Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History.

CLARK, ELIZABETH A.

Anglo-Saxonist Allen Frantzen, addressing fellow medievalists in 1993, dismissed fears expressed by female colleagues that adopting the designation "gender studies" would signal a reinstatement of "familiar male canons while crowding hard-won courses on women writers out of the curriculum." Such a regression, Frantzen retorted, was "inconceivable," since "a return to a prefeminist curriculum is as likely in most universities as a resurgence of the electric typewriter."(1)

Predictably, many scholars of women and gender within religious studies are less sanguine. Ursula King, for example, recalling the conviction of the 1980s that feminist studies in religion would effect a "paradigm shift" in the discipline, now regretfully concedes that the results "so far ... have been less noticeable in religious studies than in other areas of the humanities."(2)

Two issues lie imbedded in these citations. First, the less than overwhelming success of the hoped-for "paradigm shift" in religious studies raises unsettling questions: did scholars harbor unrealistic expectations for rapid change in their discipline? Or has religious studies been less open to these approaches than other humanities disciplines, for example, English? Or, worse yet, has women's studies in religion been relegated to the academic ghetto, as some historians rue has been the case for women's studies in history?(3)

A second issue--one that shall occupy much of this essay--is the unacknowledged elision between and among the terms "women's studies," "feminist studies," and "gender studies." "Feminist studies," the most politicized of the three, contributes, in historian Judith Bennett's words, "to the understanding of (and hence final eradication of) women's oppression";(4) "women's studies," on the other hand, may suggest the more innocuous task of merely describing women's activities.(5) Whether "women's studies" should adopt a more overtly political stance is an important question, but not one that I shall here engage. Rather, I wish to focus on the varying connotations of the terms "women's studies" and "gender studies" and to ask how the two relate to different conceptions of the task of a historian of Christianity. To this distinction I shall shortly return.

As to the meaning of the terms "religion" and "religious studies," I accept Jonathan Z. Smith's premise that "`[r]eligion' is not a native term," but rather "is a second-order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as `language' plays in linguistics or `culture' plays in anthropology."(6) This assumption implicitly rejects "religion" as a sui generis concept, as (in Rosalind Shaw's words) "a discrete and irreducible phenomenon which exists `in and of itself'"--a conceptualization that, intentionally or not, decontextualizes and "ungenders" religion.(7)

That I shall limit my discussion to texts pertaining mainly to the history of Christianity does not simplify my task, given the fierce debates among historians over how their discipline should be conceived and practiced. Although most contemporary professional historians have abandoned an older style of narrative description for analyses of change and causation, the still more recent challenge to this analytic paradigm by a hermeneutic or literary one has been strongly resisted by social historians adhering to the analytic model, who in recent decades have enjoyed dominant status in the profession.(8) Characteristic of this debate is the question of whether historians understand themselves as working on "documents" or on "texts" (that is, whether historical sources should be conceived as similar to literary ones). I shall argue that scholars of early Christian history (from whose sources many of my examples are drawn) are largely textualists, practitioners of a species of intellectual history. "Women's studies in religion," I shall suggest, has appropriated the "social history" model, while "gender studies in religion" has begun to adopt the hermeneutic paradigm of historical studies. Noting the alleged advantages and problems of the two approaches, I shall argue that keeping both models in play enriches historical studies of Christianity.

As these remarks suggest, I think that scholarship on women and gender in religion, however original its subject matter, is highly dependent on theoretical and historical approaches derived from other academic disciplines. Last, I shall note several studies of women and gender by specialists in non-Christian religions that, by comparison and contrast, serve to highlight the issues at stake in exploring women and gender in Christian history.

I. WOMEN AND RELIGION

Published in the first volume of the journal Signs (1976), historian Joan Kelly's essay, "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications for Women's History," rapidly achieved classic status.(9) Kelly, a Renaissance historian, claimed that women's history had "shaken the conceptual foundations of historical study" by problematizing "three of the basic concerns of historical thought: (1) periodization, (2) the categories of social analysis, and (3) theories of social change."(10) Concerning periodization, Kelly argued that eras often touted as manifesting "progress" for men did not do so for women--in fact, that women often lost status during these periods. Thus Kelly famously concluded that there was no "renaissance" for women--"at least not during the Renaissance."(11) Taking the history of contraception as a benchmark for historical periodization, for example, would produce a very different trajectory of "progress."(12)

Moreover, Kelly urged historians to broaden their concept of social change to include developments in the relations between the sexes,(13) and to rework theories of social change to trace "the connections between changes in class and sex relations,"(14) attending especially to the determinative role of property in the sexual order.(15) The goal of this new women's history, Kelly claimed, was twofold: "to restore women to history and to restore our history to women."(16)

Whether or not historians of Christianity have been able to achieve the transformation of their discipline that Kelly envisioned, for three decades and more "real women," as agents and as victims, have been raised up as subjects for investigation. For example, women's roles as patrons of religious institutions have been much studied: as owners of the house churches in which early Christians gathered(17) and as patrons of monasteries, churches, and the poor throughout the patristic and medieval periods among other roles.(18) But, we might ask, is not class here a more relevant analytical category than gender, since only women of wealth--like their male counterparts--had the means to serve as patrons? At best, in historian Janet Nelson's words, there were occasions when the "forcefulness of nobility compensated for the weakness of gender."(19)

Widows are a second group of women who have received considerable attention in recent years--but again, differing assessments of their position and relative power often relate to variables such as class, era, and religious ideology.(20) Even within confining patriarchal structures, historians have shown, some widows throughout history managed to exert significant influence.(21) For example, historian Barbara Harris demonstrates through an exhaustive documentary study that aristocratic widows in England from 1450 to 1550 often enhanced their families' fortunes, aided by contemporary legal changes that broke the entails restricting inheritance to men: here class and legal structures enabled women to serve as agents of change in the lives of aristocratic families.(22)

Widows in other times, places, and social classes, by contrast, were more likely to find themselves in positions of "enhanced vulnerability."(23) In early Christianity, for example, studies of the Didascalia Apostolorum (a writing that pertains to church life in third-century Syria) argue that this text obliquely reflects a struggle between women holding semi-official status as "widows" and bishops who were in "the process of establishing a church hierarchy,"(24) with the latter attempting to exclude "women (and particularly widows) from leadership functions within the congregation."(25)

Women's agency, in other words, has varied considerably with the workings of class, law, social custom, generational difference, and religious hierarchy; "the fact of being a female" in and of itself has not effected historical change.(26) As historian Lyndal Roper notes, large-scale historical transformations may barely disturb the relations of power between men and women.(27) The sex/gender dimension intersects with other historical, social, and economic conditions in different and unexpected ways that do not encourage overarching generalizations. "Uneven developments"--"the possible discontinuity between positions occupied within the economic, political, and symbolic orders"(28)--belie any attempt to predict a straightforward narrative of the conditions under which women have prospered.(29) Allowing for understandable disagreements as to the relative weight that should be assigned to social, economic, legal, and political factors in historical explanation, scholars of women in the history of Christianity have not fully attended to the intersections of these factors with religion.(30) Perhaps in a wish to accord religion the dominant role in their accounts, they often leave to their colleagues in other disciplines the study of (for example) the ways in which "women's religion" has been manipulated in the political arena--a topic for which nineteenth-and twentieth-century France provides some arresting examples in the political uses to which the cults of St. Philomene(31) and Joan of Arc(32) and the Marian revival(33) were put.

One benefit of a focus on "women" (as contrasted with "gender") in Christian history has been to highlight the ways in which female agents managed to circumvent the confines of patriarchy in its various historical manifestations;(34) for example, how the Ursulines redefined their teaching activities as "domestic"(35) and how eighteenth-century Moravian women labeled as simple "speech" what their critics disapprovingly called "preaching."(36) Raising up women's agency has unquestionably enlarged and enriched our knowledge of Christian history.

Likewise, attention to "real women" has stimulated discussions of periodization. Following Joan Kelly's ground-breaking essay, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?"(37) historians intensified the debate over the traditional periodizations of Western history. Most feminist historians now acknowledge that there is no straightforward narrative of women's "progress," nor do advances for women necessarily proceed in tandem with those for men.(38) Historians of Christianity can nonetheless identify social, economic, and other factors that in different periods permitted women's freer activity. For example, Karen King argues that in early Christianity, women's activities received freer scope in situations that de-emphasized the "hierarchical ordering of power," tolerated prophecy as a religious activity, and fostered the construction of female Christian identity apart from sexual and reproductive roles.(39)

Another site of debate regarding periodization has centered on the Protestant Reformation/early modernity: while Protestant (male) historians traditionally privileged this era as an advantageous turning point, scholars examining evidence pertaining to women have offered quite different estimates. Some, such as Colin Atkinson and Jo B. Atkinson, concluded that the sixteenth century could be divided into more and less liberating decades for women,(40) while others outrightly deny that women progressed in this era.(41) Lyndal Roper, for example, counters historians' attachment to narratives of "the rise of individualism and rationality" in early modernity with the reminder that the witch craze, responsible for the deaths of so many women, was most prominent in this period, not in the allegedly benighted medieval era.(42)

Likewise, the Gregorian Reform of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, praised by earlier scholars as a moment in which the Catholic Church amended its practices, is now characterized by historians such as Janet Nelson and Dyan Elliott as a moment when women lost status and power.(43) In Jo Ann McNamara's view, the significance of the Gregorian Reform lay in its attempt to create a "woman-free space," "a church virtually free of women at every level but the lowest stratum of the married clergy."(44) In these accounts, the period of the Gregorian Reform signals not Catholic glory, but female demotion.

If attention to women (in contrast to gender) has enhanced historical and religious studies by suggesting new ways to think about agency and periodization, other aspects of this approach have now come under criticism. The first, an offshoot of the quest for "origins," has been particularly prominent in studies of religions that have historical founders, most notably Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Just as scholars of medieval women had earlier searched for "a medieval El Dorado,"(45) so scholars of religious history have looked back to "origins" (often, of the religions to which they themselves give allegiance) to locate a golden era when women were accorded generous treatment by a prescient and charismatic founding figure. Although I acknowledge that concepts such as routinization and hierarchization are useful in analyzing changes that occur in a religion's early history, the emphasis in "women in religion" studies has rather been to look to the liberating teaching of a founder, accorded normative status for present-day devotees, before the trajectory of decline set in.

In ancient Christianity, the incipient moment of debasement has been placed as early as Paul or as late as the institutionalization of the church in the fourth century; whatever historical moment is chosen, the downhill trajectory gains speed after the time of Jesus.(46) Here, comparisons with other religions is enlightening, for it is not only historians of Christianity who press this trajectory. Scholars of Islamic women's history, for example, have looked to the era of Mohammed as exemplifying a more egalitarian form of Islam, soon corrupted by interpretations of the Qur'an that disadvantaged women.(47) Likewise, some scholars of women in Buddhism, adopting what Donald Lopez dubs "the bad monk theory,"(48) have claimed that women's status declined after an initial era of glory.(49) Even adherents of religions that lack founders can nevertheless appeal to the authoritative texts of the distant past--for example, to the Vedas--to support the notion that there was an originary period in Hinduism when women were esteemed and sati was unknown.(50) Or, again, an ancient era, rather than a text or a founder--say, Israel's Iron Age--can be advanced as one in which near equality for women was achieved, after which a decline in status set in.(51) Such accounts of "pure" origins and subsequent devolutions--whatever their historical credibility--serve mainly, I would argue, as inspirations for present-day practitioners. Moreover, the early search for pristine "origins" of a religion often entailed a "blaming of the Other" for misogynistic features and subsequent devolutions.(52) Thus a feminist Jesus was originally established at the expense of an "impure" forerunner, Judaism,(53) while Islam could be blamed for introducing the subjection of women into Hinduism in India.(54)

At worst, from a historian's standpoint, attempts to ground women's presence in history appeal to a mythic past, as in the case of various "fundamentalisms";(55) or invent traditions wholesale, as in the cases of some New Age appropriations of Native American traditions,(56) and of "Goddess" religion.(57) But "imagined tradition" also manifests itself in mainstream religions: Uma Chakravarti sees her work as documenting the "invention of tradition" in Hinduism,(58) and Catherine Hall's study of the nineteenth-century Baptist missionary James Mursell Phillippo demonstrates how he produced a "Jamaica of the mind."(59)

A third problem that I think often has attended the study of women as historical subjects and agents has been an over-concentration on "the body" and on "women's experience." The reasons for this concentration are understandable: as Ursula King notes, to feminist scholars--frustrated that the academic study of religion was so often text-oriented and "over-intellectualist," and thus often excluded women from serving as subjects of study--attention to religious experience, especially as connected to the body, seemed helpful.(60) And when "an indisputable authenticity" was ascribed to that foundational evidence of experience that no (male) historian could challenge, women were endowed with an agency capable of resisting oppression.(61)

Despite the perceived political benefits of the appeal to "experience," it was to receive a devastating critique whose effects have still not been fully registered by many historians of women. The most important scholarly critique of the category "women's experience" is Joan Scott's article, "The Evidence of Experience," published in Critical Inquiry in 1991. Although Scott appreciates the feminist claim that a resort to "experience" challenges traditional historians' appeal to "brute facts" and "objectivity,"(62) two problems soon became evident: first, that some people's experiences seemed to be more important than others (it was as easy to ignore "women's experiences" as to overlook women as agents);(63) and second, that the experience to which feminist historians often appealed was that of white, middle-class women, which was represented as if it were the experience of all women.(64) Women, particularly those of color or the working class, might well receive no benefit at all from a scholar's argument based on the evidence of "experience."

But other problems attended historians' appeal to "experience," in Scott's view: appealing to experience tended to "take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented," thus naturalizing the very difference that needed to be explained. Agency was decontextualized by assuming that it was "an inherent attribute of individuals." "The evidence of experience," Scott continues, "then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world."(65) The appeal to experience could leave unexamined the workings of ideology and the mechanisms by which it was historically constituted. In appeals to experience, "femaleness" often remained "un-historicized."(66) Since experience, Scott argues, "is always contested and always therefore political," historians must probe how the knowledge derived from experience is produced.(67) This critique of experience is also championed by historian Denise Riley, who although conceding that feminism would not want to abandon the category of "women's experience" entirely, urges historians to register that a simple appeal to "women's experience" "closes down inquiry into the ways in which female subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible, the ways in which race and sexuality intersect with gender, the ways in which politics organize and interpret experience--in sum, the ways in which identity is a contested terrain, the site of multiple and conflicting claims."(68) Thus "experience" seemed an increasingly shaky ground from which to argue.

In religious studies as elsewhere, the emphasis on women's experience was often coupled with an emphasis on the body. An important pioneer in studies of the female body in Christian history is Caroline Walker Bynum, whose books Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women(69) and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion(70) alerted scholars (indeed, far beyond the ranks of medievalists) to the importance of the body for the study of medieval women. Bynum's work served to raise "the body" to the status of a worthy historical subject. For early Christian studies, Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity(71) acquired a similarly canonical status.

Historians of antiquity, hard-pressed to find abundant material on women in their sources, might understandably assume that since the body was a girl's one contribution to the social order, it deserved to be emphasized.(72) Since early Christian writings so often denigrated the body, was it not important now to celebrate it? Had not religion scholars learned from Mary Douglas to trace the ways in which the body served as a map of society,(73) and from Michel Foucault, how the body could serve as a site for the contestation of power?(74) Thus for various reasons, the body rose to prominence as a topic of historical study.

Indeed, the body received such pride of place in history of Christianity studies that recently there has emerged, in reaction, a disinclination to emphasize it: after all, had not men's arguments concerning the fragility and evils of the female body been a factor that contributed to women's subjugated position for so many centuries? Had not a concentration on the female body triggered Anglo-American feminists' dis-ease--whether warranted or not--with the celebration of female bodiliness by French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous?(75) Does not such a celebration, as some argued, risk "a naively unitary view of the female, and ... reflecting and reproducing dominant cultural assumptions about women"?(76) Indeed, as theorist Chris Weedon has argued, "[p]oststructuralist theory has challenged all theories of sexual and gender difference which appeal to the fixed meanings of bodies."(77)

Insofar as medieval women mystics in particular have been viewed through the lens of their bodily experiences, Amy Hollywood's book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, provides an important nuance.(78) Hollywood argues that these three writers enacted a "desomatizing transformation of `female spirituality,'"(79) a retreat from the "somatic" religious experience that historians have sometimes judged to be "constitutive of women's religious experience."(80) Although male-authored hagiographies of medieval women religious often do emphasize "the body," Hollywood notes, the mystics she studies stress rather the "exiled soul."(81) In these hagiographies written by men, Hollywood alleges, the women's bodily renunciations and forms of devotion are depicted as conventional ascetic practices that kept within the bounds of ecclesiastically regulated propriety, whereas Mechthild of Magdeburg's and Marguerite Porete's own treatises express a less restrained devotion.(82) Here Hollywood pinpoints an important way in which genre may influence the representation of women in medieval religious literature. If such a link between gender and genre can be shown to hold across a wider range of medieval and early modern religious texts, scholars will have located another significant marker in women's studies in religion. In any event, Hollywood provides an important nuance to the recent concentration on women's bodies.(83)

One last distinction often employed by scholars in the "women's history" mode is that between the public and the private. Here, the assumption that women's sphere throughout much of Western history was the home, the alleged realm of "the private," is taken to explain their lack of representation in the spaces deemed "public." This account was appropriated by historians of early Christian women in particular to argue that women probably enjoyed positions of leadership when Christians met in house churches, defined as an expansion of private space, but were excluded from leadership roles when the church acquired public space.(84)

Yet it remains dubious whether the public/private distinction always helps to explain gender expectations.(85) The distinction does not hold well for early Christianity, Carolyn Osiek argues on the basis of architectural and other evidence pertaining to houses (and thus house churches) in Christian antiquity. Moreover, the fact that much of the economic and political business transacted by the Roman paterfamilias took place at home, in the front of the house--to which women in Roman antiquity had access--calls into question the utility of invoking the public/private distinction as explanatory. And since house church gatherings were not restricted to members of the immediate household, they were not, strictly speaking, private. House churches, Osiek argues, might best be described "as the crossroads between public and private."(86)

Likewise, for the early Middle Ages Janet Nelson has argued that a division of public/private according to gender is "not entirely apt": were not court and convent "both in a sense public spaces"?(87) Reviewing the first volume of Georges Duby's edited collection, The History of Private Life, Nelson faults his "curiously ahistorical" assumption that "private life" means "domesticity"--an assumption indeed contradicted, she notes, by the volume's various essays on aristocratic households. Gender, Nelson argues, does not lie on the side of the "private," but often confounds the very distinction between public and private.(88) Perhaps the distinction between "public" and "private" may hold for later periods--for example, early modernity, which saw the development of new urban political structures(89)--but scholars of history and religion would need to establish this point, not assume it.

These, then, are some of the problematic issues that should be addressed in considering the "history of women." In two areas of Christian history, however, I perceive an overlap between the assumptions of "women's history" and those of "gender history"; namely, in the studies of women as demonized heretics, and as witches. This subject can be approached from the point of view of "real women"--women who were tortured and executed--as well as from that of "women-as-code." Women accused of "heresy" in early and medieval Christianity include those labeled "Gnostics," Montanists, Priscillianists, Origenists,(90) Cathars,(91) and Beguines.(92) Studies of the witch craze now fill volumes, since Hugh Trevor-Roper's pioneering work of 1967 (in which, it must be noted, "women" are not the issue at [or on the] stake).(93)

That "women" served as the markers for deviance in early modernity is now a commonplace--whether as "witches"(94) or as the representatives of sexual depravity.(95) And the topos continued to prove useful: thus the "Hallelujah Lasses" of the Salvation Army in nineteenth-century Britain were branded as prostitutes for their association with styles of popular commercial entertainment.(96) As Pamela Walker demonstrates, the "lasses" cleverly changed the valence of the denigrating image by claiming that they would "sweep the sewers" to save the world, go where polite women would not in order to purify pestilence(97)--thus providing a spirited example of how women could invert the rhetoric of denigration in a bid to claim moral superiority.

Yet many of these essays and books also advance a gender-studies-inspired exploration of the rhetorical and symbolic demonizing of women used to shore up "orthodoxy." In texts and documents pertaining to heresy and witchcraft, women are not only represented as "real women," but are deployed as signs of sexual temptation and depravity. In early Christian studies, Virginia Burrus's work has pointedly illustrated some ways in which "orthodoxy" was secured by aligning female gender and heresy.(98) In the Middle Ages, the demonization of the priest's wife--no doubt a "real woman," but also a figure of rhetoric--helped to secure the theory and practice of clerical celibacy so essential to the Gregorian Reform.(99) As these examples suggest, there are significant areas in which the fates of "real women" and "woman-as-symbol" conjoin in the accounts left to us.

But I am getting ahead of my argument. What does the move to gender history signify, and what are its perceived benefits and potential pitfalls?

II. GENDER AND RELIGION

If "woman" as a category has been open to debate in decades past, much more so has "gender." Yet insofar as the concept itself has undergone significant changes in meaning, some of the debates now concern the appropriate usage. Gisela Bock, in the lead essay for the new journal Gender & History in 1989, expressed the assumptions that characterized the scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, namely, that "gender" was to be understood in contrast to "biological sex" and that gender studies derived from, but still could essentially be identified with, women's studies--with a passing nod to men as well.(100) Since the issue of class then dominated the subfield of social history, Bock's concern as a historian was to wrest a space in this subfield for women and gender.(101)

Theorists of "gender," understood as the socially constructed nature of sexuality and sexual relation, assumed that "sex" was the raw material on which culture and history worked to produce "gender."(102) In a famous version of this model, Gayle Rubin, through a reading of Claude Levi-Strauss and other French theorists, coined the phrase, the "sex-gender system," which she defined as "the system of social relations that transformed biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which the resulting historically specific sexual needs are met"--and whose end, she concluded, was the domestication of women.(103) At this early stage of the discussion, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, commenting on this model, argued that the concept of gender enabled scholars "to gain analytic and critical leverage on the female-disadvantaging social arrangements that prevail at a given time in a given society, by throwing into question their legitimative ideological grounding in biologically based narratives of the `natural.'"(104)

In the 1980s and beyond, some feminist theorists challenged these interpretations of sex and gender.(105) Perhaps the most heralded challenge came from Judith Butler in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble. Butler questioned the binary opposition between "sex" and "gender" and suggested that sex itself is as much a constructed phenomenon as social historians held gender to be.(106) To imagine that "sex" was "prediscursive"--as did those who contrasted "sex" with "gender"--is itself, Butler argued, "the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender,"(107) which in Butler's view is secured through "a stylized repetition of acts."(108) Here, Butler's debt to performance theory is evident.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others gave a still different turn to the debate in the 1990s: for her, "gender studies" became in effect a code for "gay studies." Sedgwick argued that "gender criticism" should designate a criticism of the categories of gender analysis, not just criticism through them.(109) She further urged historians to undertake a "history of heterosexuality," rather than permitting heterosexuality "to masquerade so fully as History itself" under "institutional pseudonyms such as Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Domesticity, and Population--when it has not been busy impersonating Romance"(110)--the very topics, it may be noted, that social historians and historians of women often chose for their studies. Such were some of the important moments in the theoretical analysis of the term "gender."

For historians, the most important discussion of "gender" is found in Joan Scott's 1986 essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." Summarizing current understandings of the concept, Scott emphasized the definition of "gender" most favored by social historians: "the social organization of the relationship between the sexes," "the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex."(111) That "gender" would now include "men" was not news. But the aspect of Scott's article that alarmed some social historians was her insistence that "gender" must be related to symbolic systems, to its production in language. Social science, Scott argued, was undergoing a shift from scientific to literary paradigms that entailed a switch "from an emphasis on cause to one on meaning."(112) Thus "gender" could be understood as "a primary way of signifying relationships of power," "of signifying differentiation" in general.(113) Far from "merely" designating relations between the sexes, "gender" could be used as a code to convey notions of class or the relations between colonialist nations and their subjects.(114)

Historians most devoted to a feminist agenda that centers on women's agency strongly criticized Scott's stress on gender as a signifying system, as undercutting women's power. For them, privileging gender and language seemed to signal a retreat in the wider historical discipline in which the battle had not yet been won for women's history.(115) Had not Scott opted for the "high fashion" of "gender" which (in Gisela Bock's words) "seeks to soften the challenge of women's history by developing a kind of gender-neutral discourse on gender"?(116) Cultural theorist Mary Poovey pondered, "What does the rise of `gender studies' do to the feminism in `feminist criticism'?" She worried that "if feminism ... is an analysis of and challenge to the oppression of women," then the substitution of gender for sex might destroy the basis for feminism.(117) Social historians argued that in Scott's brand of history, "language replaces material factors"; notions of social change and causality are supplanted by "discourse," "rhetoric," and "meaning."(118) The concern here expressed is that a turn to "gender" as a conveyer of signifying systems might lessen the hard-won struggle of scholars to highlight the manifestations of women's agency throughout history.(119)

But surely, as Scott herself would rejoin, "discourse" does not mean "just words"; "discourses" take shape in communities that bear the marks of their social, economic, and political organization. This is not, Scott writes, "to introduce a new form of linguistic determinism, nor to deprive subjects of agency. It is to refuse a separation between `experience' and language and to insist instead on the productive quality of discourse.... And subjects do have agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them.... Experience is a subject's history. Language is the site of history's enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two."(120) In Scott's view, "women" have not here been displaced, but conceived in a new mode, namely, as "a means of representing ideas about social order and social organization."(121) Indeed, replying to her critics, Scott argued that a more radical feminist politics and history requires "a more radical epistemology."(122) Such a history would shift from "the recounting of the great deeds performed by women" to "the exposure of the often silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and defining forces in the organization of most societies."(123) As theorist Chris Weedon explains, in this model "agency" has not been done away with, but "is seen as discursively produced in the social interaction between culturally produced, contradictory subjects ... the meanings of the material world are produced within discourse."(124) Nor does the move from a more allegedly objective, analytical view of history to one that understands history as an interpretive practice mean that standards are being abandoned (as Scott's critics sometimes argued), since, Scott counters, the community of historians shares "a commitment to accuracy and to procedures of verification and documentation," although the latter are themselves always open to debate and to change.(125)

Historian Judith Bennett's moderating assessment of the debate seems salutary. For Bennett, gender history "reminds us that many seemingly `natural' ideas about women and men are, in fact, socially constructed, and it has the potential to demolish entirely the academic `ghettoization' of women's history." But she also warns that "women qua women" still need more attention from historians, that material reality must always be kept in play, and that the inequality of the sexes should not be "intellectualized" in a way that forgets the "hard lives of women in the past, the material forces that shaped and constrained women's activities, the ways that women coped with challenges and obstacles"--all of which are sometimes obscured in "gender history."(126)

I agree that both women's history (with its focus on social, political, and economic forces) and gender history (with an edge on the production of knowledge) need to be kept in tandem--most especially for historical eras for which abundant "documentation" exists. But for my own period of early Christian history in which the extant materials are almost entirely "texts" of a highly literary and rhetorical nature, I would argue that the exploration of gender, in both its pre-Scottian and Scottian modes, while not eclipsing the study of "real women," seems particularly desirable. The arguments of feminist social historians who fault Scott for construing the entire discipline of history on the model of the (somewhat scorned) subfield of intellectual history(127) seem less applicable to early Christian history, which is, I would posit, largely a subfield of intellectual history.

Within religion studies on women and gender, almost all scholars profess to accept the notion of gender as socially constructed; whether many (with Judith Butler) so understand "sex" is dubious.(128) At the most simple level, gender studies "lets men in"--both as subjects for discussion and as authors. As medievalist Allen Frantzen argues, "gender theory redefines the positions from which one can write about sexual difference; it allows men equal opportunity to assume the positions of feminist critics," and "also redefines the positions of power in medieval texts and institutions.... The role of victimizer and victim can be occupied by men and women alike, and the same men and women can occupy different roles at different times."(129)

An explicit focus on "men's studies" in religion is still in its infancy; the book Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities, one of the first to address the topic wholesale, was published in 1996.(130) The book's introduction underscores the difference between "men's studies"--as "critical" and political--and traditional scholarship by and about men. Acknowledging its debt to feminist theory, the editors cite "male studies" scholar Harry Brod: "Like women's studies, men's studies aims at the emasculation of patriarchal ideology's masquerade as knowledge."(131) Although most essays I have read under the rubric of "men's studies in religion" appear less aggressively "emasculating" than Brod's statement implies, the essays in Redeeming Men suggest some of the topics that could profitably be discussed under this rubric, for example, Evelyn Kirkley's study of the "Men and Religion Forward Movement" (with its slogan, "More Men for Religion, More Religion for Men") that, despite its brief heyday in 1911-1912, provided a counterpoint to the Victorian era's alleged "feminization of Christianity";(132) or John Fout's

interpretation of moral purity movements in pre-Nazi Germany as (in Fout's view) a deliberate attempt "to regulate male behavior with the specific intent of countering the endeavors made by women to carve out a public role."(133) Scholars of the Middle Ages--a ripe field of research on gender issues--have also contributed to "male studies" in Christian history; several essays in the collection Maculinity in Medieval Europe critically explore issues pertaining to men and maleness.(134) Within Judaism studies, the scholarship of Daniel Boyarin, Michael Satlow, and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz further illuminates our understanding of "men in religion."(135)

Another much-cited study of gender that treats historiographical problems pertaining to men in addition to women is Jo Ann McNamara's "The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System." McNamara suggests that the question medievalists have debated for over a century, the Frauenfrage (how to understand the alleged medieval problem of disposing of "excess" women), was precipitated by a crisis over masculinity. In McNamara's view, the Gregorian Reform destabilized sexual relations in that it accorded superior status only to celibate men--but left unanswered the question of how men could display their "manliness" if not by dominating women.(136) Hence "the Herrenfrage"....

One recent book that imaginatively reconceives the rubric of "men's studies" is Virginia Burrus's "Begotten, Not Made": Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity.(137) Burrus argues, via the theological writings of Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Ambrose of Milan, that "when the confession of the full and equal divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit became for the first time the sine qua non of doctrinal orthodoxy," a new style of masculinity was authorized that "heightened the claims of patriarchal authority while also cutting manhood loose from its traditional fleshly and familial moorings";(138) "a radically transcendent ideal of manhood" now commanded the highest place on the scale of virility.(139) Borrowing theoretial tools from Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, Burrus argues that these Fathers' Trinitarian reflections served as a focus for the establishment of human sexual difference--even while they adamantly denied such "genderization" at the divine level. Erasing materiality and the feminine from the discussion of divine generation, the Fathers engaged in a series of theological "paternity suits," asking: who is a legitimate father and son, and who is illegitimate? Human generativity is here cut free from its bodily moorings and translated "upward," so to speak, to the realm of logos or language. She concludes: "By denying sexual difference, the Fathers affirm the difference of divinity; by making maternity invisible, they privilege fatherhood on the very basis of its invisibility; by eliminating the difference between mother and child, they assert the sameness of father and son; by suppressing materiality, they push the spirit to new heights. If this is the logic of paradox, it is also the logic of belief."(140)

Another aspect of the category "gender" resonates well with the now famous aphorism of Levi-Strauss, that women were "good to think with."(141) They were, to be sure, "good" for thinking about relations between men and women, as exemplified in rhetorical discourses that pertain to authority and morals.(142) Thus Conrad Leyser said, in writing about the Gregorian Reform: "The woman in the texts of Reform is, therefore, like the woman in the courtly romances, or the woman who is Jesus as Mother: she is not an historical agent but a woman to think with." But, Leyser continues, we need to ask further "why actors in the drama of Reform should have called upon this rhetorical tradition when they did.... why the ancient rhetoric of gender was used to enforce a division of male sexual labour in eleventh-century Europe."(143)

But if women were good for thinking about power relations between men and women, gender might stretch the "ways to think" still further. If, with Marilyn Strathern, gender is seen as "a code for the conceptualisation of difference,"(144) it could "stand in" for many things. To cite some examples from various divisions of religious studies: It could be used as an aid to medieval churchmen's and friars' reflections on God, as Caroline Walker Bynum and John Coakley have taught us.(145) By way of comparison, it could be used as a code by which to describe the relation between male master and male disciple in Sufism;(146) as a means to represent the connections between sacrifice and kinship structures;(147) or as the field on which debates about tradition (equated with "woman") were played out in nineteenth-century India.(148) In fact, gender analysis could prove useful for the study of many topics in which power is articulated, for example, to class analysis.(149)

Turning to my own field, late ancient Christianity, I note that women have been a central focus of scholarship and teaching for three full decades. Various colleagues have raised up for consideration the lives and activities of "real" women, and have called attention to topics such as asceticism and martyrdom in which women receive more textual representation than we might expect, given their absence from most discussions of "high theology." Yet much less attention has been paid to the ways in which "woman" or "the female" becomes a rhetorical code for other concerns. In part this inattention stems, I think, from the fact that patristics is a highly traditional field of study, some of whose practitioners reject theoretical incursions onto their scholarly turf or, indeed, types of analyses now common across the modern scholarly disciplines. Yet the slowness seems even more surprising insofar as most ancient Christian writings--highly literary and rhetorical in their construction--fall squarely into the category of textually oriented intellectual history. Although some of us for a decade or two played that we were anthropologists, encountering "real natives" in our texts, I would argue that now we should register more fully that the written materials surviving from late ancient Christianity are almost exclusively "texts," not "documents." And if we believe, with historian of ancient Christianity Averil Cameron, that "[l]anguage is one of the first and most fundamental elements in the construction of sexual identity,"(150) then attention to the ways in which patristic authors construct "woman" (and much else) through their discourse seems mandatory. To study the meaning of the rhetoric pertaining to women--an addition to raising up women as agents and victims--enlarges our historical perspective.

I wish to cite just one book to illustrate how gender analysis of this type might enlarge our understandings of late ancient texts.(151) Among recent studies of early Christian women, a book that (I think) successfully employs the category of gender is Kate Cooper's The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity.(152) Published in 1996, Cooper's book details the disruptions that the rising tide of Christian ascetic fervor--especially a fervor for sexual renunciation--wrought on ancient Roman notions of chaste matronhood. Cooper explores the "conventions by which gender-specific characteristics were assigned to women and to men, and the rhetorical ends that such conventions could serve"--an exploration that not only illuminates "the relations between men and women," but also "the competition for power between men and other men."(153) She examines the ideology that measured a man's suitability for public duties by the (assumed) quality of his marital relationship.(154) The much-praised concord between husband and wife thus "served as an emblem of ... the self-mastery that made men reliable citizens."(155) Aristocratic chaste matrons thus assume a "symbolic position as arbiters of masculine virtue"--a symbolic function that the coming of Christian asceticism, with its message of sexual and marital renunciation, fiercely challenged. Indeed, Christian asceticism questioned whether there was "a religiously positive role for married couples, and a socially positive role for married women."(156) Yet Cooper nuances her argument with a further observation: despite asceticism's throwing a "wild card" into Roman notions of social rank by its disruption of "inherited patterns for negotiating status," it (somewhat ironically) "drew from the same rhetorical font as did the ideal of a chaste wife as guarantor of social concord: both sought to dissociate particular women from the stereotype of the gender as persuaders to vice, while leaving unchallenged the stereotype itself."(157) Cooper s book, then, illustrates well the volatile role of gender in the discourse of moral superiority," as she puts it.(158) Here we come to understand better the power dynamics of late ancient aristocratic manhood by seeing something about men in relation to "their" women--women as "real" and as symbolic of wider social values.(159)

Finally, I would urge that as historians of Christianity continue to raise up the lives of "real women" in ways that expand and alter our understanding, we also remember the utility for religious studies of Roger Chartier's recommendation that historical work be an exercise in analyzing the process of representation and the function of ideas in ideological systems.(160) For those who have struggled for some years with questions of women and gender, such an analysis would complement and enhance our previous labors and, I venture, inspire future ones.

(1.) Allen J. Frantzen, "When Women Aren't Enough," Speculum 68 (1993): 454, citing Elaine Showalter, Speaking of Gender (New York, 1989), 10.

(2.) Ursula King, "Introduction: Gender and the Study of Religion," in Religion and Gender, ed. King (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 2-3, 22.

(3.) For the "ghettoization" of women's studies within history, set, Judith M. Bennett, "Feminism and History," Gender & History 1 (1989): 252-53. Bennett blames this development in part on scholars' "toning down" the explicitly feminist orientation of their work to fit more comfortably into their a-feminist or anti-feminist disciplinary spaces. Also see the assessments by Janet L. Nelson, "Family, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages," in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (New York: Routledge, 1997), 167-68, and by Cecile Dauphin, Arlette Farge, Genevieve Fraisse et al., in "Women's Culture and Power," in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, eds. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, Postwar French Thought I (New York: New Press, 1995), 620: "the fact remains that women's history is for the most part done by women, and it is tolerated on the fringes of a discipline on which it exerts no direct influence" (French original: "Culture et pouvoir des femmes: Essai d'historiographie," Annales E.S.C. 41 [1986]: 271-94).

(4.) Bennett, "Feminism and History," 256: Bennett urges feminist historians "to regain our moral vision, our political nerve, our feminist indignation."

(5.) Thus Liz James's blunt assessment of "stage one" feminist historiography: it is "boring" simply to write that "there were women saints and this is what they did"--yet this approach was acceptable to the patriarchal establishment, so that "we could all safely `do women.'" In "stage two" (and here she writes as an art historian) the "why" questions were asked, centering around the investigation of a "feminine aesthetic" and an investigation of the means of production ("Introduction," Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium [New York: Routledge, 1997), xii-xiv).

(6.) Jonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281-82.

(7.) Rosalind Shaw, "Feminist Anthropology and the Gendering of Religious Studies," in Religion and Gender, ed. King, 68-69. See Caroline Walker Bynum, "Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols," in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, eds. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 2: if "there is no such thing as generic homo religiosus," then "[n]o scholar studying religion, no participant in ritual, is ever neuter."

(8.) See discussion in Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1066.

(9.) In Signs 1 (1976): 809-23. I cite from the version reprinted in the collection of Kelly's essays, Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1-18.

(10.) Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes," 1.

(11.) Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes," 3, 19. The next year, Kelly published a longer essay on this theme, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), reprinted in Kelly, Women, History, and Theory, 19-50.

(12.) Kelly, "The Social Relations of the Sexes," 3-4.

(13.) Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes," 8.

(14.) Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes," 9.

(15.) Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes," 12. This latter theme Kelly developed in a third essay, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the `Women and Power' Conference," Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 216-27, reprinted in Kelly, Women, History, and Theory, 21-64.

(16.) Kelly, "The Social Relations of the Sexes," 1. Fellow Renaissance historian Diane Owen Hughes notes the (somewhat limited) help that the Annales school of history contributed to this process: Annales historians weaned others away from a narrative history of politics and "great men" by suggesting that through the study of household relations and rituals, we could begin to map "the silent world of those ruled by structure rather than event" ("Invisible Madonnas? The Italian Historiographical Tradition and the Women of Medieval Italy," in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987], 49).

(17.) For example, Carolyn Osiek, "Women in House Churches," in Common Life in the Early Church: Essays Honoring Graydon F. Snyder, ed. Julian V. Hills (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998), 300-15.

(18.) For example, Elizabeth A. Clark, "Patrons, Not Priests: Women and Power in Late Ancient Christianity," Gender & History 2 (1990): 253-73; for the medieval period, see the project "Women's Religious Life and Communities, A.D. 500-1500," led by Mary Martin McLaughlin; interim report, "Looking for Medieval Women," in Monastic Studies: The Continuity of Tradition, ed. Judith Loades (Bangor [Wales]: Headstart History, 1991), esp. 274; Jo Ann McNamara, "The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages," in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, eds. Renate Blumenthal-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 199-221. For women as patrons in Buddhism, see Janice D. Willis, "Nuns and Benefactresses: The Role of Women in the Development of Buddhism," in Women, Religion, and Social Change, eds. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), esp. 73-77.

(19.) Janet L. Nelson, "Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages," in Women in the Church, eds. W. J. Sheils and Diana Woods, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 70; cf. 63, 77 for other examples.

(20.) Dauphin, Farge, Fraisse, et al., "Women's Culture and Power," 627: "Women, who frequently survive their spouses and are left in charge of jointly owned property, are the guardians of memory during long years of widowhood, which in some cases are the years of a woman's greatest power; others, however, must endure an extended period of growing loneliness and impoverishment."

(21.) One primary goal of women's history is "to understand how a women's culture was constructed within a system of inegalitarian relations and how it concealed the flaws of that system"; see Dauphin, Farge, Fraisse et al., "Women's Culture and Power," 624 for a discussion of this goal.

(22.) Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers, forthcoming (introduction and chap. 7). I thank Harris for sharing her work with me prior to publication.

(23.) The phrase is Janet L. Nelson's; see her essay "Family, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages," 169. For a detailed examination of an early medieval widow's "will," see Nelson's "The Wary Widow," in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, eds. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 82-113.

(24.) See now Charlotte Methuen, "Widows, Bishops and the Struggle for Authority in the Didascalia Apostolorum," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 203; also see her essay which makes clear that not all classed as "widows" were women with deceased husbands, "The `Virgin Widow': A Problematic Social Role for the Early Church?" Harvard Theological Review 90 (1997): 285-98; Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 145-49, 151-52; Bonnie Bowman Thurston, The Widows: A Women's Ministry in the Early Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); and Anne Jensen, God's Self-Confident Daughters: Early Christianity and the Liberation of Women, trans. O. C. Dean Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996; German original, 1992), 22-25.

(25.) Charlotte Methuen, "`For Pagans Laugh to Hear Women Teach': Gender Stereotypes in the Didascalia Apostolorum," in Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 34 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1998), 25. By way of comparison, religious and political contestations in nineteenth-and twentieth-century India over widows' rights--and deaths--provide further evidence for the vulnerability of the condition of widowhood. Recent scholarship on sati tends to emphasize the Western exploitation of a limited phenomenon for political ends. For some interesting and politically informed discussions on sati, see, for example, Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati in Colonial India," in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990; 1st ed., New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88-126; John S. Hawley, "Hinduism: Sati and Its Defenders," in Fundamentalism and Gender, ed. John Stratton Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 79-110. For a recent case in India in which Muslim custom and Indian law clashed, see Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, "`Shahbano'," Signs 14 (1989): 558-82, and Peter J. Awn, "Indian Islam: The Shah Bano Affair," in Fundamentalism and Gender, 63-78.

(26.) Even Joan Kelly, who doubtless wished to claim as much "agency" for women as possible, points to the mode of production and property relations as keys to understanding women's roles: "The Social Relations of the Sexes," 9, 12.

(27.) Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37. Roper's overall argument is that historians have left out "the psychic" from their considerations.

(28.) John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 76.

(29.) For one expression of this problem, see Jill K. Conway, Susan C. Bourque, and Joan W. Scott, "Introduction: The Concept of Gender," Daedalus 116 (1987): xxii: "Recent social theory has led us to see that changes in the family in early modern and modern Europe did not neatly coincide with changes in the forms of government, economic organization, or religious practice."

(30.) In early Christian texts pertaining to women that I have studied, "class" (in the sense of money and status, differently configured in antiquity than later) often reigns supreme: see various essays in my Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations, Studies in Women and Religion 1 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1979) and The Life of Melania the Younger: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Studies in Women and Religion 14 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1984). The aristocratic associations of women religious continues into the early Middle Ages; see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg's interesting observations on how biographers of women saints tried to make them "class-less" ("Saints' Lives as a Source for the History of Women, 500-1100," in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal [Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990], 287). For historians of the later Middle Ages, more could be known about those whose status was less than aristocratic. See, for example, Marilyn Oliva, "Aristocracy or Meritocracy? Office-Holding Patterns in Late Medieval English Nunneries," in Women in the Church, 197-208.

(31.) Caroline Ford, "Female Martyrdom and the Politics of Sainthood in Nineteenth-Century France: The Cult of Sainte Philomene," in Catholicism in Britain and France Since 1789, eds. Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (London: Hambledon, 1996), 115-34.

(32.) James F. McMillan, "Reclaiming a Martyr: French Catholics and the Cult of Joan of Arc, 1890-1920," in Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 359-70.

(33.) Barbara Corrado Pope, "Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century," in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, eds. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 173-200.

(34.) Thus Judith Bennett calls historians to engage in studies of the workings of patriarchy throughout history--how it "adapted, changed, and survived over time and place. Women have a large part to play in this historical study of patriarchy, not merely as victims, but also as agents" ("Feminism and History," 262-63).

(35.) Linda Lierheimer, "Preaching or Teaching? Defining the Ursuline Mission in Seventeenth-Century France," in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, eds. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 212-26, esp. 213.

(36.) Peter Vogt, "A Voice for Themselves: Women as Participants in Congregational Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement," in Women Preachers and Prophets, 234-35. Also see Karen L. King's comments ("Voices of the Spirit: Exercising Power, Embracing Responsibility") along this line in the same volume, 339. Likewise, medieval Christian mystics engaged in practices that "pushed back the boundaries of male-defined spirituality" while still accepting "male-defined controls," to cite Grace Jantzen's study of Christian mysticism. See Grace M. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 160, although Jantzen largely stresses male attempts to control expressions of women's mystical spirituality.

(37.) See above, n. 11, for bibliographical information.

(38.) To be sure, re-periodizing human (and especially Western) history with a view to women's fate is not a recent preoccupation. From different perspectives, nineteenth-century writers such as Sarah Hale, best-known as editor of the Godey's Lady's Book, and J. J. Bachofen offered their varying imaginative reconstructions; see Sarah Hale, Woman's Record (2d ed., New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), discussed in Nina Baym, "Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale's History of the World," New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 249-70 (the narrative is one of women's progress under the influence of Christianity, culminating in contemporary America); J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967; translation of the 1927 German original, Mutterrecht und Urreligion, the story of primitive matriarchy's downfall).

(39.) Karen L. King, "Prophetic Power and Women's Authority: The Case of the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene)," in Women Preachers and Prophets, 32-33. For a recent attempt to address the question of periodization from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, see Julia M. H. Smith, "Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World?" Gender & History 12 (2000): 552-71.

(40.) Colin Atkinson and Jo B. Atkinson, "Subordinating Women: Thomas Bentley's Use of Biblical Women in `The Monument of Matrones' (1582)," Church History 60 (1992): 298-99.

(41.) See, for example, the essays of Keith Moxey, "The Battle of the Sexes and the World Upside Down," and of Thomas Head, "The Religion of the Femmelettes: Ideals and Experience among Women in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France," in That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity, eds. Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elizabeth W. Sommer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 134-48 and 149-75, respectively.

(42.) Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 5.

(43.) Janet L. Nelson, "Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages," 76-78 (in an effort to mark more deeply the boundaries between clergy and laity, the line between women and men was more sharply policed); Dyan Elliott, "The Priest's Wife: Female Erasure and the Gregorian Reform," in Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, & Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 80-106. Conrad Leyser cautions, however, against imagining that misogynist texts map on to social reality; in his view, the Reform movement can be seen as a contest between male religious specialists, using women to "think with" ("Custom, Truth, and Gender in Eleventh-Century Reform," in Gender and Christian Religion, 75-91, esp. 82-83, 87, 90-91.

(44.) Jo Ann McNamara, "The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050-1150," in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Medieval Cultures 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 5, 7; see McNamara, "The Need to Give," 204, 221. McNamara plans a book that will reperiodize late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In her broader scheme, women gained status, compared to their previous and subsequent statuses, in the period between the demise of the Roman Republic and the era of the Gregorian Reform. Private conversation with McNamara, 8 July 2000.

(45.) The phrase is Barbara A. Hanawalt's, "Golden Ages for the History of Medieval English Women," in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 17.

(46.) Some of the earlier writings by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and myself elaborated this scheme, which became common.

(47.) See, for example, Riffat Hassan, "Feminism in Islam," in Feminism and World Religions, eds. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 248-78; Jane I. Smith, "Women, Religion and Social Change in Early Islam," in Women, Religion, and Social Change, 19-35. A helpful overview of the varied "historiographies" of early Islam's approach to women can be found in Judith Tucker, "Gender and Islamic History," in Islamic & European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 37-73, and in Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), part II; Ahmed is particularly keen to note the political uses to which discussions of women's place in Islam have been put (see, for example, 166, 237, 243).

(48.) Donald Lopez, private conversation, 23 July 2000.

(49.) For example, see Nancy Schuster, "Striking a Balance: Women and Images of Women in Early Chinese Buddhism," in Women, Religion, and Social Change, esp. 103.

(50.) See the excellent studies and critiques by Nancy Falk, "Gender and the Contest over the Indian Past," Religion 28 (1998): 309-18; Uma Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past," in Recasting Women, 27-87; and Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions," esp. 111-14 (those working for the abolition of sati in the nineteenth century privileged more ancient texts to enable "the belief that Hindu society had fallen from a prior Golden Age" [111]). These studies on India are informed by a more sophisticated approach to the intersections of politics, women, religion, and postcolonial theory than most others I have read. For an example of an author who accepts the "devolution" theme in Indian religion, see Ellen Banks Findly, "Gargi at the King's Court: Women and Philosophic Innovation in Ancient India," in Women, Religion and Social Change, 38-41; for example, 38: The Vedic period was "an era of unsurpassed advantage and opportunity for women."

(51.) See, for example, Carol Meyers, "Gender Roles and Genesis 3:16 Revisited," in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth, eds. Carol Meyers and M. O'Connor (Philadelphia: Oriental Schools of Research, 1983), 337-54; idem, "Procreation, Production, and Protection: Male-Female Balance in Early Israel," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983): 569-93.

(52.) King, "Voices of the Spirit," 340.

(53.) See the classic essay by Leonard Swidler, "Jesus Was a Feminist," Catholic World 212 (1971): 177-83; and the also classic response from Judith Plaskow, "Blaming the Jews for Inventing Patriarchy," Lilith 7 (1980): 11-12; and idem, "Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation," in Searching the Scriptures. Vol. I: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 117-29. Ross S. Kraemer notes that some Christian scholars (especially feminists) "have had considerable interest in painting a particularly gloomy portrait of Jewish women's participation in Jewish life at the time of Jesus, so that Jesus himself can be seen as a first-century liberator of women" ("Jewish Women and Christian Origins," in Women & Christian Origins, eds. Ross Shephard Kraemer and Mary Rose D'Angelo [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 35).

(54.) Falk, "Gender and the Contest over the Indian Past," 312; Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?" 38, 55-56. If Christian feminists gave up the appeal to "origins" as foundational for their views, would they be any the worse for their renunciation? Or is Christian tradition so rooted in historical explanation that any move to renounce the search for historical foundations would necessarily be counted as a blasphemous misrepresentation? Here, it is tempting to reflect on Rita Gross's observation that such historical questions are not so important for Buddhist feminists as for Christian ones "because history is neither exemplary nor normative for Buddhists." See Rita M. Gross, "Strategies for a Feminist Revalorization of Buddhism," in Feminism and World Religions, 84.

(55.) For Islam, see Minoo Moallem, "Transnationalism, Feminism, and Fundamentalism," in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, eds. Norma Alarcon, Karen Caplan, and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 334; on Protestant fundamentalism, see Randall Balmer, "American Fundamentalism: The Ideal of Femininity," in Fundamentalism and Gender, esp. 53.

(56.) Laura E. Donaldson, "On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans: New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism," Signs 24 (1999): 677-96.

(57.) A good critique by archeologists Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey is "Rethinking Figurines: A Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas, the `Goddess' and Popular Culture," in Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, eds. Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 22-45, 197-202. Now see Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon, 2000), esp. chaps. 6, 7, and 9. Also see the critique by classicist Helene P. Foley, "A Question of Origins: Goddess Cults Greek and Modern," Women's Studies 23 (1994): 193-215.

(58.) Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?" 78. The phrase "the invention of tradition," as she acknowledges, comes from Eric Hobsbawm; see chaps. 1 and 7 in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and his interesting earlier essay, "The Social Function of the Past: Some Questions," Past and Present 55 (1972): 3-16.

(59.) Catherine Hall, "A Jamaica of the Mind: Gender, Colonialism, and the Missionary Venture," in Gender and Christian Religion, 361-90. Also see Jonah Steinberg's exploration of how the Modern Orthodox movement within Judaism has recast the rabbinic and medieval Jewish past by proclaiming that niddah had not to do with menstrual impurity, but allows couples to enjoy "an eternally renewing honeymoon," stands as another nice example of the mythic recasting of tradition for purposes of present edification; see Steinberg, "From a `Pot of Filth' to a `Hedge of Roses' (and Back): Changing Theorizations of Menstruation in Judaism," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 13 (1997): 5-26.

(60.) Ursula King, "Introduction," 19-20. Also see June O'Connor, "The Epistemological Significance of Feminist Research in Religion," in Religion and Gender, 57.

(61.) Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 787.

(62.) Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 780, 786.

(63.) Scott especially emphasizes this problem in regard to historian E. P. Thompson's book, The Making of the English Working Class; although "experience" is introduced as a category for historical analysis, the "experiences" were all of men ("The Evidence of Experience," 784-85).

(64.) For example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience," in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Debates, eds. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 27 (original essay in Copyright 1 [1988]: 30-44). For similar critiques from those working in women's studies in religion, see, for example, Sheila Greeve Devaney, "The Limits of the Appeal to Women's Experience," in Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, eds. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 32; Elizabeth A. Castelli, "Heteroglossia, Hermeneutics, and History: A Review Essay of Recent Feminist Studies of Early Christianity," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 19 (1994): 77.

(65.) Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 777.

(66.) Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 778-79. And as historian Denise Riley pointedly reminds scholars who celebrate "women's experience," those "experiences" are not likely to be the result of "womanhood alone, but [exist] as traces of domination" ("Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988], 99).

(67.) Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 797.

(68.) Scott's summary of Riley's book, "Am I That Name?" in Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," 777.

(69.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

(70.) New York: Zone Books, 1991.

(71.) New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

(72.) Brown, The Body and Society, esp. chap. 1; idem, "The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church," Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, eds. Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq, World Spirituality 16 (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 429, 430, 436.

(73.) Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Also see the warning to historians against effacing "the material praxis of people's lives" in Susan Bordo, "`Material Girl': The Effacements of Postmodern Culture," in Negotiating at the Margins: The Gendered Discourses of Power and Resistance, eds. Sue Fisher and Kathy Davis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), esp. 314. Bordo here warns against what she calls "a new inscription of mind/body dualism. What the body does is immaterial, so long as the imagination is free."

(74.) Especially Foucault's Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, and the volumes of The History of Sexuality.

(75.) See discussion in Elizabeth Grosz, "Conclusion: A Note on Essentialism and Difference," in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew (London: Routledge, 1990), 338; and Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, Theory and History of Literature 55 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 142-47. Scholars of French feminism now often point out that for theorists such as Irigaray and Cixous, "the body" means "the written body." Moreover, it is helpful to recall that some French feminist writing emerged from an intellectual culture that had privileged a psychoanalytic understanding of the female as "lack"; over against this, French feminists reacted by emphasizing the "positivity" of the female, especially the maternal, body.

(76.) Foley, "A Question of Origins," 199 (critiquing some recent exaltations of "the Goddess"). See Morny Joy, "God and Gender: Some Reflections on Women's Invocations of the Divine," in Religion and Gender, 137: the most problematic idealization of "women's experience" lies in the appeal to "the Goddess."

(77.) Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 102.

(78.) Published as Studies in Spirituality and Theology, vol. 1 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).

(79.) Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 5.

(80.) Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 24.

(81.) Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 26, 35. She urges close attention to the genre in which accounts of women are written, differentiating male-authored hagiographies from the theologies that Mechthild and Marguerite produced. In Mechthild's text, "the will increasingly displaces the body as an adversary who must be quelled, closed off, and reshaped through ascetic acts" (86). Hollywood faults scholars for not noting the strong distinction between hagiographies of women by men and works such as the ones that Hollywood here studies (27-31). Hollywood's interest in apophatic mysticism (for example, 24), prompted her further study of Luce Irigaray's link to this tradition: "Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray and the Philosophy of Religion," Journal of Religion 78 (1998): 230-45.

(82.) Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, esp. 50.

(83.) Yet historian Lyndal Roper, reacting to what she considers "an excessive emphasis on the cultural creation of subjectivity" in recent historical writing, urges historians to a reconsideration of the body, understood in all its physicality; see Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 3, 4, 17, 21.

(84.) This argument has been advanced especially by Karen Jo Torjesen; see her When Women Were Priests, chaps. 4-6 and her essay "Reconstruction of Women's Early Christian History," in Searching the Scriptures, chap. 19.

(85.) Susan Mosher Stuard, "A New Dimension? North American Scholars Contribute Their Perspective," in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 94.

(86.) Osiek, "Women in House Churches," 302-3. Simply because women were not addressed in public settings (as recorded in literary texts), she notes, "does not mean that they were not there"; that women were indeed active in business and the professions suggests that that the "social invisibility" accorded women in many ancient texts should not be interpreted as "actual invisibility." Also note Charlotte Methuen's critique of the other assumption that church space is "public": the issue is not that "the Church should act as a proper public institution, but that it should represent the right kind of household with the right kind of social roles" ("`For Pagans Laugh to Hear Women Teach,'" 34).

(87.) Nelson, "Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages," 74.

(88.) Janet L. Nelson, "The Problematic in the Private," Social History 15 (1990): 355, 363-64. Her views reinforce those earlier voiced by Joan Kelly: in the Middle Ages, the family order was a public order ("The Social Relation of the Sexes," 14).

(89.) Yet the public/private distinction can be questioned by scholars of Italian Renaissance/early modern history. See, for example, Giorgio Chittolini, "The `Private,' the `Public,' the State," in The Origins of the State in Italy 1300-1600, ed. Julius Kirschner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34-61; and Stanley Chojnacki, "Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State," in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Longman, 1998), 63-86). Also see Linda Kerber's fascinating discussion of the ways that the trope of "separate spheres" has been deployed by commentators and historians since the time of De Tocqueville: "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9-39.

(90.) Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), chap. 3; Karen L. King, ed., Images of Women in Gnosticism, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Ross Shepard Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religion among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 11 ("Heresy as Women's Religion: Women's Religion as Heresy"); Christine Trevett, "Gender, Authority and Church History: A Case Study of Montanism," Feminist Theology 17 (1998): 9-24; Jensen, God's Self-Confident Daughters, 133-82 (on Montanist women); Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), passim; Elizabeth A. Clark, "Elite Networks and Heresy Accusations: Towards a Social Description of the Origenist Controversy," Semeia 56 (1991): 81-117.

(91.) See Richard Abels and Ellen Harrison, "Participation of Women in Languedocian Catharism," Medieval Studies 41 (1979): 215-51; Anne Brenon, "The Voice of the Good Women: An Essay on the Pastoral and Sacerdotal Role of Women in the Cathar Church," in Women Preachers and Prophets, 114-33; see also her book, Les Cathars: Vie et mort d'une eglisle chretienne (Paris: J. Grancher, 1996).

(92.) Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New York: Octagon, 1969; 1st ed., 1953). For selections from Beguine literature, see Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chaps. 4, 5, and 7. For extended discussions of the theology of Beguines Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete, see Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Bride, chaps. 3 and 4. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, emphasizes the dangers incurred by women mystics from charges of "heresy" (chap. 7 and 325-27).

(93.) Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Witches and Witchcraft: An Historical Essay," Encounter 28, 5 (1967): 3-25 and 28, 6 (1967): 13-34; also see his The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969). Among the numerous studies are Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centers and Peripheries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, part III. For other studies, see notes in Elizabeth A. Clark and Herbert Richardson, eds., Women and Religion (rev. ed.; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 351-54.

(94.) Elspeth Whitney, "The Witch `She'/The Historian `He': Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch Hunts," Journal of Women's History 7 (1995): esp. 86.

(95.) Kate Peters, "`Women's Speaking Justified': Women and Discipline in the Early Quaker Movement," in Gender and Christian Religion, 227 (the London gutter-press accused Quaker women of sexual depravity).

(96.) Pamela J. Walker, "A Chaste and Fervid Eloquence: Catherine Booth and the Ministry of Women in the Salvation Army," in Women Preachers and Prophets, 297-98.

(97.) Pamela J. Walker, "A Chaste and Fervid Eloquence," 298.

(98.) Virginia Burrus, "The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome," Harvard Theological Review 83 (1991): 229-48; idem, "`Equipped for Victory': Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy," Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 461-76.

(99.) See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, chap. 4 and 118, 160. For an analysis of the phenomenon that emphasizes the side of rhetoric, see Leyser, "Custom, Truth, and Gender in Eleventh-Century Reform."

(100.) Gisela Bock, "Women's History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate," Gender & History 1 (1989): 11, 14, 17. For Bock, women's history and gender history (here elided) attempt to render visible "the concrete, manifold and changing forms of women's and men's bodily experience, activity, and representation." That "gender studies" is often taken to mean "women's studies" is also noted by Ursula King, in her "Introduction: Gender and the Study of Religion," 4-5, 30; likewise Susan Mosher Stuard, "Fashion's Captives: Medieval Women in French Historiography," in Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 71.

(101.) Bock, "Women's History and Gender History," 18. As one example, Bock argued that the history of religions remained "incomprehensible" if treated as a "gender-neutral" field of study (21).

(102.) Donna J. Haraway, "`Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991; German original, 1987), 132--a distinction that Haraway claims goes back to Marx's and Engels's inability to historicize the man/woman relation.

(103.) Haraway's succinct analysis of Rubin, "`Gender'," 137 (Rubin would doubtless add, "men's sexual needs"). See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Rapp Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 157-210. Rubin's thesis was overtly political: "At the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality" (179).

(104.) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Gender Criticism," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 274.

(105.) The history of this discussion is well reviewed in Haraway, "`Gender'," 137-46.

(106.) Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. chap. 1.

(107.) Butler, Gender Trouble, 7.

(108.) Butler, Gender Trouble, 140.

(109.) Sedgwick, "Gender Criticism," 273.

(110.) Sedgwick, "Gender Criticism," 293.

(111.) Scott, "Gender," 1053, 1054.

(112.) Scott, "Gender," 1063, 1066.

(113.) Scott, "Gender," 1067, 1070.

(114.) Scott, "Gender," 1073. The concepts of "man" and "woman" are both empty and overflowing categories--"[e]mpty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions" (1074).

(115.) Christine Stansell, "A Response to Joan Scott," International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (1987): 29.

(116.) Bock, "Women's History and Gender History," 16.

(117.) Mary Poovey, "Recent Studies of Gender," Modern Philology 88 (1991): 420.

(118.) Claudia Koonz, "Post Scripts," The Women's Review of Books 6 (1989): 19. Historian Christine Stansell complained, "While we were occupied with realigning social history with formal politics, the edge of speculation has moved away from the nature of society to the nature of knowing; experience lost out to epistemology ... the franchise on the big questions ... has gone to the literati" ("A Response to Joan Scott," 25). Even the history of sexuality, Lyndal Roper objected, should not be reduced to a "linguistic taxonomy"(Oedipus and the Devil, 160). Feminist historian Claudia Koonz pointedly asked, "[a]re political battles to be won or lost on the field of discourse?" ("Post Scripts," 20).

(119.) I thank Amy Hollywood for stressing this point in her response to an earlier version of this paper delivered at "Congress 2000: The Future of the Study of Religion," Boston University, 14 September 2000.

(120.) Scott, "Evidence," 792-93.

(121.) Joan Wallach Scott, "'L'ouvriere! Mot impie, sordide ...': Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840-1860," in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 162.

(122.) Joan Wallach Scott, "Introduction," in Gender and the Politics of History, 4.

(123.) Joan Wallach Scott, "Women's History," in Gender and the Politics of History, 27 (an original version of this essay appeared in Past and Present 101 [1983]: 141-57). Nor does moving from a more "objective," analytical view of history to one that holds history to be an interpretive practice mean that standards are being abandoned, since the community of historians shares "a commitment to accuracy and to procedures of verification and documentation," although the latter are themselves open to debate and to change (Joan Wallach Scott, "AHR Forum: History in Crisis? The Others' Side of the Story," American Historical Review 94 [1989]: 690).

(124.) Weedon, Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference, 107.

(125.) Scott, "AHR Forum: History in Crisis?" 690.

(126.) Bennett, "Feminism and History," 258. In this citation, Bennett (writing ca. 1988) does not yet fully register the newer, discursive understandings of "gender" as used by Scott.

(127.) I thank Barbara Harris of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's department of history for helping to clarify this point for me.

(128.) Karl Borresen, a scholar of women in Christian history and theology, is one of the few who outrightly rejects the sex/gender distinction on which much earlier women's scholarship was based. Blaming the prevalence of the distinction on social scientists, she believes that the "sharp distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as culturally constructed" is simply "a relic of androcentrism in asexual disguise." Labeling her own approach more "holistic," she argues that "gender" should mean both "psycho-physical sex" and "socio-cultural [constructed] gender." Her own work, however, does not appear to replicate Judith Butler's argument, that is, that sex as well as gender should be considered a "performance." See Kari Elisabeth Borresen, "Women's Studies of the Christian Tradition: New Perspectives," in Religion and Gender, 246-47; idem, "Recent and Current Research on Women in the Christian Tradition," Studia Patristica (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur) 29 (1997): 224. Borresen's larger project, however, is to trace the intellectual history of the notion of the "imago Dei" in Christian theology; see Kari Elisabeth Borresen, ed., The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995).

(129.) Frantzen, "When Women Aren't Enough," 451.

(130.) Stephen B. Boyd, W. Merle Longwood, and Mark W. Muesse, eds., Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

(131.) Boyd et al., Redeeming Men, xiii-xiv, citing Brod, "The Case for Men's Studies," in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Winchester, Mass.: George Allen & Unwin, 1987), 40.

(132.) Evelyn A. Kirkley, "Is It Manly To Be Christian? The Debate in Victorian and Modern America," in Redeeming Men, esp. 80-83.

(133.) John C. Fout, "Policing Gender: Moral Purity Movements in Pre-Nazi Germany and Contemporary America," in Redeeming Men, 104. Also see Fout's longer study of the topic in the Journal of Men's Studies 1 (1992): 5-31.

(134.) For example, Conrad Leyser, "Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emission and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages"; Janet L. Nelson, "Monks, Secular Men and Masculinity, c. 900"; Ross Balzaretti, "Men and Sex in Tenth-century Italy"; Robert N. Swanson, "Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation"; Patricia H. Cullum, "Clergy, Masculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England," all in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999), 103-96.

(135.) Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct and the Rise of Heterosexuality: The Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Michael L. Satlow, "`Try To Be a Man': The Rabbinic Construction of Masculinity," Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996): 19-40; idem, "Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity," Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 429-54; Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon, 1994).

(136.) McNamara, "The Herrenfrage," esp. 3-8.

(137.) Virginia Burrus, "Begotten, Not Made": Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

(138.) Burrus, "Begotten, Not Made," 3.

(139.) Burrus, "Begotten, Not Made," 5. But divine "transcendence," too, was masculinized: the symbolization of the doctrine of the Trinity, Burrus argues, entails "a radical suppression of materiality ... accompanied by an explicit masculinization of the constructed `self,' articulated in the theological terms of a motherless patriliny" (185, 57).

(140.) Burrus, "Begotten, Not Made," 190.

(141.) Provocatively developed by Janet Nelson in "Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages," 58-59 and n. 20. On the one hand, we should ask, "For whom was it good to think?"; on the other, we should reflect on the translation of the phrase, for "bonnes a penser" can also mean "goods to think" (that is, "women as property"). In a forthcoming essay, Shelly Matthews correctly stresses that Levi-Strauss meant more than that woman was "a sign in the text." She quotes his caveat, that women are not to be reduced to "pure sign," as phonemes and words are: "[f]or words do not speak, while women do; as producers of signs, women can never be reduced to the status of symbols or tokens" (Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology [New York: Basic Books, 1963], 61, cited in Matthews, "Thinking With Thecla: Issues in Feminist Historiography," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17 (2001, forthcoming). Levi-Strauss appears to react to allegations that his notion of the "exchange of women" in his Les Structures elementaire de la parente is "anti-feminist."

(142.) See, for example, Julia M. H. Smith, "Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages," in Gender and the Christian Religion, 51-73; and Leyser, "Custom, Truth, and Gender," in the same volume, 75-91.

(143.) Leyser, "Custom, Truth, and Gender," 91.

(144.) Marilyn Strathern, "Marriage Exchanges: A Melanesian Comment," Annual Review of Anthropology 13 (1984): 50.

(145.) Caroline Walker Bynum, "`... And Woman His Humanity': Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages," in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, 257-288; idem, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); John Coakley, "Gender and the Authority of the Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans," Church History 60 (1991): 445-60; idem, "Friars, Sanctity, and Gender: Mendicant Encounters with Saints, 1250-1325," in Medieval Masculinities, 91-110.

(146.) Margaret Malamud, "Gender and Spiritual Self-Fashioning: The Master-Disciple Relationship in Classical Sufism," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996): esp. 101-2: when female imagery was applied to the disciples, it betokened their "dependence and subordination," but when applied to the master, it suggested creative and nurturing powers.

(147.) Nancy Jay, "Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman," in Immaculate and Powerful, 283-309.

(148.) Mani, "Contentious Traditions," 90, 118. Mani writes, "Tradition was thus not the ground on which the status of women was being contested. Rather the reverse was true: women in fact became the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated. What was at stake was not women but tradition" (118). Or in one last example, how female characters in religious literature could be used to introduce novel ways of thinking about philosophy, as in the story of Gargi at the king's court in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad; see Findly in "Gargi at the King's Court," in Women, Religion and Social Change, esp. 38, 45.

(149.) Scott, "Gender," 1069, 1073, emphasizing that the nature of the process depends on its specific historical determination.

(150.) Averil Cameron, "Sacred and Profane Love: Thoughts on Byzantine Gender," in Women, Men and Eunuchs, 17.

(151.) Another essay that also falls into this category is by art historian Leslie Brubaker and is entitled, "Memories of Helena: Patterns in Imperial Female Matronage in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries" (in Women, Men and Eunuchs, 52-75). Helena, the Emperor Constantine's mother, was of course a "real woman," and she is credited with the extravagant patronage (or Brubaker prefers, "matronage") of building projects that secured the church's presence in the Holy Land and elsewhere in the early fourth century. As Brubaker documents, until the mid-fifth century, monuments were commissioned (often by women) that imitated Helena's activities and honored her contributions to the church. But thereafter, imperial women, doubtless stimulated by ecclesiastical decrees honoring the Virgin Mary as the "Mother of God," began increasingly to dedicate buildings and other monuments to the Virgin, a chief exemplar of the new ascetic ideal. Women had helped to construct "Helena" through their material projects, and now they apparently abandoned dedications to her, although "Helena-as-symbol" lived on into the Byzantine period. Brubaker asks "why?" and posits (provocatively if speculatively) that Helena's ideologically loaded exemplification as "upholder of traditional Roman social codes," "the honour of men," "commitment to family," and "specific lineage claims" were values increasingly called into question as the highest "goods" of society. Brubaker's essay, I think, weds the strengths of "women's history" with those of "gender history" to good advantage.

(152.) Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

(153.) Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, 4.

(154.) Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, 5-11.

(155.) Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, 5. A man's practice of sexual temperance--manifest in his harmonious, faithful relationship to a wife--was understood to signal "the self-control of a male protagonist in matters other than the sexual" (11).

(156.) Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, 14, 82. See 16-17: Cooper aims "to chart the subversion of the rhetorical economy itself."

(157.) Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, 85-86, 113.

(158.) Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, 147.

(159.) Likewise, Cooper's essay, "Apostles, Ascetic Women, and Questions of Audience: New Reflections on the Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocryphal Acts" (Society of Biblical Literature 1992 Seminar Papers [Atlanta: Scholars, 1992], 147-53), explores texts that, she argues, were "made-to-measure for rhetorical purposes" (149); the fight to win women for Christianity in the Apocryphal Acts is "not really about women," but "represents a challenge to the social order" (151).

(160.) Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 13-14, 34.

I would like to thank Elizabeth Castelli for her extensive assistance with materials for and comments on this essay. Some of the materials she shared with me will be published in an anthology, Elizabeth A. Castelli, ed., Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, with assistance from Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: St. Martin's, forthcoming 2001). I also thank my colleague Kalman Bland, members of the North Carolina Research Group on Medieval and Early Modern Women, and Amy Hollywood, Barbara Harris, and Stanley Chojnacki for their suggestions and criticisms on an earlier draft.

Elizabeth A. Clark is John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion at Duke University