History is written by the victors, we are told. In the church, history was written by the men. How do we know? Because the men, for the most part, held the power.
I’m not throwing shade on the church’s well-documented history of male leadership. They weren’t making things up—men truly did rule the world. We read about them in verified records such as the pages of Scripture, scholars’ letters that crisscrossed the Western world for centuries, and literature.
So what about the women? Logically we know they were present, but what impact did they have on their societies and church life? If our current historical documents tell the whole story, the women generally fed the men and raised their children. A few of them rebelled against secular parents and ran off to live celibate lives for Christ. But women leaders? We just don’t have much to go on in the written records.
Influence or Power?
300–400 years after Christ, male priority became baked into the church system as it mimicked the world’s power structures. But holding office was not the only way to wield influence. Especially during the earliest centuries of the church, leadership was less formalized, less institutionalized. Believers met in house churches, each of which had its own hosts/leaders. And not all households were led by men.
A Paper Trail of Female Influence
Scripture
The Bible itself offers clues to women who led in their faith communities. Since they are not my focus today, I’ll mention names and Scripture references:
Teachers: Priscilla, Acts 18
Prophets: Deborah, Judges 4–5; daughters of Philip, Acts 21:9
Patrons: Phoebe, Romans 16:3
Apostles: Junia, Romans 16:7
House Church Leaders: Lydia, Acts 16; Priscilla and her husband, Aquilla, 1 Corinthians 16:19; Nympha, Colossians 4:15
Early Church Era
Perpetua
If we are talking about written records, Perpetua’s diary offers us an insider look at the journey one young mother took to prioritize Christ over her family and culture—to the point of death. Perpetua wrote her own faith memoir, as it were, becoming one of the earliest female authors whose work is still extant. Read it here. She and her young slave, Felicitas, who joined her in the arena to die for their faith, were highly respected figures in the following centuries.
Thecla
Another female figure who caught the imagination of the early church, Thecla embodied the drive to reject women’s usual circumstances as useful tools to further the Roman Empire—motherhood. Not wanting to marry and birth children to build Rome’s strength, she and women like her desired to remain celibate and serve the church wholeheartedly. Her adventures inspired generations of women. Read them here.
Christ gave women agency in an age when society did not.
In some writings of the Church Fathers, we find men extolling the women they admire: Gregory related the genius of his sister Macrina, while Augustine sang the praises of his mother, Monica. Francis supported Clare’s ministry, and Jerome credited Paula for her help. But in centuries’ worth of spiritual writings, mention of women’s contribution to the church is scarce.
Medieval Church
For lack of space in this post, I offer you a list of names to research:
600s: Hilda of Whitby, Abbess of the double abbey (men and women) in northern England.
1100s: Hildegard of Bingham, Benedictine nun, spiritualist, prophet to kings
1200s: Clare of Assisi, student of St. Francis, founder of monastic order of women
1300s: Bridget of Sweden, author and church reformer
1300s–1400s: Julian of Norwich, Anchorite and author
1300s–1400s: Margery Kempe, mystic and preacher
Hidden in Plain Sight
The paper trail is scarce. But we have another reliable source of information on church history.
Art.
“To save your neck muscles, consider packing a small handheld mirror.” Of all the items on the suggested packing list for a class trip to Italy, this surprised my fellow doctoral students the most. But professor Dr. Sandra Glahn knew from leading multiple trips to Italy that we would be craning our necks to view church walls and ceilings.
Rather than peer down into files full of ancient documents, we stood in dozens of cathedrals and museums—and looked up. Why? Mosaics, frescoes, stained glass, and inscriptions from centuries past remain vivid evidence of who influenced the ancient church. Mosaics shine as brightly now as the day they were installed. Inscriptions can’t be edited or erased. Wood carvings and paintings fill museums and churches across Europe and the Mediterranean countries where the church first exploded in growth. We have a plethora of visual records revealing women in leadership.
The Visual Museum of Women in Christianity
A new project dedicated to documenting art showing women in the church recently opened its virtual doors. The Visual Museum of Women in Christianity is the brain child of three seminary professors and scholars: Dr. Sandra Glahn of Dallas Theological Seminary, Dr. Lynn Cohick of Houston Theological Seminary, and Dr. George Kalanzis of Wheaton College. Glahn first used a small grant to fund a photographer who accompanied her graduate class on a tour of Italy to document art on church walls that depicted women. Read the Christianity Today article that featured some photographs from that trip.
With the help of a larger grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the three scholars created the Visual Museum, a website whose purpose is to house images of women in the visual record of the church. Each image is free to download, without attribution, in order to facilitate speakers and teachers who wish to teach others about them. No need to ask for copyright permissions when you want to show a picture of the Madonna and Child or St. Clare of Assisi, for instance.
Alongside each image, curators have included each woman’s story of faith: What roles did they play in the church that gave them such honor as to be memorialized in stone, glass, or paint? What did God do through them? And what do their stories mean for us today?
Each image also includes information on each artist and art piece itself. Who created it, when, under what circumstances? What did the artist want to convey through his/her use of color, medium, perspective, etc? How was the art received in the church?
Highlights from the Visual Museum
We did need those compact mirrors after a few days of craning our necks to take in all the imagery coating the walls of cathedrals. On that trip we discovered a number of favorite places and specific pieces of art. Many of them are included in the Visual Museum already, with many more waiting in the wings as students and volunteers work to complete each entry.
Mary, Mother of Jesus
She is everywhere. Virtually every Italian town boasts one or more churches dedicated to her, and second only to Jesus himself, she appears in more artwork than any apostle or saint. In the highly favored Annunciation scene (taken from Luke 2), Mary is most often depicted with a book or scroll, suggesting she was literate. The early church understood that she uttered her Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) out of a robust understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures. They respected her devoutness, intelligence, and lifelong witness to her son.
The Visual Museum includes twenty-eight images thus far, each with its own story to tell. Through them we see both her place in the biblical story and how the church came to see her through the years.
Courageous Second-Century Sisters
Tucked among a sea of red-tiled roofs, the comparatively tiny church dedicated to Prassedes (Praxedes) hides a treasure trove of mosaics from the ninth century that feature the second-century sisters Praxedes and Pudentiana. These young virgin women secretly gathered the bodies of martyrs, cleaning and burying them with honor. Pudentiana’s basilica, a five-minute walk down the street, is even older—built in the fourth century. In both basilicas, the apse mosaics present the women as victorious saints, handing their crowns to Jesus, who stands between them. And in the crypt under the high altar of Prassedes lies iconographic evidence from the ninth century affirming that Theodora Episcopa, the pope’s mother, held official church office.
Virgin Martys
In Ravenna’s Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, we marveled at the long wall of fifth-century mosaics depicting twenty-two female saints, each holding her martyr’s crown. On the opposite wall, male saints are depicted in the same manner.
Among the female martyrs, we saw these:
Anatolia and Victoria, virgins during the reign of Decius. They refused to recant their faith and died by the sword.
Daria, a virgin of Athens whose fiancé converted and was baptized. She was arrested with him, and they were imprisoned separately before being tossed in a pit and buried alive.
Cristina was a young woman whose father had her beaten and imprisoned for refusing to bring offerings to a statue. Her tongue was cut out before she was put in a dungeon with snakes, then bound to a tree and shot with arrows.
Cecilia, third-century virgin martyr forced to marry yet converted her husband, who was martyred soon after. When confronted, Cecilia survived the flames before she was beheaded. Her incorrupted body was discovered in 1599 (see cover image for the sculpture created in her honor).
Savina, a third-century martyr and widow of Milan, upon her husband’s death committed herself to helping victims of persecution and was killed for praying at their tombs.
Anastasia was forced to marry an unbeliever who persecuted her. She disguised herself so she could visit imprisoned Christians and was burned alive for her faith.
Lucy of Syracuse, rather than marry a pagan nobleman, liquidated her inheritance and gave it away to the poor. She was arrested and commanded to sacrifice to idols but refused and died by a sword through the neck.
Lessons for Today
Christ gave women agency in an age when society did not. The witness of the virgin martyrs can give women today courage to step out in faith and obedience in the face of opposition.
If we close our Bibles and wonder why God doesn’t use women, or believe that he doesn’t, we have not read closely enough.
As we saw in the Ravenna procession of saints, the young church willingly recognized the contributions of women alongside those of men. In a nearby chapel, matching arches featured mosaic portraits of saints’ faces, men on one side and women on the other. We easily recognized the apostles and popes, but the women were less known. Visitors like us found the portraits very helpful for research since they included the names of each person.
When we discuss God’s call on his children, men and women, we start with the Bible’s witness. Though outnumbered by their brothers in the text, the women we do know of lived obedient, courageous lives as they pursued God. Some were called to lead and teach and prophesy. They often endured persecution in their own times and, throughout history—including the present—their impact has been minimized. If we close our Bibles and wonder why God doesn’t use women, or believe that he doesn’t, we have not read closely enough.
Likewise, we have not adequately scrutinized our history books or cathedrals. Augustine told Perpetua and Felicitas’s story every year on their feast day—the day of their death. Which of the female saints’ stories have you heard taught in church or catechism? How intentional are our churches to include the testimonies of women in the great cloud of witnesses?
By studying the written and visual record of the early church, we can better understand how leaders then understood God’s will for women. God called women. God equipped women. God’s Spirit empowered women. In word and art—but mostly in art—the church retold women’s stories.
To find them, fix your eyes beyond the paper trail. Look up.
Resources to learn more about women in church history:
Love this... life giving!
I restacked this and it went before I had a chance to comment.
Excellent information. Thank you Kelly.