The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West

The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West
ISBN-10
0199947066
ISBN-13
9780199947065
Category
History
Pages
280
Language
English
Published
2012-11-29
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Gary Macy

Description

The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How might the current debate change if our view of the history of women's ordination were to change? In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy argues that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages.

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