Church History and Religious Culture最新文献

In her 1772 memoir, Sarah Chapman relays an exciting tale of daring escape from her parent’s home in December 1752. She was seventeen, single, and determined to join the Moravian Church, a new group originating in eastern Saxony. Women like Sarah—usually young and single—saw in the Moravians an alternative to settled life. This article explores the place of the Moravian Church as a disruptive organization which built congregations of young people who separated themselves from home and family, often dramatically retold in spiritual memoirs. Their Hussite proto-Reformation influences, combined with the charismatic leadership of the Saxon Count Zinzendorf, provided space for diverse forms of female participation. Through tales of run-away women, I argue that studying Moravian women disrupts the traditional conception of church creation as predominantly male and instead reconceives the religious fracturing of eighteenth-century Protestantism as something intimately experienced by women, even those young and single.

The story of the Reformation in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania has been told primarily through the actions of men who purged churches, settled ministers, expelled Catholic priests, and defended the freedom of worship at the local and national level. This article challenges that androcentric perspective, drawing on synodical acts and surviving church visitations to reexamine the religious praxis of Reformed Churches (Calvinist and Church Brethren) in Lesser Poland, Greater Poland, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It finds that, despite the absence of women in historiography, women were involved in shaping the piety and practices of the Reformed Churches from the beginning. From Katarzyna Ostroróg to Ludwika Karolina Radziwiłł women not only participated in the foundation of Protestant churches but also actively challenged patriarchal assumptions.

In the course of the Twentieth century, the roles for women in Protestant churches in Europe expanded to include the possibility of participating in the church office of minister. For the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the year 2022 marked the centenary of women in the ordained ministry. On June 12, 1922, the Lutheran synod decided that, according to the existing regulations, women could also be admitted as candidates for the ministry. In 1929 Jantine Auguste Haumersen (1881–1967) became the first female Lutheran minister in the Netherlands and worldwide. This made the Lutheran church, after the Mennonites and the Remonstrants, the third denomination in the Netherlands where women could hold the office of minister.

Utilizing a broad cultural analysis and based on recent extensive archival research this article describes the turning points in the development of women’s ordained ministry in the Lutheran Church in the Netherlands.

This article analyzes forms of ecclesiastical punishments found in the fourth-century Council of Elvira canons. Previous work on the council and canons has rightly argued that the regional bishops were concerned with policing the boundaries of their communities, especially when it comes to marriage, women, and sexual behavior. Yet rather than see the punishments and preoccupation with women as representing a natural result of heterosexual male desire or sexual anxiety, a re-evaluation of the canons reveals that church leaders used excommunication as a punishment to exercise social control. In effect, the efforts to deprive community members of communion and baptism function as a form of privative violence. The article analyzes how the canons use the most severe forms of privative violence, near-total and total excommunication, for situations that concerned the sexual behavior of women. By situating the Council of Elvira canons in their sociocultural context in Roman Hispania, as well as among other examples of early Christian texts focused on women’s supposedly deviant bodies, this article contributes to efforts to expand our understanding of the intersection of gender and violence. More importantly, it addresses how these acts of privative violence, particularly against women, shaped the contours of ancient Christian communities.

This article expands scholarly definitions of female religious authority—conversations that typically focus on women—by situating girlhood as an equally important site of receiving, developing, and performing religious agency. Using a biographical case study approach, the article examines the life of Mary Chrystie, a deeply pious American girl who lived from 1825–1841 in the mid-Atlantic region and left one of the most substantial extant primary source collections produced by a child from this period. Her life represents the religious potency of girlhood’s “in-between status” to building female-centric sacred repositories. To demonstrate this dynamic, the article analyzes Mary’s stewardship over her spiritual interiority, participation in religious communities, and her engagement with voluntarism. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the necessity of incorporating age as a category of analysis into gendered reformulations of religious authority, allowing girls to be integrated into scholarly narratives of women’s religious history as actors in their own right.