often surprises many of my students). Her husband, John, calls her “no good wife” when she admits she would rather him be decapitated by a murderer than sleep with him again, but reluctantly he agrees to a chaste marriage.8 In her insightful discussion of this encounter, Isabel Davis observes that Margery’s willingness to pay off John’s debts shows “the kind of autonomy Margery can buy with her independent finances.”9 Without a doubt, Margery’s money and position smoothed her unconventional path.
But Margery Kempe went free from the archbishop of York because of more than just her financial standing. She was also helped by the fact that when she faced him, she didn’t stand alone. A great cloud of female witnesses, not only remembered but revered by the medieval Christian world, stood with her.
Unlike modern evangelicals, medieval Christians remembered the female leaders of their past. Medieval churches, sermons, and devotional literature overflowed with valiant women from the early years of Christianity. Women who defied male authority, claiming their right to preach and teach, converting hundreds, even thousands, to Christianity. Women who received ordination as deaconesses and took vows as abbesses—perhaps at least one woman ordained as a bishop. Women who performed miracles and publicly taught the apostles, and even one woman who won an argument with Jesus (Matthew 15:21–28). This cloud of witnesses stood alongside Margery Kempe as she faced the archbishop, imbuing her with both the strength and the familiarity of the past.
At one point in The Book of Margery Kempe, God promises Kempe that the powerful female leaders from early Christianity would be with her and would escort her to heaven when she died. “I promise you,” God said to her, “that I shall come to your end, at your dying, with my blessed mother, and my holy angels and twelve apostles, St Katherine, St Margaret and St Mary Magdalene, and many other saints that are in heaven. . . . You shall not fear the devil of hell, for he has no power over you.”10
Like Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan—a professional writer who lived in late fourteenth-century France and was employed by the French court—also remembered the strong female leaders from Christian history. Beyond using these women to defend her individual right to speak, Christine used these women to authorize female speech more broadly. As she wrote,
If women’s language had been so blameworthy and of such small authority as some men argue, our Lord Jesus Christ would never have deigned to wish that so worthy a mystery as His most gracious resurrection be first announced by a woman, just as He commanded the blessed Magdalen, to whom He first appeared on Easter, to report and announce it to His apostles and to Peter. Blessed God, may you be praised, who, among the other infinite boons and favors which You have bestowed upon the feminine sex, desired that woman carry such lofty and worthy news.11
In a feminine twist on apostolic authority, Jesus’s authorization of Mary Magdalene “bestowed upon the feminine sex” the right not only to speak but to speak with authority.
When Margery Kempe reminded the archbishop about the conversation between Jesus and a woman in Luke 11, she was reminding him that, in the world of medieval Christianity, she didn’t have to be silent.
Jesus had already given women the freedom to speak.12
Margery Kempe’s Cloud of Female Witnesses
I am a women’s retreat dropout. I really tried to go during the early years of our ministry—I knew it was important in my role as a pastor’s wife to spend time with other women and build community. But I grew to dread such retreats. One retreat in particular scarred me. Around thirty women from our church went. The accommodations at a nice encampment in the East Texas woods provided a lovely, peaceful setting. The food was delicious. I relished the chance to spend time with friends.
The speaker was a different story. She had one message: women are divinely called to be stay-at-home moms dedicated to childrearing and keeping the home. She reduced the story of Luke 10, in which Jesus tells Martha that her sister has chosen the “better part,” to a lesson about a woman so self-absorbed with being the perfect host that she almost ruins Jesus’s dinner. Instead of emphasizing the strength of women’s faith and how central women’s discipleship was to the success of the early Christian movement, she focused her message almost entirely on a very narrow interpretation of Titus 2. I couldn’t take it for long, and I skipped the next session to grade papers.
That semester I had assigned Larissa Tracy’s Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints Lives. This book is a collection of Middle English stories about female saints, drawn from one of the most popular religious texts in the medieval world, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. I love introducing these women to my students because the stories shatter stereotypes about medieval women. They are Margery Kempe’s great cloud of witnesses; the group includes several women Kempe mentions in her own book.
As I sat on the front porch of the cabin, reading essays about women who broke free from marriage to serve God, whose preaching brought thousands to salvation, and whose words openly defied the patriarchy around them, I couldn’t escape the irony. Not far from me, a roomful of women were being told that their highest calling as Christian women was to be wives and mothers—which implied that women who found meaning or calling apart from being wives and mothers were defying God’s call for them. Yet I knew medieval women who were told the exact opposite—women’s primary calling was to serve God first, which for some meant eschewing traditional family life and for others meant working around it.
I wondered what the speaker would think of women like Saint Paula, who abandoned her children for the higher purpose of following God’s call on her life. Paula’s story tells of how she set sail for Jerusalem—after the death of her husband—on a pilgrimage, leaving three of her children alone, crying on the shore. Maybe the speaker would have claimed that Paula was not following biblical womanhood, as she did not exemplify Titus 2. But Paula seemed to believe she was practicing biblical womanhood, drawing strength from Jesus’s statement that “whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). Saint Jerome, her biographer, tells us that as the ship drew away from the shore, Paula “held her eyes to heaven . . . ignoring her children and putting her trust in God. . . . In that rejoicing, her courage coveted the love of her children as the greatest of its kind, yet she left them all for the love of God.”13 Paula founded a monastery in Bethlehem and worked alongside Jerome to translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. The Bible she helped translate became the Vulgate, the first major translation of the Bible into an everyday language outside of Greek and Hebrew. It became the most commonly used Bible throughout the medieval era.
What would the speaker think about Saint Margaret of Antioch, an alleged Christian martyr, also from the fourth century? Margaret’s story was not only told in collections of saints’ lives like the Gilte Legende but was also repeated in sermons. John Mirk’s Festial explains how Margaret’s beauty complicated her vow to remain a virgin and serve God. According to the text, “she was fair surpassing all other women” and caught the eye of a Roman governor. When she refused his sexual advances and his demand for her to forsake Christianity, the governor tortured her and threw her into prison. Festial records that despite the “great plenty of blood” that poured from her body, Margaret steadfastly prayed that God would empower her to resist.14
At this point the story gets interesting, because God answers her prayer.
A devilish creature appears in the corner of her cell—“a great horrible dragon.” Without much delay, it eats Margaret. The text reads, “His mouth was on her head, and his tongue stretched down to her heel.” Margaret remains surprisingly calm, despite being “all in the mouth” of a demonic dragon. She simply makes the sign of the cross, calling on the power of God to aid her. The dragon bursts apart and Margaret steps free.15
In this brief but dramatic moment, the scene in the prison cell shifts from that of a dragon towering over Margaret to Margaret standing tall above the dragon. With the last of his strength, the devil confesses his failure: “Alas, I am undone forever, and all my might is gone, now such a young woman has overcome me; for many a big and a strong man I have defeated, but now such an inferior has gotten mastery and put me under her feet.”16 Although the story concludes with Margaret’s martyrdom (she gets her head chopped off), it first tells how her final act involves a great earthquake followed by the Holy Spirit descending from heaven as a dove to anoint her. The thousands of people who have gathered to watch her tortured death convert on the spot to Christianity, proclaiming, “There is no God but [the God] in which Margaret believes.”17
Again, I wondered what the conference speaker would do with Margaret, a woman who defied marriage, defied male authority, fought and killed a dragon, and was anointed by God in the same way that Jesus was anointed. Margery Kempe would have had special affinity with Margaret, not only because of Margaret’s reputation as a preaching dragon-slayer but also because Margery’s home church in Lynn was dedicated to Saint Margaret—and the name Margery is probably a diminutive of Margaret, showing how well medieval Christians remembered women like Margaret.
Of course, modern evangelicals don’t forget all the women in Christian history. Take, for example, Mary and Martha, the sisters from Bethany. I heard the conference speaker talk that day about Martha, who was praised as a homemaker. She cooked, cleaned, took care of the domestic space, and showed hospitality to Jesus and his disciples. This understanding of Martha is popular in devotional resources for today’s Christian women. Author Katie M. Reid describes Martha this way in her 2018 book, Made Like Martha: Good News for the Woman Who Gets Things Done:
Martha welcomed Jesus into her home. Some versions of the Bible say she “opened her home to him” ([Luke 10:38], NIV) or “received him into her house” (KJV).
Welcome. Opened. Received. These words paint a bright picture of hospitality.18
Martha was the hostess of Jesus, making her the ideal housekeeper for author Sarah Mae. In 2016, Mae published Having a Martha Home the Mary Way: 31 Days to a Clean House and a Satisfied Soul. Mae includes “Mary Challenges” to encourage the spiritual development of women, and she offers “Martha Challenges” to inspire women to clean different parts of their home. As Mae writes, “My goal is to inspire you and give practical help to get you moving and cleaning, so that ultimately your house will be nice and tidy by the end of the thirty-one days.”19
I sat there in the fading sunshine, the pages of Larissa Tracy’s book on medieval women ruffling in the breeze. I could hear a rumble of voices as the afternoon session ended.
I wondered what the women at the conference would do with the medieval conception of Mary and Martha. Since the seventh century, Martha of Bethany has often been identified as the sister of Mary Magdalene—the most recognizable female saint in the late medieval world (next only to Mary, mother of Jesus). Not until the sixteenth century does Mary Magdalene begin to be separated from her medieval identification as Martha’s sister, the sinful woman possessed by seven devils, and the repentant woman with the alabaster jar.20 So, for medieval Christians, Mary of Bethany was not just a woman who sat quietly at the feet of Jesus; she was a repentant prostitute and former demoniac. She was the apostle of the apostles—the first apostle who carried the good news of the resurrection. She was a missionary of Christ, affirmed by Peter. She preached openly, performed miracles that paralleled those of the apostles, and converted a new land to the Christian faith.
Even though we may doubt the historical accuracy of Mary’s missionary journey to France, medieval Christians didn’t. As one Cistercian monk wrote, “Just as she had been chosen to be the apostle of Christ’s Resurrection and the prophet of his world . . . , she preached to the unbelievers and confirmed the believers in their faith.”21 Mary Magdalene was an exemplary Christian leader—a brave woman who had repented of her sinful life and now shared the good news about Jesus where men lacked the courage to do so.
Martha accrued an elaborate medieval backstory that wasn’t limited to homemaking. The Golden Legend describes her as a noble single woman who accompanied her famous sister to Marseilles.22 While Mary Magdalene was preaching to the people, Martha encountered a dragon on the nearby beach. She faced a gruesome sight: a dragon that was described as a giant half-beast, half-fish with long, sharp teeth. When Martha happened upon the scene, the frightening monster was eating a man. Martha was undaunted. She sprinkled holy water on the beast, confronted the demonic creature with the cross, and calmly tied it up. When she presented the now-subdued dragon to the people of Marseilles, they stabbed it to death with their spears. Martha performed additional miracles, interspersed with a preaching agenda similar to that of Mary Magdalene’s.
Mary and Martha look rather different from the medieval perspective, don’t they? Today both women, especially Martha, are most associated with traditional female duties. But neither medieval woman is limited to the domestic sphere. Martha could be both a superb hostess and a preacher who slew dragons. Mary could both sit quietly at her devotions and be the apostle of the apostles whose preaching spread the gospel in France. “The legends of female saints, especially in vernacular collections like the Gilte Legende,” writes Tracy, “provided strong, visible role models for medieval women through the diversity of their speech and the eloquence of their silence, elevating women above the traditional roles assigned to them and giving them a power of their own.”23
I watched the women stream from the meeting space. Soon, a friend sat down in the rocking chair next to me, dropping her Bible and session notes on the same table where I had stacked my essays. “What are you reading?” she asked, nodding at the blue cover of the Gilte Legende.
“Just something for class,” I told her, pushing Tracy’s book to the side.
I wasn’t ready yet. I still wasn’t sure what to do with what I knew. But I also knew that the women remembered by medieval Christianity undermined modern biblical womanhood. I knew the problem wasn’t a lack of women leading in church history. The problem was simply that women’s leadership has been forgotten, because women’s stories throughout history have been covered up, neglected, or retold to recast women as less significant than they really were.
Because Women Couldn’t Be Written Out of the Story
In fall 2016, I was teaching one of my favorite graduate courses, a course on medieval sermons. That was the semester my husband was fired from his pastoral job, three weeks after we had asked the church elders to reconsider their position on women. At first we were paralyzed. One of our best friends had helped the pastor deliver the verdict to my husband, making it exponentially more painful. Now, instead of a ministry job, we had only severance pay that was dependent on our good behavior—that is, not telling anyone the truth. We had lost our church family and some of our best friends. We were told to walk away from the youth group of about seventy kids whom we loved and had discipled for the past fourteen years.
Just three weeks to completely upend our lives. And we couldn’t tell anyone why.
It took everything in me to appear normal for my children that first day. By the time we left my son’s afternoon football game, finished homework with the kids, and cleaned up after dinner, I had nothing left. I had already broken down in tears at the football game after one of my Baylor colleagues simply asked how I was. I just wanted to go to sleep and forget everything for a few hours.
But I couldn’t. I had a three-hour seminar the next day filled with graduate students from the history, English, and religion departments. I had to teach. Life didn’t stop, especially since we were suddenly a one-income family.
So I grabbed my books, left my husband watching Star Trek with the kids, and climbed up to my son’s treehouse in our backyard. It was cooler by then, the oak leaves shimmering in the fading light. Texas has glorious summer sunsets. Glowing pink and golden fingers of light reached out across the dusty blue horizon, quieting my fears, strengthening my heart.
Our story wasn’t over. I knew God was working. I took a deep breath and started reading.
I was preparing a background article that night. I hadn’t assigned it for the students, but I wanted to review the material for discussion. The article, “Prophecy and Song: Teaching and Preaching by Medieval Women,” is by the insightful historian Carolyn Muessig. Listen to what Muessig writes (the long quotation is worth it):
The notion of women teaching and preaching was deemphasized in favor of women’s educating privately within the family or a cloister. However, examples of women preaching and teaching publicly were found in biblical stories and legends. Mary Magdalene offered a biblical example of a woman preaching in her announcement of the “Good News” to the apostles. But this biblical model was often portrayed by theologians as an exception and not the rule. . . . In a sermon for the feast of Mary Magdalene it is written: “And this glorious sinner, just like the star of the sea, illumined the world with the joy of the dominical resurrection.” However, the implications of this feminine exemplar of preaching are quickly restricted and defined: “And although it is prohibited for other women to preach, this woman had dispensation from the highest pope, therefore, she is called the apostle of the apostles, for she taught not only the simple but also the doctors.” The implication of Mary Magdalene as a precedent for female preaching is underscored by the statement of why her pastoral activity was more an anomaly than an exemplar.24
I read that about three times. My fuzzy brain knew something vitally important was in those words, but it was slow to click. When it finally did, I stood up, knocking the article onto the acorn-strewn floor. What I felt was not yet hope; it was more like grim determination. But the paralyzing, barely suppressed fear that had gripped me all day faded just a little.
Did you catch what Muessig says that took so long to click in my slow brain that night? The implication of Mary Magdalene as a precedent for female preaching is underscored by the statement of why her pastoral activity was more an anomaly than an exemplar. If women couldn’t preach, then Mary Magdalene shouldn’t have preached. Except medieval Christians believed that she did preach, and they used the Bible as undisputed evidence. So either women could preach, or Mary Magdalene had to be explained away.
Guess which option most medieval theologians chose?
As Muessig writes, “Mary Magdalene offered a biblical example of a woman preaching. . . . But this biblical model was often portrayed by theologians as an exception and not the rule.”25 So the problem wasn’t a lack of biblical and historical evidence for women in leadership. Mary Magdalene carried the news of the gospel to the disbelieving disciples. In a world that didn’t accept the word of a woman as a valid witness, Jesus chose women as witnesses for his resurrection. In a world that gave husbands power over the very lives of their wives, Paul told husbands to do the opposite—to give up their lives for their wives. In a world that saw women as biologically deformed men, monstrous even, Paul declared that men were just like women in Christ.
No, the problem wasn’t a lack of biblical and historical evidence for women to serve as leaders along with men in the church. The problem was male clergy who undermined the evidence.
The medieval clergy couldn’t explain away Mary Magdalene preaching, so they made her an exception. Because she was an extraordinary rather than an ordinary woman, ordinary women’s ability to follow her example was diminished. I couldn’t help remembering a favorite quotation from New Testament scholar Ben Witherington: “No, the problem in the church is not strong women, but rather weak men who feel threatened by strong women, and have tried various means, even by dubious exegesis, to prohibit them from exercising their gifts and graces in the church.”26 Instead of following a clear and plain reading of the biblical text, the medieval world grafted their imported Roman patriarchy onto the gospel of Jesus.
As I sat back down in the treehouse that evening, brushing the pine needles out of my seat and picking up my spilled Coke can, I realized that what had just happened to me in our twenty-first-century evangelical church was a rerun for Christian women.
You see, the story starts with women as strong leaders.
Take, for example, Margery Kempe’s great cloud of female witnesses. The medieval church was simply too close in time to forget the significant roles women played in establishing the Christian faith throughout the remnants of the Roman Empire. Along with early saints like Mary Magdalene and Margaret of Antioch (Margery Kempe’s great cloud of female witnesses), female missionaries, preachers, and ecclesiastical leaders crowded the historical landscape.
Among the great cloud of female witnesses were missionaries like Clotilda, the Burgundian princess who defied her pagan husband Clovis, king of the Franks, in the late fifth century. Her faithfulness convinced him to convert (after he prayed and won a critical battle), and in 508 he was baptized along with three thousand of his Frankish warriors. Historian Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg remarks that Clotilda assumed the primary role in converting her husband, as Clovis invoked the “Christ of Clotilda.”27 Medieval historians and clergy also recognized Clotilda’s leadership, giving her, rather than the officiating priests, the credit.
Bishops like Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare were also part of the great cloud. Historian Lisa Bitel recounts the hagiographical stories of how Genovefa became the de facto ecclesiastical leader of Paris. She protected the city from the ravages of the Huns, just as the bishop of Rome, Leo the Great, had done. She enhanced the Christian prestige of the city through her miracles and her patronage of the first bishop of Paris (Saint Denis), and she refused to submit to other episcopal authorities. As Bitel writes, “Because she was a saint, she could take the place of a man, Paris’s bishop. Because she acted as a bishop, she was able to build.”28 Genovefa established Paris as a Christian stronghold just as effectively as male bishops did throughout Europe.
Genovefa acted like a bishop, but Brigit of Kildare (according to hagiography) was actually ordained as a bishop. The bishop presiding over her consecration accidentally read the episcopal orders. After realizing his mistake, he announced, “This virgin alone in Ireland will hold the episcopal ordination.”29 Brigit journeyed the island several times, performed miracles, practiced ecclesiastical authority (such as blessing houses), and established spiritual equality with Saint Patrick himself. What is really fascinating about Brigit is that even though she received ordination like a man would have, she exercises her authority in a distinctly feminine way. As Bitel explains, “She was at once a typical woman, caring for her men’s needs and ministering their deaths, and a visionary who could see even what Ireland’s apostle [Saint Patrick] could not.”30 Like the medieval Martha of Bethany, Brigit could be both a domestic goddess and a public religious leader.
The great cloud of female witnesses included even preachers, like Hildegard of Bingen. Kings and princes also sought the advice of the twelfth-century German mystic, author, theologian, Benedictine abbess, composer, and preacher. Hildegard preached regularly in Germany, undertaking four preaching tours between 1158 and 1170. We know beyond doubt that clergy as well as ordinary people filled her audiences. We also know that she spoke with authority to the clerical members of her audience—calling them to repentance. Barbara Newman wrote how “astonishing” it was that Hildegard preached against bishops and priests so vehemently, yet none of them invoked “St. Paul’s authority against her.” Instead, Newman writes, “they actually invited her to preach and then wrote to her afterward, begging for transcripts of her sermons.”31
So when Elaine Lawless writes that “women have been preaching in the Christian tradition from the earliest historical moments, perhaps only days after Jesus Christ was crucified and his resurrection announced,” she is absolutely right.32 And the medieval church agreed—both recognizing women as preachers, teachers, and leaders in Christian history and accepting that women continued to preach, teach, and lead throughout the medieval era.
Qualified Female Leadership
The medieval church, even though it accepted women’s roles as leaders, was nonetheless uncomfortable with women actively serving in these roles. The church had been uncomfortable for a long time—almost from the beginning. While medieval Christians couldn’t forget the truth about female leaders in Christian history—Jesus made certain of that through his interactions with Mary, Martha, and even the Canaanite woman—medieval Christians also couldn’t accept female leadership as normative.
Why? Because the medieval world inherited the patriarchy of the Roman world. Remember the Aristotelian belief that women were defective (incomplete) men, making them passive and weak compared to strong and active men? These “pre-Christian ideas,” writes historian Jacqueline Murray, “meshed with Christian theology.”33 Beliefs about female inferiority haunted Christianity from the beginning, influencing early church fathers like Clement of Alexandria and Jerome to characterize spiritual maturity for women as a progression to manliness. “As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is as different from man as body is from soul,” explained Jerome. “But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.”34 If women are imperfect men, then only by becoming men can women achieve spiritual equality. These ideas affected stories about women in the early church, resulting in female martyrs described as behaving like men and virginity praised as the highest calling for women.
This brings us to the next part of the rerun—the part where women get pushed out of leadership.
As the church waxed in power, opportunities for women waned. Male leadership became the norm. But because of the long history of women in leadership roles, excuses had to be made for why women could lead in the past but could no longer do so in the present. Women’s actions, in other words, had to be qualified to justify male-only authority.
One particularly effective move to qualify women’s leadership happened during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A renewed interest in ancient ideas about women (namely their inferiority and impurity) collided with a reform movement trying to strengthen ecclesiastical leadership.35 Christianity had a long history of associating sexual activity with impurity. Augustine argued that original sin was transmitted to every human through sexual intercourse that created new life, firmly connecting sex with sin. As the priesthood and sacramental theology evolved, elevating the priest as having special spiritual powers and duties, so too evolved clerical celibacy. While it was technically heretical to claim that an impure priest couldn’t properly perform the sacraments (baptism, absolution, Eucharist, etc.), people feared it was true and resented their married clergy.36
It is important to note that this represented a change in Christian theology. Before the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ordination was less clearly established and less critical for leadership. Evidence suggests that at least some women were ordained in the early medieval church, like Brigit of Kildare, but this practice disappeared in the Western church after the reforms of the central Middle Ages. Gary Macy writes that the twelfth-century French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard, perhaps the most famous student of Anselm, championed the “last defense” for the ordination of women in the Western church. Abelard settled into a monastic teaching life after an HBO-worthy love affair with Heloise, his student-turned-wife, ended badly: Abelard was castrated by Heloise’s angry uncle (lest you think medieval history is boring), and both Abelard and Heloise spent the remainder of their lives apart, in separate monasteries, as steadfast pen pals. Abelard championed women’s ordination, building on the historical precedent of women carrying the title of deaconess in the early Middle Ages and on the New Testament story of the prophetess Anna. As he wrote, “We now call abbesses, that is mothers, those who in early times were called deaconesses, that is, ministers.” And similarly, “This ordo of women began a long time ago because we read in the Old Testament and in the New that there were deaconesses, that is women who ministered to the saints.” Abelard argued that female ordination “was established by Jesus himself and not by the apostles, specifically rejecting the teaching that only the male priesthood and diaconate were part of the original church.”37 Of course women could preach, argued Abelard, because women already did preach, including in the Bible (Anna, Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene, and even the Samaritan woman in the Gospel of John).
But he didn’t lose it on the same grounds he argued it. He used Christian history as a defense for why women could lead, and this the church leaders deemed acceptable. The battle was lost because the historical circumstances had changed. The lines had been redrawn. To increase the authority of clergy, medieval church leaders needed women out of the way. You see, Christianity had a long history of secular lords and powerful families controlling clerical positions. Sons and nephews inherited the ecclesiastical jobs of their fathers and uncles. Powerful families sought to control important bishoprics and the papacy itself, often by purchasing clerical positions. The church fought back, cracking down on both clerical celibacy and simony (the buying and selling of church offices). If priests couldn’t marry, and if priests could be assigned to clerical positions only by other clergy, rather than by rich noblemen, it would greatly diminish secular control over the church.
The result strengthened the church but weakened the position of women.
The period of church reforms spanning the eleventh century through the early thirteenth century redefined the ecclesiastical structure of the Western church—legitimizing the power of the papacy, promoting the authority of bishops, and establishing the unique status of the local priest. “Churches were redesigned to emphasize clerical status; celibacy was demanded, legislated for, and pursued; parochial tithes allowed churches to be free from direct secular control,” explains historian Ian Forrest. “A common culture of priesthood created a clear status group whose basic position in relation to secular authorities, bishops, and the ordinary laity gave more-than-superficial unity to the institutional Church.”38 Priests were defined as men who were not polluted by the sexual impurity of women. Not only could women not be priests, but women’s bodies were seen as potentially threatening to male leaders.
To help my students better understand how these reforms affected women, I often use a visual example from Durham Cathedral. A line, made from marble and marked with a center cross, stretches across the westernmost part of the cathedral’s nave. Local guides proclaim that the misogyny of the cathedral’s seventh-century patron, Saint Cuthbert, led him to institute the line to bar women from the sacred space of clergy. Unlike men, women were forbidden to enter either the nave or the cemetery.39 Harrowing stories from the twelfth century tell of the consequences for women who challenged Saint Cuthbert. One woman was struck with madness just for trying to take a shortcut. She was upset about the poor quality of the traveling road, as her feet kept sinking into the deep puddles. So she decided to cut through the well-kept churchyard of Durham Cathedral. “She was seized with some kind of indefinite horror, and cried out that she was gradually losing her senses.” After falling down in a fit, she was carried home, where she died. Another female transgressor was “inflamed woman-like” to see the beautiful decorations within the church. “Unable to bridle her impetuous desires, for the power of her husband had elevated her above her neighbours, she walked through the cemetery of the church.” Her punishment, perhaps because she was motivated by pride, was even more horrific. She went mad, bit out her own tongue, and then committed suicide by slitting her throat.40
Yet the historical Cuthbert didn’t have a problem with women. Evidence suggests he worked well and closely with women during his lifetime. He didn’t become a misogynist until four hundred years after his death. The stories blaming him for forbidding women from entering Durham Cathedral stem from the eleventh- and twelfth-century church reforms. In 1083, after the Norman conquest in England, the married clergy at Durham were forced out and replaced with celibate Benedictine monks. This was a difficult change to enforce, as you might imagine. Schulenburg writes that, in order to smooth the transition, “the famous seventh-century patron St. Cuthbert was conveniently provided with a posthumous abhorrence of females. Thus the reform writings of Symeon of Durham served to reshape the patron saint of Durham according to the blatant prejudices of the period.”41 Cuthbert became a misogynist to further the ecclesiastical campaign for clerical celibacy.
The exclusion of women from the space of Durham Cathedral stemmed from a local attempt to enforce reform. Indeed, the bereaved husband of the woman who died because of her “impetuous desires” to see the beauty of Durham Cathedral took on “the dress of a monk.”42 Her death-by-exclusion literally forced him to accept clerical celibacy.
The reforms bolstering clerical status and ecclesiastical authority—and emphasizing the impurity of female bodies—distanced women from leadership in the medieval church. It’s true that historical memory about female leadership empowered later women like Margery Kempe to preach, teach, and lead. But it’s also true that patriarchal beliefs about the inferiority and impurity of female bodies made it more difficult for women to exercise these spiritual gifts.
Women had led in Christian history, and women could continue to lead—but it would be harder and mostly not in official positions. And the reason for this seemed to have less to do with women themselves and more to do with protecting the power of men, especially men in the church.
Writing Medieval Women Out of Church History
Historical memory of female leaders, past and present, empowered medieval women. Christine de Pizan proclaimed these words in her early fifteenth-century defense of women against misogynistic literature: “What strong faith and deep love those women possess who did not forsake the Son of God who had been abandoned and deserted by all His Apostles. God has never reproached the love of women as weakness, as some men contend, for He placed the spark of fervent love in the hearts of the blessed Magdalen and of other ladies, indeed His approval of this love is clearly to be seen.”43 The great cloud of female witnesses that empowered Margery Kempe to speak out against the archbishop of York also empowered Christine de Pizan to argue that women were of equal worth before God. Indeed, as the words of Lady Justice (one of the three women who visit Christine and tell her to build a city of ladies filled with worthy women) explained to Christine, “I tell you that, in spite of what you may have found in the writings of pagan authors on the subject of criticizing women, you will find little said against them in the holy legends of Jesus Christ and His Apostles.”44
As I continued to mow my lawn on that day almost four years ago, I considered the vibrant history of women as leaders, teachers, and preachers in the medieval church. I also thought about how modern evangelicals have mostly forgotten this history. Take, for example, the popular Christian history textbooks Church History in Plain Language and The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, as well as the popular Sunday school church history textbook Christian History Made Easy. Not only do these texts contain very few references to female leaders in the medieval church; they minimize the authority of these women.
In Christian History Made Easy (which also has a leader’s guide, a participant’s guide, and a video series), I found thirteen women listed in the index, including four medieval women: Julian of Norwich, Joan of Arc, Hilda of Whitby, and Hildegard of Bingen. The author, Timothy Paul Jones, praises Hilda of Whitby as training “hundreds of nuns and even some monks—five of whom became overseers.” But his discussion of Hildegard of Bingen, while accurate, has significant omissions. She was a “Renaissance woman in the Middle Ages. . . . a musician and mystic, artist and author, proclaimer of truth and prophet of reform. Popes and emperors praised her. Only Bernard surpassed her prestige,” the author writes. Hildegard of Bingen proclaims, reforms, and writes; she does not, in Christian History Made Easy, preach. She is also “praised” by popes and emperors instead of providing advice and instruction to them.45
The Story of Christianity has a much more developed index, with over one thousand entries. The author worked to include women, explaining in the introduction that he sought “to acknowledge the role of women throughout the life of the church in a way that most earlier histories did not.”46 I did count at least thirty-two individual women listed in the index, as well as an index entry for women. Once again, Hildegard of Bingen is not described as preaching. She is an abbess with popular writings.47 Catherine of Siena receives a more in-depth discussion. Carolyn Muessig argues that Catherine of Siena was a preacher, achieving “the conversion of the listeners and the spiritual refreshment of both the audience and the preacher herself.48 Yet The Story of Christianity describes her only as a famous “teacher of mysticism” who “gathered around her a circle of men and women, many of them more educated than she, whom she taught the principles and practice of contemplation.”49 Hildegard and Catherine could teach, but they didn’t preach. Both texts do discuss some noteworthy women in church history, but the male-female ratio of the indexes suggest that their narratives focus more on men.
The fourth edition of Church History in Plain Language, which seems to be one of the best-selling church history books, includes the fewest women. It contains over 280 index entries for people, eight of whom are women. Moreover, despite the book covering the first century through the twentieth century, the index mentions only one woman from the ancient church and only one woman from the modern church. The remaining six women are all from the Reformation era. Not only are women lacking representation in Church History in Plain Language, but their window of appearance is surprisingly narrow.50
Despite the significant role women play in church history, and despite clear historical evidence of women exercising leadership, these popular, modern church history texts present a masculine narrative of church history that minimizes female leadership.
Could it be that another building block for modern biblical womanhood is simply that evangelicals have rewritten Christian history?
Once, after I finished a lecture on women in the church, a lecture whose audience included both academics and church members, a pastor stopped me.
“Why don’t they teach us this in seminary?” he asked. “I have never learned any of this.”
I told him I didn’t know.
But that wasn’t true. I do know. I think it may be for the same reason that the medieval church pushed women out of leadership: to protect and enhance the authority of men.
Indeed, rather than Margery Kempe’s great cloud of female witnesses, what modern evangelicals seem to remember most about medieval Christianity are the limitations placed on women. Women couldn’t be priests, and this lends credence to evangelical arguments that women can’t preach.
Margery Kempe stood with a host of female witnesses who helped authorize her voice, pushing back against male authority and even the limitations placed on her.
Evangelical women, thanks to our selective medieval memory, stand comparatively alone.