Introduction

Abstract

In a recent lecture he gave at Girton College to celebrate the life and work of Eileen Power, Professor Patrick Collinson divided historical writing on women into two types, the pessimistic and the optimistic, the school which believes that women have been discriminated against by men throughout the ages and sets out to document this oppression, and the other which, while not minimizing the difficulties with which women have had to contend, emphasizes their achievements rather than their failures. When the Ecclesiastical History Society selected ' Women in the Church' as its theme for the academic year 1989—90 it seemed likely that representatives of both these historiographical groups might be involved in the venture. The chief reason for choosing this precise topic as the subject for a year's deliberations was its relative novelty, although the enthusiastic reception of Medieval Women, the Festschrift presented by the Society to Professor Rosalind Hill in 1978, had demonstrated both the widespread interest in the subject and the abundance of material available for the study of women in the Middle Ages. It was hoped that the theme would be sufficiently broad to embrace both discussions of the Church's official teaching concerning women, what churchmen thought it was fitting women should, and should not do, and also investigations into what women actually did in the Church, such as their role as evangelists, as founders of religious orders and movements, as educators, as philanthropists, as clerical patrons, as well as preservers of old religious practices. While the theme could clearly allow an exploration of specifically feminist issues, such as the campaigns for the ordination of women to the priesthood, it was not envisaged as being overtly political, but rather as a historical assessment of the activities of women in the Church from the first century until the present day. The excellent contributions the theme has inspired, touching as they do upon almost all of these aspects of the life of women in the Church, have amply fulfilled these expectations. Overall, the more optimistic school of writing on women's history has tended to predominate, though Janet Nelson, in her nuanced essay on equivocal reactions to the speech of women in the Carolingian period, draws attention to clerical misogyny which, sometimes hidden, sometimes in the open, has proved such a constant motif over the centuries. For whose who seek, virtually every