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23 results

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  • 16 - The Treatment of Ordination in Recent Scholarship on Religious Women in the Early Middle Ages

  • Edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, John Van Engen
  • Book: Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages
  • Published by: Boydell & Brewer
  • Published online: 30 April 2020
  • Print publication: 17 April 2020, pp 291-302

  • Summary

    The purpose of this essay is to review recent literature on the role of medieval religious women in the period before the reform movement often attributed to Gregory VII that took place between the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries. The reason for choosing this particular period in Christian history will become clear, one hopes, in the course of the essay. It is divided into three sections. The first will offer a brief summary of historical studies of women religious in the early Middle Ages (roughly 500–1200 CE). The second will offer a summary of scholarly theological discussion of the ordination of women in Christian history. The third will summarize studies of the meaning of ordination, and more importantly, the change in the meaning of ordination in Christian history. Finally, a brief conclusion will offer suggestions for a more integrated study of these three areas in order to more precisely understand the role religious women played in the early medieval Church.

    More precisely, this essay attempts 1) to demonstrate that the majority of scholarship on early religious women in Western Christianity has failed to address the extensive scholarship demonstrating that women were designated as ordained in this period, and 2) that this is in part because they are assuming an anachronistic definition of ordination in their studies.

    Discussions of the Ordination of Women in Historical Studies of Women Religious

    Suzanne Wemple in her 1981 study, Women in Frankish Society, offers one of the few and most complete discussions of women deacons and the roles that they may have played in early medieval ecclesiastical circles. She notes that the attempts to exclude women from the diaconate in the sixth and seventh century failed, and the “Gallican church had ordained deaconesses who regarded themselves as equals to the male clergy.” By the end of the sixth century, however, the office of deaconess had been abolished, and women were removed from ministry. Monastic women continued to defy ecclesiastical legislation by participating in liturgical rites, a practice forbidden by new legislation during the Carolingian period. Women continued to assume the title of deacon at least into the tenth century, although by that time, the title was applied to abbesses.

  • Heloise, Abelard and the Ordination of Abbesses

  • GARY MACY
  • Journal: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History / Volume 57 / Issue 1 / January 2006
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2006, pp. 16-32
  • Print publication: January 2006

  • Abelard discussed the status and history of the ordo sanctimonialium in several of his works. In them he identified abbesses as the successors to the ancient order of deaconesses and thus sacramentally ordained and equal to any male order. This understanding followed a venerable tradition that stood in stark contrast to the more recent claims of the Glossa ordinaria, Gratian and Peter the Lombard that the only true sacramental orders were the subdiaconate, the diaconate and the presbyterate. Abelard's work then can be understood in part as a response to these claims and a defence of the older tradition.

  • Was there a ‘the Church’ in the Middle Ages?

  • Gary Macy
  • Journal: Studies in Church History / Volume 32 / 1996
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016, pp. 107-116
  • Print publication: 1996

  • Scholarly works on the Middle Ages frequently enough mention ‘the Church in the Middle Ages’, or ‘the teaching of the Church in the Middle Ages’ without further specification, as if the reader could immediately identify the institution to which the author is referring. The authors of such works assume both that the reader readily recognizes what the author means by the phrase, but also, and perhaps more troubling, assume that there was an easily identifiable group in the Middle Ages that was ‘the Church’. Yet, when one tries actually to establish some agreement among medieval sources as to what constituted ‘the Church’ or even some agreement as to the criteria by which one could recognize a ‘the Church’, the ‘the Church’ which ought to be so solid seems to disappear into a thousand disparate factions. If, in fact, ‘the Church’ is really better described as a set of common traditions rather than as an institutional monolith, then the question of unity within ‘the Church’ would centre more on the commonality of this tradition than on the structural integrity and uniformity of belief within the institution. In short, how one understands and defines ‘the Church’ will determine the criteria by which one affirms or denies the unity of that Church. A discussion of what ‘the Church of the Middle Ages’ might be seems to be methodologically prior to any determination of the unity or disunity of Christianity in the Middle Ages. This contribution will limit itself to an exploration of some of the problems inherent in assuming that there was a ‘the Church in the Middle Ages’ and, further, that this ‘Church of the Middle Ages’ can be easily identified and defined.

  • The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages

  • Gary Macy
  • Journal: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History / Volume 45 / Issue 1 / January 1994
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009, pp. 11-41
  • Print publication: January 1994

  • Under the heading ‘transubstantiation’ in the Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church, one finds that the word was in widespread use in the later part of the 12th cent., and at the Lateran Council of 1215 belief in Transubstantiation was defined as de fide; but the elaboration of the doctrine was not achieved till after the acceptance of the Aristotelian metaphysics later in the 13th cent., when it found classic formulation in the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas.

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