The aged Bishop Polycarp was burnt to death in the arena at Smyrna in the afternoon of 23 February 155 (or 156), in front of a hostile crowd. The terrible story was lovingly recorded, copied and passed round the churches; it is probably the first non-biblical record of a martyrdom, and survives by itself and in Eusebius’ History. As Polycarp entered the arena Christian eyewitnesses heard a voice from heaven, saying in Greek, for all to understand, . The first word means ‘be strong’; the last shares a root with two other Greek words, which means courage, and which means a male person, a man. We shall consider later how Polycarp’s contemporaries understood this; centuries later, about the 1880s, an Anglican academic clergyman, Joseph Lightfoot, who was soon to be a bishop himself, translated Polycarp’s story into English. He found an apt English idiom: ‘Be strong, Polycarp,’ he wrote, ‘and play the man.’

In Confessions 13, Augustine discusses the right interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis. His exegesis is allegorical, relating spiritual truth to its expression in the physical world. This physical expression was needed because Adam fell:

The broader theme of gender and Christian religion presupposes three definitions: of Christianity, of religion, and of gender. Probably none of these is as simple as it might first appear, but that of gender is perhaps the most critical for our theme. Although there are still some who would use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ interchangeably, there is a growing tendency to recognize an important distinction between gender – that is, femininity and masculinity, regarded as largely socially constructed – and sex, the biological distinction between male and female human beings. Gender is best considered as born out of interactions between men and women. This means that the gender roles which make up what we experience as masculinity and femininity cannot be defined by looking only at men or at women, although ideas about both can be gained from looking at one group or the other. That is why gender history is different from women’s history, and that is why both women’s history and gender history are essential enterprises. We need women’s history because we need to know where women were as well as where they were not.

In the prologue of her De vita sancti Radegundis, Baudonivia, an inhabitant of Radegund’s community of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, adopted a phrase from Venantius Fortunatus’ Vita Hilarii to express her unworthiness for the task: ‘I can as easily touch heaven with my fingers as perform the task you have imposed on me.’ Baudonivia, the first female hagiographer in Merovingian Gaul, was here drawing from the Life of a male saint to introduce her work. She was thus, like all hagiographers, not alone in her task. This was doubly the case, since immediately prior to the composition of her own work Venantius Fortunatus had himself composed a Vita of the saint. Radegund was thus a focus of both male and female interest. This paper will examine the two Lives from a gendered perspective, exploring the manner in which gender, a constructed rather than a physiological form of sexual differentiation, may illumine Radegund’s sanctity.

On 29 June 824, a woman named Dhuoda went to Aachen to be married in the imperial palace. She herself tells us about the wedding, yet it is characteristic of the Carolingian age that we know far more of the groom, Bernard of Septimania, than of the bride. His career and connections can be pieced together from a wide range of sources, but she is only known from the manual of moral and spiritual advice which she composed in 841–3 for her absent fifteen-year-old son William. Bernard’s life can be reconstructed as a coherent narrative, but Dhuoda’s only emerges from a few tattered snapshots, without even a family album to contain them. Famous as she is as the only lay woman among the tiny handful of women writers known to us by name from the early Middle Ages, Dhuoda’s isolation must be stressed. Not merely her personal sense of loneliness, powerfully conveyed, nor even the difficulty of placing her within any secure literary context, but also her historiographical isolation mark her out, for we know all too little about the women of the early medieval aristocracy to which Dhuoda belonged. We can neither sketch with any precision the lifestyle of Dhuoda’s peer group, nor assess whether she is typical of it – or exceptional. The married women of the Carolingian aristocracy remain largely occluded from our sight, chronicled only in disjunct fragments of evidence which do not permit of any extended or systematic analysis. When we can find them, aristocratic women more often appear enveloped within the bonds of family and kinship than independent individuals within political contexts. But there remains the unsettling image of the young Dhuoda, briefly translated out of her familial and domestic setting into the shadowy corridors of imperial power: and the scene prompts questions about the place of wives and marriage within the Carolingian polity.

The Lord did not say, “I am custom”, but “I am Truth”.’ So, allegedly, Pope Gregory VII, in words that – among medievalists at least – have become almost as well known as the Scriptural text to which they refer, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14.6). The Gregorian dictum embodies the paradox at the centre of the movement for Church Reform in the eleventh century, a paradox which continues to shape historiographical discussion of the period. On the one hand, Gregory and his circle presented themselves as uncompromising fighters for the truth of their vision of the Church, prepared to dismiss any appeal to established practice, however venerable; on the other, and in the same moment, however, they themselves appealed explicitly to past precedent in broadcasting their manifesto. In the comment attributed to Gregory, the authority of ‘the blessed Cyprian’ (mediated in turn by Augustine) is invoked to sanction the rejection of custom. To ‘custom’, then, the reformers opposed not ‘truth’ as a timeless absolute, but a notion of truth embedded in a tradition of moral language. Like many revolutionaries, they saw themselves as restoring their society to a pristine state from which it had fallen away – deaf to the accusation of their opponents that such ‘reform’ was in fact irreparably destructive of the peace of the community. In part because eleventh-century questions about the moral, and in particular the sexual, behaviour of the priesthood continue to be relevant in modern churches, modern scholars continue to take sides over Reform, depicting Gregory VII either as faithful restorer or as demonic innovator. This interpretative deadlock suggests, perhaps, that we should look again at the reformers’ paradoxical notion of truth as it emerges through their use of inherited language. My suggestion is that crucial to the truth of Reform in the eleventh century was its reassertion of a very ancient rhetoric of gender.

In a famous eucharistic vision, recorded in the Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen saw what she calls the ‘image of a woman’ (‘muliebris imago’) approaching the Cross so that she was sprinkled by the blood from Christ’s side. In the Eibingen miniature which accompanies this vision, the woman is shown not only sprinkled with Christ’s blood but catching it in a chalice. Below the Cross an altar bearing a chalice is shown and the same woman stands beside it, her arms outstretched in prayer. Hildegard says in the text that the woman ‘frequently approached’ the altar and there ‘devotedly offers her dowry, which is the body and blood of the Son of God’. The illustration shows nothing of the vested priest who is described in the text approaching the altar after the woman to celebrate the divine mysteries; but it appears that the woman herself is celebrating the mysteries of Christ’s passion which are recalled in the Eucharist and pictured around the altar. The interpretation of this vision says that the woman is Ecclesia, the Church, the Bride of Christ.

Both R. Howard Bloch and Jean Leclercq have recently included the name of Pope Innocent HI (1198-1216) among the ranks of medieval misogynistic writers. Such an anti-feminist designation results from his treatise De miseria humanae conditionis (1195), which he authored whilst a cardinal deacon, as Lothario de Segni. However, the passages cited by Bloch and Leclercq only appear misogynistic when we consider them superficially. If we look at the entire corpus of Innocent’s writings and his actions, in their proper contexts, we discover that this Pope can not be so easily categorized. Rather, our analysis will show that there is much more diversity in his perspective on gender than originally thought.

The De miseria should be seen in its unique context when evaluating its attitude towards women. Books I and HI of the treatise belonged to the contemptus mundi tradition which emphasised the vileness and misery of human existence. Moreover, John C. Moore has recently proposed that Book II is a speculum curialis which reflected the questionable moral practices Innocent observed during his career in the Roman Curia.

The presence of a malodorous taint of misogyny in Christian literature, both ancient and medieval, is a familiar fact that feminist writers, more than male chauvinists, have been keen to push under our noses. What is its explanation? The inferiority of women is a standard theme in male-dominated cultures. Christian literature, for so long the virtual preserve of male celibates, inevitably reflected their anxieties and their need for reassurance. But was there also a genuine theological component, however misconceived, arising from basic Christian convictions about human nature and the moral law?

This paper explores the possibilities of a feminist reading of the Middle English life of St Margaret of Antioch, whose status as a virgin-martyr is sometimes held to have made her an unattainable role model, suitable only for virgins who had dedicated themselves to God. Using both written and painted English narratives of St Margaret’s life dating mainly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it shows that many elements of these could have been interpreted by all women as a validation of themselves and their experiences. The paper uncovers certain common themes and similarities of presentation, to see how far a general picture of Margaret emerges from them and what they say about the construction of femininity and the female. Although the narrative of the legend takes a variety of forms, both written and painted, it is sufficiently stable (largely ‘controlled’ by the Legenda Aurea) to allow different versions to be drawn on in this way.

In Orthodox Last Judgements in sixteenth-century Moldavia, both Adam and Eve appear as saintly intercessors on behalf of mankind. The presence of these suppliant figures, on either side of the throne of hetimasia (Plate i), suggests that Orthodoxy and Catholicism differed significantly in their evaluations of the gender implications of the Fall. In medieval Catholicism the portrayal of a nimbed figure of Eve, or even of Adam, was inconceivable. In the West the ideas of the Fall as the cause of the crucifixion and of Mary as the antithesis of Eve produced a powerful set of negative views of women’s nature. The weaker sex was inherently vulnerable to temptation, flattery, and persuasion, endangering not only women’s souls but those of all mankind. The veneration of Mary tempered this negative image, but Mary’s extraordinary nature could never entirely erase the assumptions of innate female inferiority based on the role of Eve in the Fall. The depiction of Eve as a saint in Orthodox wall painting appears to offer an unexpected challenge to the view that such gender associations are the only possible outcome of the Genesis account. It is also tempting to relate the presence of such representations in Moldavia to the highly unusual social position of women in Moldavian society, based on inheritance customs which divided estates equally between both sons and daughters.

Conduct books, or household manuals offering advice about marriage and the ordering of domestic relationships, attained their greatest popularity in early modern England between the late sixteenth century and the Civil War. Many of these works, including William Whately’s popular A Bride-Bush, which ran into three editions between 1617 and 1623, and William Gouge’s influential Of Domesticall Duties, which first appeared in 1622, originated as sermons and were written by puritan preachers. They are also a valuable source of information about the construction of ideal masculine and feminine behaviour in the early modern period. At the start of A Bride-Bush, which was based on a marriage sermon, Whately asserted ‘I will make the ground of all my speech, those words of the Apostle Paul, Ephes. 5. 23. where hee saith, The Husband is the Wives head.’ Towards the end of the book he noted that the male sex is ‘preferred before the female in degree of place & dignity, as all men will yeeld that read what the Scriptures speake in that behalfe’.

Patriarchs at home, but brides of Christ in spirit: it is an intriguing fact that while puritan writers opposed any confusion of gender roles in everyday life, they were happy for men to adopt a feminine identity in spiritual experience. On one hand, seventeenth-century conduct books and sermons hammered home the divinely-ordained place of husbands and wives in marriage. William Whately (1583-1639) argued that wives should always have on their lips the refrain ‘Mine husband is my superior, my better’, and that

The Christian tradition has been elaborated and developed over many centuries in the context of gender, which provides the bedrock and framework of social order, powerfully influencing men and women’s conduct of every aspect of their daily lives. The dynamic relationship between gender and religious experience – a relationship that may at times channel, control, confine, or liberate – is bound to be complex for the historian to unravel. This paper attempts the beginning of such an unravelling, albeit confined to the experience of women and to England. It focuses upon 1600 to 1900, to argue that the effective gender system – the patriarchy – of this period was being revised by men in a radical way which had major implications for the possibilities open for women to find the space they needed for their spirituality. We cannot of course speak of patriarchy as something given and permanent in Western Christendom, only of patriarchies; for, if we take the term to refer to men’s institutionalized dominance over women and children in the family and the subordination of women outside it, men were bound to need constantly to adapt and adjust their means of achieving this end over the centuries. The objective here is as follows: the paper begins by exploring how the meaning of gender and therefore the patriarchal system was revised between 1600 and 1900; it will then offer an outline, with illustrative examples, of the patterns of women’s spirituality in that period. It starts with the home and within the home with the privacy of the closet, besides the family world of the hall and parlour. It will also look at some women who, through visions or prophecy, sought a national platform.

In October 1655, two Quakers, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, imprisoned in Exeter gaol, published a warning to the priests and people of England. It was in many ways a typical Quaker tract, decrying the national Church of England, and urging people to turn to the inner light of Christ, rather than rely on the outward teachings of the national Church. But Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole also levelled the following bitter accusation against England’s ministry:

The relationship between the two co-ordinates of this essay, ‘gender’ and ‘the clerical profession’, might be interpreted in a number of ways. It could, for instance, be taken to mean the manner in which clergy articulated and encouraged differences in gender roles. For it is certainly true that the most commonly quoted conduct books of the period – and especially those which prescribed roles for women – were written by the clergy. Clerics like James Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister in London, in his popular Sermons to Young Women (1765) advised his presumed audience: