Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity

Rating:
Summary: Preachers...but not priests
Review: In their preface to Women Preachers and Prophets the editors, Beverly Kienzle and Pamela Walker, describe the book as an exploration of "the diverse voices of Christian women who claimed the authority to preach and prophesy and . . . their relationship to broader Christian communities from the second century to the twentieth" (p. xv). The rationale is to illustrate how a narrow definition of the preaching office, and of who has the right to exercise it, has been used throughout Christian history to undermine certain types of religious discourse. "The voice of women, saddled with accusations of theological and biological inferiority," write Kienzle and Walker, "have been especially constrained and delegitimized" (p. xiv). Women Preachers and Prophets is an effort to show that, despite centuries of prohibition, Christian women have indeed preached, either by claiming authority for themselves as prophets inspired directly of God or as preachers by another name who express themselves in song, in letters, and as teachers in more private settings.

This project is pursued through seventeen separate essays, the first ten of which treat the period stretching from the days of early Christianity to the Reformation. Particularly well placed here is Katherine Ludwig Jansen's essay on "Maria Magdalena: Apostola apostolrum," which serves to connect the essays on the early Church to those that deal with preaching in the medieval period. Jansen argues that the contradictory medieval reactions to the reports of the Magdalene's preaching, which tended to see Mary as the exception who proved the rule, makes her paradigmatic of the ambiguous response women could expect: even if hailed as persuasive catechists and evangelizers, women would have to weather doubts about the propriety of their actual engaging in such activities. Anne Breton's essay "The Voice of Good Women" picks up the thread by underscoring a point of divergence between the Cathars and the orthodox Church that has received less attention than it deserves, namely, that women apparently wielded much greater pastoral authority within the Cathar community than they could amongst Catholics. "Prophecy and Song" by Carolyn Muessig, although a bit undeveloped, has another interesting observation to share: that medieval women who would never aspire to formal preaching oftimes turned to singing as a medium by which to communicate religious instruction, and particularly those things they claimed as prophetic insights.

The eight essays that complete the volume examine the period from the Reformation to the twentieth century. Two are devoted to the place of women in the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic response, respectively. Edith Wilks Dolnikowski investigates John Foxe's use of stories about Protestant lay women who proclaimed their faith publicly to impress upon his followers the importance of reading the Gospel in the vernacular, while Linda Lierheimer traces the early history of the Ursuline Sisters to show how the Catholic Church in its hour of greatest need allowed a new female teaching order to experiment with new models of public activity for women that ever more closely approximated preaching. Another two essays, those by Peter Vogt on the Moravian Movement and by Phyllis Mack on British Quakerism, examine two eighteenth-century religious communities that gave women a prominent rôle. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are represented in the final four essays, which treat topics ranging from the Salvation Army to black Spiritual churches in the southern United States to the women's suffrage movement in England.

Women Preachers and Prophets succeeds in rising to the challenge it set itself when promising to cover two thousand years of women's participation in preaching the gospel: the essays, although focusing upon particular moments in that history, nevertheless provide a good sense of the perennial questions and the developmental lines the editors hoped to highlight. The juxtaposition of the lives of women who taught and coped with similar limitations in different times and places is thought-provoking in the patterns it suggests. The volume is a bit less successful, however, in acquitting itself of the charge of being an agenda-driven exercise rather too tied to the vocabulary of "patriarchal historiography," "delegitimization," and "élite sources." The editors also overstate their case when claiming that all the contributors to the volume take an interdisciplinary approach to their topics and that all the essays break new ground. Still, the book as a whole is an important contribution to the history of preaching--and not just women's preaching, although clearly it is that--but to the history of teaching and communication within the Christian tradition.
M. Michèle Mulchahey