This is a well written and accessible history of women from the late antique to the early modern period, a timespan that covers the history of Christianity up to the major challenge of Protestantism. As the author sets out in the introduction (chapter i), her book offers a synthesis of research carried out over the last decades into the role and place of Christian women in society and in the Church. With admirable clarity she explains why it is important to study women who lived and worked in the one and a half millennia that until the early twentieth century were the domain of scholarship devoted almost exclusively to men. One explanation is of course that the Roman Catholic Church's officers were male from the pope at the top to the local parish priest at the bottom. Alongside the men who occupied the role of priest, the mediators of sacraments between the laity and God, were those who lived in monasteries or were active as hermits or wandering priests in the secular world. As Matis emphasises, only recently has the role and place of women in this patriarchal structure become an object of research, which is so voluminous in its output that there is a demand for a synthesis. A special theme of interest throughout the book is the history of canonised women and informal saintly women. In thirteen chapters Matis takes her readers chronologically through the period, with three chapters (ii–iv) devoted to the late antique period, two to the Merovingian and Carolingian periods (v–vi), two chapters to the long twelfth century (vii–viii) and one to the later Middle Ages (ix). Two final chapters are devoted to the role of women in Protestantism (x) and in the Catholic (Counter) Reformation (xi), and they are followed by a short conclusion (ch. xii). Each chapter is illustrated with black-and-white images taken from the Internet under the Creative Licence agreement, and is accompanied by a substantial bibliography as a guide for further reading.
The volume does indeed fulfil its promise as an introduction to the role and place of women in Christianity, a religion that turned itself in a bastion of male dominance and patriarchal morality. Matis teases out how lay women used religion to shape their own lives and that of their families in lively vignettes of historical women to illustrate the wide variety of ways in which they negotiated Christian precepts alongside and in interaction with male priests. And as promised in the introduction special attention is paid to women saints and saintly women whose actions of piety and devotion left traces in the records allowing Matis to present them to her audience. For the early period covered by her book she has made ample use of recent archaeological research to fill in gaps in the written record by revealing what the material culture tells us about the role of women in Christianity.
Where the book is perhaps less successful as an introduction is as a guide to Christianity for an audience that is not Christian. Dogmatic aspects, such as transubstantiation and the eucharist, the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, or the resurrection are mentioned but are not explained. In our increasingly secularised modern society, which of course is also a multi-religious society, more effort could have been made to explain the Christian religion both in terms of dogma and in terms of pastoral practice.
Bearing this limitation in mind, altogether this is an useful well-written introductory text that will be helpful for students with knowledge of Christianity who venture into the late antique, early modern and medieval periods.
