MY HUSBAND DROPPED THE FLYER on the counter. “Don’t you want to sign up?” he asked, grinning. It was an invitation from Dorothy Patterson to enroll in her seminary class for pastors’ wives. During the years my husband was a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, I was eligible to take the class. I rolled my eyes. “One day you will wish you had!” he said, laughing.
He was right. I do wish I had taken the class, because it would have been fascinating to see the syllabus firsthand and participate in the conversations. As it stands, I can speak only as an outsider and rely on secondhand information.
But I did hear things about the class (it was pretty famous).
First, it emphasized equipping women to serve alongside their husbands in ministry—a task that Dorothy Patterson embodied. Historian Elizabeth Flowers writes, “The spirited and highly visible Patterson reigned throughout the 1990s as the ‘matriarch of complementarianism,’ becoming as well known and as controversial as her husband, Paige.”1 Second, the class emphasized women’s roles as focused on the household and caring for the family. Even though Dorothy Patterson had earned a master of theology (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), a doctorate in ministry (Luther Rice Seminary), and a doctorate in theology (University of South Africa), she always introduced herself publicly as a wife and mother. “She was, in her words, ‘primarily a wife, mother, and homemaker,’ with grandmother added in years to come,” writes Flowers.2 In line with how Patterson presented herself, the class for pastors’ wives focused on homemaking.
I also heard the rumor that the final exam tested the domestic hospitality skills of each woman in the class: Dorothy Patterson would randomly show up at your house during the week, inspect your housekeeping skills, and stay while you served her tea. I shudder to think what would have happened if she had shown up at my house during some weeks of graduate school (my disinclination to do dishes has been a consistent pattern in my adult life; it was worse when I was a stressed-out, newly married graduate student).
Finally, I knew that Patterson’s training class for pastors’ wives was rooted in Paul’s writings about women. For “nearly two millennia,” Patterson argued, Christians have agreed that Paul’s writings barred women from leadership. She accused academics who argued otherwise of “jesuitical casuistry” and “historical hanky-panky.”3 Only complementarians like herself preserved “the pure Word of God as enduring across cultures and throughout history and as appropriating itself from age to age with vigor and relevance.” Biblical womanhood, as she argued in her dissertation, was a timeless continuity throughout church history, divinely ordained by God and clearly articulated by Paul.4 From everything I knew about her and her husband, I am quite sure that she stressed the importance of biblical womanhood to her students.
I will never know firsthand what Dorothy Patterson’s class was like. But I do know that the roots of what Patterson taught and embodied about women’s roles lay not in the past “nearly two millennia” but rather in the past five hundred years.5
Women have always been wives and mothers, but it wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation that being a wife and a mother became the “ideological touchstone of holiness” for women.6 Before the Reformation, women could gain spiritual authority by rejecting their sexuality. Virginity empowered them. Women became nuns and took religious vows, and some, like Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, found their voices rang with the authority of men.7 Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.
The Holy Household
The late afternoon light slanted gray through the window of the small room. It was empty, apart from a few chairs and a seminar-style table—everything I needed so that I could work while my husband was in class. I piled several books next to me, an optimistic habit. It wouldn’t be possible to get through more than one or two books that afternoon. I had at most three hours while my husband was in class. But hope springs eternal, especially for history doctoral students in the midst of comprehensive exam prep. We had driven together that afternoon to Wake Forest, North Carolina, where my husband was working on his MDiv. I could hear the hum of conversation from his nearby classroom as I sat alone with my pile of books. I picked up the top one from the stack and began reading. The book was The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg by Lyndal Roper.
Two hours later, my world had shifted.
From childhood, conservative Protestant Christians like me are taught that the Reformation is a story of success, of freedom, of faith revived and reinvigorated. This is why we use Halloween as an occasion for a Reformation Day costume party, in honor of Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to those doors in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. It is why a tiny plastic Martin Luther—complete with quill and Bible—became the fastest-selling Playmobil figure ever. (The first thirty-four thousand figures sold out within seventy-two hours.) It is why Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and John Calvin’s Institutes are still household titles, despite publication dates close to five hundred years ago.
For evangelical Christians, the story of the Reformation is a story of triumph. Roper’s scholarship tells a different story. Instead of focusing on the dramatic moments, such as Martin Luther declaring “Here I stand,” she focuses on the aftermath of the Reformation in the German town of Augsburg. Instead of focusing on the Reformation heroes, Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, she focuses on how the Reformation affected the lives of ordinary women.
Her very different perspective produces a very different story—a story of loss rather than a story of gain, of increased subordination rather than of liberation.
According to Roper, the male political and economic leaders of Augsburg found Reformation theology supportive as they worked to strengthen control over the city and make it more financially stable. These economic and religious changes hardened a “theology of gender” for women that, far from improving their lives, placed women more securely under the household authority of their husbands. Marriage guaranteed women stability and significance, but their increasingly subordinate role confined them to low-status domestic work, increased their dependence on their husbands for economic survival, and curtailed their economic and social opportunities outside the household structure. Women were encouraged to be chaste, modest, obedient, and passive, while men were encouraged to be aggressive, domineering, controlling, and active. “The heritage of Protestantism for women was deeply ambiguous,” writes Roper. While it could have affirmed women’s spiritual equality with men, the Reformation instead ushered in a “renewed patriarchalism” that placed married women firmly under the headship of their husbands.8
I put the book down. I could hear the buzz of conversation from my husband’s classroom. I don’t remember what course he was taking that day, but I remember the opposition many of his professors and fellow students held toward women in ministry. One professor was known to divide his students into permanent small groups in his class, and each student was tasked with leading a group discussion. The professor would then pronounce in front of the entire class that if a male student was uncomfortable with a woman leading, the student should let him know. The professor would switch that student into a group without women. The message was clear: any man could lead in this class, regardless of his qualifications or how uncomfortable he made women, but the position of every woman in his class was precarious. A woman’s ability to complete the course requirements depended on whether the male students would grant her the permission to do so.
Unfortunately, this professor’s stance was not anomalous, even if his tactics were more blatant than those of other professors. It had been a few years since the conservative SBC takeover, and Paige Patterson reigned supreme at Southeastern Seminary. Women were not allowed in preaching courses, and the emphasis was on men as leaders and teachers and women as stay-at-home wives and mothers. From the classes offered to the professors who taught them to the preachers in chapel to the president overseeing it all, Southeastern rooted itself firmly in a gender hierarchy that elevated men over women.
Yet I had just read a compelling historical argument that the roots of this gender hierarchy had more to do with politics and economics than with divine order. As Europe shifted from the medieval era to the early modern era, political ideas about state governance and economic ideas about business management also shifted. These shifts started well before Luther nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses, so they were not launched by the Protestant Reformation per se. But the changing political and socioeconomic landscape of Europe found a supportive partner in Reformation theology. The language of God, argues Roper, married the gender hierarchy of early modern Europe, and subordinate wifedom became synonymous with being a godly woman. Biblical womanhood is rooted in human patriarchal structures that keep seeping back into the church, but the emphasis in biblical womanhood on being a wife was strengthened and reinforced during the social changes wrought by the sixteenth century.
Was Roper Right?
I knew I wasn’t going to get the job.
I was in the middle of my teaching presentation for a tenure-track position in a religion department. For the topic of my lecture, I had chosen (rather poorly, in hindsight) the less-often-told story of the Reformation: how it affected women. The students, lining the first two rows of the theater-style room, were engaged. The Baptist professors filling the back row were a different story. I focused on how the Reformation elevated the status of wives, but I also talked about what women lost—like the ability to choose a religious life in the convent among a community of women. Instead of focusing exclusively on the success of Luther, I also talked about the narrowing of economic options for women—as trades like medicine became more professionalized, female practitioners found themselves pushed out. In addition to discussing the priesthood of all believers, I talked about the increasing authority of men as heads of spiritual households—women no longer sat with their friends in church, as they had done for so long, but now sat next to their husband under his visible care. I didn’t teach the narrative most often found in seminary textbooks and Protestant histories. Instead, I taught the narrative I had learned from my training as a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I didn’t get the job.
Now, let me be clear. I know a lot about Catholic theology, especially medieval Christianity, and I am both understanding and sympathetic. Theologically, though, I agree with the Reformation. I am a Protestant—not just because I grew up as a Protestant but also because, as an adult, I have chosen to remain Protestant. I think Luther was right—about faith, Jesus, the priesthood of all believers, and the Bible. At the same time, the Reformation wasn’t perfect. Glorifying the past because we like that story better isn’t history; it is propaganda. Just because I agree with the outcome of the Reformation theologically doesn’t mean I think everything that happened during the Reformation era was good.
So let’s talk about how the Reformation affected women.
Merry Wiesner-Hanks—a highly respected historian of the early modern world—has summed up the different scholarly positions on how the Reformation affected women: “Some see it as elevating the status of most women in praise of marriage, others see it as limiting women by denying them the opportunity for education and independence in monasteries and stressing wifely obedience, and still others see it as having little impact, with its stress on marriage a response to economic and social changes that had already occurred, and not a cause of those changes.”9 Historians disagree in their interpretation of the evidence, but they agree about the evidence itself.
For example, women’s alternatives to marriage decreased, and their dependence on their husbands (economic, political, legal, etc.) increased. Katharina von Bora (Katie Luther) exemplifies this. She was a runaway nun who married the ex-monk Martin Luther. Luther taught that marriage was God’s best for both men and women, and his writings helped popularize the godly role of wife and mother. As Katherine French and Allyson Poska explain in Women and Gender in the Western Past, “Unlike Catholicism, Luther did not promote female models of spiritual power. Luther’s God was not influenced by the Virgin Mary or supported by the work of female saints. Instead of the Virgin Mary, Luther extolled the virtues of Martha, the sister of Lazarus, who stayed in the kitchen, prepared the food, and oversaw the household.” Katharina von Bora embodied Martha, turning the Luther household into a domestic sanctuary for their family (she birthed six children) and hosting dinner parties that furthered the fame and influence of her husband. Her husband’s theology about marriage was so influential that, as French and Poska write, “every Protestant territory passed a marriage ordinance that stressed wifely obedience.”10 Women’s identity, both inside and outside the church, became more firmly intertwined with the household. As Luther said in his lectures on Genesis, “For just as the snail carries its house with it, so the wife should stay at home and look after the affairs of the household, as one who has been deprived of the ability of administering those affairs that are outside and that concern the state.”11
Katie’s reputation as a domestic goddess helped her family while her husband was alive. Their dinner table (enhanced by her conversational wit as well as the fame of her husband) became the place to be for everyone in Europe—from politicians and leaders to university professors, exiled clergy, and ex-nuns. But this fame didn’t help her earn a living after his death.12 Luther’s death deprived his family of income, and Katie and her children faced financial challenges. Few economic options existed for a sixteenth-century widow and ex-nun who lacked family support. While Katie’s difficulties would have been common even for medieval women (women’s work remained low status and low pay), they were intensified by changing perceptions about work. As the household became more firmly established as a woman’s space, professional work became more firmly identified as a man’s space. The European economy had been swiftly commercializing since the late Middle Ages—success now required deeper pockets and broader networks. Professional status was more clearly identified, often requiring more intentional training, and trade regulations were more clearly established by civic authorities. None of these trends favored women working for pay.
Judith Bennett tells the story of how English brewing went from being the work of medieval women to being the professional job of early modern men. In the fourteenth-century brewing town of Oxford, for example, women dominated the trade. When women brewed for their families, they brewed extra to sell to their neighbors and made a little extra cash. Brewing for sale was mostly small scale, but it helped women contribute to their household needs. Over time, brewing in Oxford became more regulated—by the university, by a brewers’ guild, and then by the professionalization of the trade. By 1600, instead of dozens of housewives brewing for their neighborhoods, a few brewers began to supply the city. These few brewers were men. They had deeper pockets and more resources; they invested more money and developed new techniques. They also made close friends with the local government. Women couldn’t compete with these bigger, more professional brewers because they had less investment capital and less social clout.13 A woman who sometimes sold ale to her neighbors might have made a tasty beer, but she couldn’t compete with the big boys—just like the woman next door who sells donuts out of her garage on Saturdays can’t compete with Krispy Kreme (or Shipley’s, which is my family’s favorite). Even if women were better brewers than men, they simply couldn’t keep up in this changing world.
Of course, increasing professionalization and commercialization didn’t really change the kind of work women did. Women in the medieval era mostly worked in low-pay and low-status jobs, and this continued throughout the Reformation era. What seems to have shifted (or at least started shifting for Protestant women)—and this is what is important for modern evangelicals—is how working wives were perceived. In the medieval era, women who brewed ale were ale-wives. They were often identified as such in the records. They were identified by their work as well as by their marital status. They could have more than one identity. But later, in the early modern era, a Protestant wife who brewed was a good wife working alongside her husband (or taking over her deceased husband’s trade).14 Her primary identity was her marital status, and her job was secondary. Indeed, her husband even stood in for her as the public face of the business.
The implications of these shifting ideas about women’s work would not be fully realized until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as we will see in chapter 6. But the increasing emphasis on a woman’s primary role as wife, trumping all other callings, would have a profound impact for modern evangelical women.
Take, for example, the emphasis placed on marriage for conservative evangelical women today—it’s often considered more important than a career. Marriage, from the evangelical perspective, ranks right after salvation in regard to the most important life decisions for women. Contemporary Christian musician Wayne Watson’s hit song “Somewhere in the World” illustrates this well. Released on his 1985 Giants in the Land album, the song is still listed as one of his top songs on Apple Music. Watson sings, “A little girl will go out to play, / All dressed up in mama’s clothes.” This little girl is brought up in the godly ways of her mama to love Jesus and—the song later implies—to learn how to become a wife. Watson prays for the little girl to come to Jesus because someday “a little boy will need a Godly wife.”15 This heartfelt song enshrines the goals for Christian women: salvation and marriage.
Marriage (followed by motherhood) completes us. I will never forget a story told by one of my early mentors. She was a single woman who became a missionary. Once, when she was younger and still training for the mission field, she was given a pair of men’s pants. She was advised to hang them on her bed and pray for God to fill them. I can still see her laughing while she told us the story.
While women can aspire to other goals, marriage and family should be the priority. As the ESV proclaims in its resources for marriage and sexual morality, “The union of one man and one woman in marriage is one of the most basic and also most profound aspects of being created in the image of God.”16 The emphasis on “most basic” and “most profound” are mine, but these words are also the crux of the sentence: because we are created in the image of God, implies the ESV resource, we desire the union of marriage. Marriage—from the evangelical perspective—completes us. This becomes clear in current debates about the Trinity, which I will discuss in chapter 7. Some of the evangelical scholars and pastors who are most vocal about male headship and female submission argue that the relationship between husband and wife models the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Wives follow the leadership of their husbands, just as Jesus follows the leadership of the Father. The marriage hierarchy, like marriage itself, they argue, is embedded in the imago Dei.
Indeed, evangelical Christians focus so much on marriage that we neglect the vocational callings of career women and the choices of single women. This is very shortsighted given how many evangelical women continue to work outside the home. “Christians who are worried about feminism’s influence, or about the breakdown of the family, will not have much luck telling married women to stop working,” writes Katelyn Beaty in A Woman’s Place. “Women are already working—in the home, outside of it, for their families, for their neighbors, for the glory of God.”17 It is also shortsighted given how many evangelical women remain unmarried. My friend and fellow Baylor historian Andrea Turpin writes about “singleness microaggressions” in evangelical churches—“Like when someone at church asks, ‘Why aren’t you married?’ before adding, ‘You’re great!’”18 The Reformation world elevated marriage as the ideal state for women, and evangelicals, who identify strongly with the Reformation legacy (remember how well the Martin Luther figurine sold?), have done the same—to the detriment of not only single women and working women but also married women.
The Irony of Reformation Theology for Women
Reformation theology should have set women free, but it didn’t.
When I teach the second half of my European women’s history course, covering roughly 1215 to 1918, I use my own interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s phrase “a room of one’s own” to explain historical differences within the continuity of women’s lives.19 Women, throughout history, live within the confines of patriarchy. Bennett describes this as the patriarchal equilibrium. Regardless of how much freedom women have, they always have less than men. Yet the patriarchal equilibrium is a continuum, not a fixed standard. The boundaries of patriarchy wax and wane; the size of a woman’s room—the space where she is able to make her own choices—changes. Some women have bigger rooms, such as wealthy women with husbands and fathers among the highest social classes. Some women have smaller rooms, such as poorer women from families with little political and social influence. Historical circumstances, such as the aftermath of the Black Death in Europe, temporarily expanded women’s rooms by increasing their independence as wage earners, while other historical circumstances, such as Athenian democracy, made women’s rooms smaller.
If we look at the broad sweep of history, we find some interesting patterns regarding the size of women’s rooms. When political and social structures are less centralized and less clearly defined, women often experience greater agency; their rooms are bigger. It is no accident that the stories of the most authoritative women in Christian history stem from the fourth century through the tenth century, when the authority structures of Christianity—not to mention the political structures to which Christianity became attached—were more fluid. It is also no accident that, after the ecclesiastical hierarchy became more centralized and more powerful during the central Middle Ages, women’s ability to exercise formal authority diminished; women’s rooms became smaller. There are always exceptions, of course, but these general patterns are clear.
Consider, for example, the modern missions field. Power structures and centralized authority are often less accessible and less clearly defined, leaving room for conservative evangelical women to lead as preachers and teachers on the mission field in ways that they cannot when they return to their home churches. Margaret Bendroth, in her classic Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, notes that “when the China Inland Mission called for two hundred volunteers in 1929, 70 percent of those who left for China the following year were women, and all but four were single.”20 But the home offices that sent them were run predominantly by men, and when the women came home, they were reminded quickly of their place—beneath male authority.
The Reformation ushered in a theology about ecclesiastical leadership that, ironically, made evangelical women’s rooms smaller. Taken at face value, Reformation theology should have expanded women’s rooms. Priests were no longer necessary, as all believers had direct access to God. While the female body was still the “weaker sex,” it was no longer considered impure. Men and women were both understood to be created in the image of God, and the union of man and woman in marriage was considered the ideal state intended by God—even for clergy.
Medieval women had to transcend their sex to gain authority in the medieval church. But Protestant women didn’t have to do this—their bodies were not a spiritual problem. Indeed, Protestant women were celebrated for their roles as wives and mothers. So couldn’t women now preach and teach just like men? Didn’t the priesthood of all believers apply to women just as it applied to men?
Some women thought so.
They insisted that Reformation teaching made their rooms bigger.
For example, Katherine Zell, wife of the Strasbourg reformer Matthew Zell, demanded that she be judged “not according to the standards of a woman, but according to the standards of one whom God has filled with the Holy Spirit.”21 Argula von Grumbach, a German woman who converted to Protestantism despite her husband remaining Catholic and who became one of the most outspoken supporters of the Reformation (even publishing eight works between 1523 and 1524 in defense of Lutheranism), certainly thought that she had the God-given right to teach and preach. In a letter to the University of Ingolstadt defending the Lutheranism of a young teacher, she proclaimed, “What I have written to you is no woman’s chit-chat, but the word of God; and [I write] as a member of the Christian Church against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail.”22 She knew the writings of Paul, but she did not believe they applied to her. “I am not unfamiliar with Paul’s words that women should be silent in church,” she announced, “but when I see that no man will or can speak, I am driven by the word of God when he said, ‘He who confesses me on earth, him will I confess, and he who denies me, him will I deny.’”23
Anne Askew, an English reformer, likewise believed women had the authority to speak. Accused of heresy, she argued back when Paul’s directive for women to “be silent” was quoted at her. Preaching only took place behind a pulpit, and since she wasn’t behind a pulpit, she wasn’t preaching. As she explained, after the bishop of London Edmund Bonner’s chancellor (1539–49 and 1553–59) quoted Paul at her, “I answered him, that I knew Paul’s meaning so well as he, which is, 1 Cor. xiv. that a woman ought not to speak in the congregation by the way of teaching. And then I asked him, how many women he had seen go into the pulpit and preach? He said he had never seen any. Then I said, he ought to find no fault in poor women, unless they had offended against the law.”24 In other words, she argued that she had the right to speak God’s Word and teach men, as long as she stayed out of the official preaching space. Moreover, because she had stayed out of the official preaching space, the chancellor had no right to accuse her because she hadn’t broken any law.
The early modern world didn’t agree with these women. “Zell’s wish was never granted,” writes Wiesner-Hanks, “and women’s writings were always judged first on the basis of gender. Argula von Grumbach’s husband was ordered to force her to stop writing.”25 As for Anne Askew, she was burned at the stake for heresy.
So what was the problem? Why didn’t Protestant theology sanction women to teach and preach, even though it had declared the priesthood of all believers and sanctioned the marriage bed? The response to von Grumbach gives us a clue. Instead of being ordered herself to stop preaching and writing, her husband was ordered to stop her. She was under his authority. The problem was what Roper calls the “holy household.”
Reformation theology might have removed the priest, but it replaced him with the husband. The 1563 Tudor homilies, a series of sermons authorized by the Anglican Church, clearly show this: “Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the Church. Here you understand, that GOD has commanded, that you should acknowledge the authority of the husband, and refer to him the honor of obedience.”26 The sermon continues, emphasizing that wives should cover their heads as a sign of submission. In an eerie echo of the ancient Roman paterfamilias, the orderly household once again became the barometer for both the state and the church, and the waning power of the Catholic priest was balanced by the waxing power of the Protestant husband.
A Refashioned Paul
The medieval world argued for women’s exclusion from ecclesiastical leadership based on the inferiority of the female body and the subordinate role of wives. But since not all women were wives, and since some women could transcend their bodies, special allowances existed for women to preach and teach and lead. Historian Nicole Beriou describes how the thirteenth-century Franciscan priest Eustache of Arras explained women preaching. According to Eustache, the Holy Spirit did indeed inspire women like Mary Magdalene and Thecla to preach and gave them spiritual authority, just like men. But these women were exceptions. They were not married, and so, Eustache explains, “Saint Paul’s interdiction did not concern them, but it was directed against married women only.” Women in general did not have the right to preach, but “a certain right to speak authoritatively might be recognized for women who had the special gift of prophecy” and were not married.27
This changed after the Reformation.
The early modern world argued for women’s exclusion on the basis of an emerging gender theology that emphasized differences between women and men rather than their spiritual sameness and on the basis of an expanded understanding of Pauline prescriptions and household codes. Paul’s words now applied to all women, not just wives, and the importance of women being wives was underscored.
I confess, as an evangelical woman, it surprised me that the Reformation introduced so much emphasis on the Pauline texts about women. I remember reading an offhand comment from medieval church historian R. N. Swanson that the Pauline household codes were not nearly as important to medieval Christians as modern historians thought they were.28 I marked exclamation points and underlined the comment. “Seriously?” I wrote in the margin. I couldn’t imagine a world without gracious submission filling the pages of women’s Bible studies and the authority of husbands preached regularly from the pulpit. I couldn’t imagine a world of marriage sermons not focused on Ephesians 5.
But my own research into late medieval English sermons showed me that such a world existed.
Medieval preachers did preach Paul. In fact, the most frequently cited Scripture passages in late medieval English sermons, after Matthew 25:31–41 (which is cited in more than fifty sermon manuscripts), are Pauline texts. Yet these sermons are almost completely silent about the Pauline prescriptions and household codes for women. As I revealed in my presidential address to the Conference on Faith and History in 2018, I have found that the usual-suspect Pauline texts (1 Corinthians 11:3; 14; Ephesians 5; Colossians 3; 1 Timothy 2; Titus 2) appear in only a handful of the 120 late medieval English sermon manuscripts I have studied.29 On the few occasions when these Pauline texts are used in medieval sermons, their focus is mostly not on female roles.
Take, for example, 1 Timothy 2:15: “Yet she will be saved through childbearing.” In one of the only two medieval sermons to discuss this verse, the sermon casts the woman (the “she” in the verse) as an example for all Christians, who must go through the pain (like childbirth) of cleansing themselves of sin before experiencing the joy of salvation (the child itself). In other words, the sermon interprets Paul’s claim that women “will be saved through childbearing” not as a way to enforce strict gender roles or to emphasize women’s domestic responsibilities or even to highlight women as mothers. This medieval sermon author is clearly aware of Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 2:15, but he uses them to encourage all Christians to face the pain of repentance and penance so that they might be reborn into the joy of salvation.
Medieval preachers preached Paul, but their primary focus was to teach parishioners how to find redemption through involvement in the sacraments and practices of the medieval Catholic Church. Paul was used to reinforce these medieval lessons, and women as exemplars of faith became much more important to the medieval religious agenda than women as exemplars of submission and domesticity. The woman saved through childbearing as an exemplar of the sanctification process for all Christians was more important to medieval theology than tethering the salvation of literal women to their reproductive capabilities.
For the most part Paul was not preached in medieval sermons to reinforce women’s subordinate role.
Early modern preachers also knew their Paul. But unlike their medieval counterparts, they preached Paul to enforce women’s subordinate role within the household. Early modern sermons emphasize godly behavior as reflective of spiritual status. Adherence to the Pauline prescriptions became a barometer for the spiritual health of families, and women as models of submission and domesticity became critical exemplars for Protestant theology. This was a departure from sermons of the medieval world.
Lancelot Andrewes, in a sermon published posthumously in 1657, interprets 1 Timothy 2:15 thus: “The domesticall duty of preserving the household pertaineth to her, as it is in Proverbs 31:21. She should be of the property of the Snail, still at home. . . . The house in holy Scripture is taken for the children, whom she must bear and bring up in the fear of God; The Wife through bearing of Children shall be saved, saith Paul in 1 Tim. 2. 15.”30 The medieval sermon author uses Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 2:15 to encourage all Christians to face the pain of repentance and penance so that they might be reborn into the joy of salvation. Andrewes, in stark contrast, uses Paul’s words as evidence for the divinely ordained subjection of women and their divinely ordained calling as—if I may use a modern term—homemakers.
Let me provide one more example.
In 1690, Isaac Marlow, a member of minister Benjamin Keach’s Baptist church, published a tract that countered Keach’s teaching that congregational hymn singing was important. Marlow argued that singing was unbiblical because if the entire congregation sang, women would sing too:
That Women ought neither to teach nor pray vocally in the Church of Christ, is generally believed by all Orthodox Christians, and is asserted from 1 Cor. 14.34, 35. Let your Women keep silence in the Churches: for it is not permited unto them to speak and 1 Timothy 2, 11, 12. Let the Women learn in Silence with all Subjection: but I suffer not a Woman to teach, nor to usurp Authority over the Man, but to learn in silence. I therefore greatly marvel that any Man should assert and admit of such a Practice as Women’s Singing; and that any Woman should presume to sing vocally in the Church of Christ, when he positively and plainly forbids them in his Word: for Singing is Teaching, Coloss. 3.16. and Speaking, Ephes. 5.19. both of which are plainly forbidden to Women in the Church.31
Although agreeing that Paul’s injunction banned women from church leadership, Keach argued that singing “doth not lie in a Ministerial way, and therefore not intended by the Spirit of God here; Preaching or Teaching is not Singing, nor Singing Preaching or Teaching. You [Isaac Marlow] must learn better to distinguish between different Duties and Ordinances, before you take upon you to teach others.”32
From my medieval perspective, I find this sermon-inspired dialogue striking. While Keach defended women’s right to sing, he did so by accepting the Pauline ban against women teaching and preaching. Women could sing only because singing did not fall within the purview of 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy. In other words, a shift occurred across the Reformation era in how preachers used Paul. Rather than always having serious consequences for women, Paul had less impact on attitudes toward women within late medieval English sermons. In the aftermath of the Reformation, however, Paul came to define Christian womanhood. Remember, it was the 1563 Tudor homilies that declared women’s position in the church and household to be subordinate: “Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the Church. Here you understand, that GOD has commanded, that you should acknowledge the authority of the husband, and refer to him the honor of obedience.”33 The godly woman was submissive and silent, just as Paul declared she should be.
The question, of course, is why?
Why the shift in how Pauline texts were used in regard to women?
First, the preaching program put forward in the thirteenth century and reinforced in the fifteenth century dictated teaching focused on the basics of the faith. It actively discouraged preaching to ordinary people on more complex and potentially controversial topics. Second, the theological emphasis on redemption through penitence as rooted in the sacramental community of the medieval church profoundly shaped how preachers preached Paul in medieval sermons, emphasizing women’s faith as more important than their sex.34
Finally, the medieval reality was that most men would never be priests, placing them—strangely enough—on more spiritually equal footing with women. The spiritual headship of a husband didn’t matter so much in a patriarchal world where both husbands and wives had to go as individuals through a priest for the necessary sacraments. But it did matter in a world in which patriarchy was already the norm and women potentially had as much spiritual power as men did. Patriarchy had to shapeshift to adapt to the new Reformation world. As Roper explains, “The values of evangelical moralism were harnessed to an older conservative tradition which defined women as wives in submission to their husbands. . . . Far from endorsing independent spiritual lives for women, the institutionalized Reformation was most successful when it most insisted on a vision of women’s incorporation within the household under the leadership of their husbands.”35 The emphasis on Pauline texts by early modern reformers was born into a secular world already supported by a gender hierarchy. Rather than Protestant reformers reviving a biblical model, they were simply mapping Scripture onto a preceding secular structure. Instead of Scripture transforming society, Paul’s writings were used to prop up the patriarchal practices already developing in the early modern world.
A Refashioned Family
We stumbled on the church by accident.
It was March 2003. I was writing the final chapter of my dissertation and made a last-minute trip to England with my parents. I was hunting seven sacrament fonts on England’s east coast. Ann Eljenholm Nichols has written about these “seeable signs,” arguing that parishioners carved the stone baptismal fonts in an attempt to combat fifteenth-century heresy. The parishioners literally reinscribed orthodoxy by inscribing scenes of their faith in stone.36 Several of the images depict women interacting with priests, which is why I wanted to see them. So off we went—my parents and I driving around the British countryside for seven full days tracking down fifteenth-century baptismal fonts.
We only made a couple of mistakes as we hunted down the churches, and this was one of them. There were two different churches in two different towns but with the same town name: Wilby. We drove to the wrong Wilby.
But it was a worthwhile mistake, stumbling into the church of All Saints, Wilby.
It was the first time I had seen a church with seventeenth-century box pews. Not much remains of what medieval churches looked like in England before the Reformation. The aftermath of Henry VIII’s reformation (1533–36), which included the dissolution of the monasteries (a nice way of describing the looting and destruction of medieval churches), combined with the chaos of the English Civil War (1642–49) and the so-called Victorian “restorations” (1840–75), left little that medieval parishioners would recognize. The vibrant colors of medieval stained glass windows and the interior paintings on the church walls are mostly lost, smashed and whitewashed over. The medieval naves that used to be crammed with chantries and separated from the altar with elaborate rails and rood screens are now filled with chairs and pulpits. The church we had just walked into was about as far removed from the colorful, noisy, incense-filled churches of medieval England as our full English breakfast was from medieval porridge. But All Saints, Wilby, mostly escaped Victorian restorations, so it still stands as a testament to the Anglican Church on the eve of the Civil War.
Two features dominated the small, bright space: the large double-decker pulpit fixed on the wall, accessed by a circular staircase, and the remaining box pews partially lining the aisle. I stared at those boxed spaces, envisioning the families that filed into each one, closing the door to “box” them in for the duration of the service.
My medieval history–trained eyes stared hard at those box pews. I caught a glimpse, maybe for the first time, of how vastly the Reformation had changed Christian worship. In medieval churches, women and men gathered on opposite sides of the church regardless of their family affiliations. This is probably why the salutation “Good men and women” was a favorite way medieval preachers opened their sermons—I can almost see them looking first to their left, welcoming the “good men” before turning to their right and welcoming the “good women.” Weddings today still echo this old medieval arrangement, as the bride stands to the right of the pastor and the groom to the left. Grouping women and men by their sex instead of by their families encouraged the single-sex parish communities that flourished in late medieval England. One of the first articles I ever read by historian Katherine French told me about medieval church communities for women. These groups, argues French, not only built community but also expanded women’s agency in late medieval churches while reinforcing accepted gender norms. As she writes, “We can imagine that in wives’ groups, women found both comfort and advice to help them through difficult marriages, the birth and death of children, and the running of a household. Through these groups women could create their own hierarchies, based somewhat on family status and wealth, but also on less visible criteria, such as piety, fertility, or personality.”37 French shows how through these female communities women expanded their domestic authority into the space of the church. “Together they created opportunities for collective action and created visibility in the name of salvation.”38
But these groups were lost with the Reformation as the family unit became paramount.
Instead of sitting with their female communities, women now sat with their families. Instead of the preacher directing his sermon to “Good men and women,” he now mostly directed it to the spiritual leaders of the household—the “men, fathers, and brethren” as one preacher addressed his audience.39 Standing in that refashioned church, I could almost hear the changes wrought in the Reformation aftermath. I could almost see the women lined up with their children in the boxed pews, sitting literally under the increased authority of their husbands. French is not talking about box pews in churches when she describes the impact of the Reformation on women in the English parish, but her words still ring true. As women’s activities were redirected into the household, women became less “collective, visible, and active” in the late medieval parish. “The lay agency that was at the heart of women’s ability to turn the parish into a forum for their own spiritual practices ended, as the family became increasingly a religious unit that was on display in the parish.”40
Women’s identities were now subsumed within the family.
Yes, the role of wife had been elevated but at a price.
I love how French concludes her book The Good Women of the Parish:
To be sure, some women rejoiced at the abolition of guild dues, the veneration of saint images, and the pomp and ritual of the Sarum Manual. However, those who were going to find meaning in this new Church needed to develop a new set of skills and actions from which to create religious meaning. For some, literacy, a personal relationship with God, and the increased role of faith rather than works were the new skills and actions. For others, unable to read, and unable to hear the Word of God with their friends who supported them through difficult times, it was not enough.41
I am a Protestant woman, and I am thankful for the theological changes wrought by the Reformation world. But as a historian, I know these changes came with a cost. As the role of wife expanded, the opportunities for women outside of marriage shrank. The family became not only the center of a woman’s world but her primary identity as a good Christian.
The subjugation of women is indeed a historical constant—but that doesn’t make it divinely ordained. While Paul’s writings about women were known consistently throughout church history, it wasn’t until the Reformation era that they begin to be used systematically to keep women out of leadership roles. Instead of Scripture transforming society, society transformed how early modern Christians interpreted the Bible—and this was compounded (as we will see in the next chapter) by the proliferation of the English Bible.