A History of Women in Christianity to 1600

This book concentrates on women's experience, but it should nevertheless be a cogent summary of the major events within the history of Christianity. It does not present women and women's experience as marginal or peripheral to the main narrative of Christianity but as significant actors within it. It aims to introduce students and the more general reader to figures who are well known within specialized academic discourse but often ignored in broad-brush narratives. It attempts to synthesize often diffuse areas of scholarship into a single, easily accessible volume, and to act as a resource for teachers and clergy who are looking for an introduction to the material but do not know how to begin. Finally, it attempts to avoid over-simplified or triumphalist confessional approaches to this history. A Women's History of Christianity is an overarching, synthetic narrative of the major figures, movements, and events within the history of Christianity from its origins through the Reformation, paying particular attention to the contributions of women, their relationship with the church, and the forms their spirituality has taken. It is a balanced assessment of how women have engaged with the church, and it with them, with a particular view to showing the complexity of discourses regarding women and gender that exist within Christianity. It grounds these discourses in an analysis of broader, structural and environmental factors that have shaped women's experience of Christianity--