THE FIRST WOMEN PROPHETS

‘If Montanus had triumped …’

The quotation from Salmon's study of Montanus in the late nineteenth-century Dictionary of Christian Biography speaks volumes. It presupposes the primacy of Montanus; a particular susceptibility of women to wild excitement together with their incapacity for insight on matters of doctrine and also the triumphalism of women in any religious group unwise enough to give them space. It is a good example of its kind.

Our sources provide many references to women as well as utterances and records from the women themselves. Montanism is unusually rich in that respect, though still there are difficulties in recovering the women's history. For, as Virginia Burrus has observed about ancient heretical movements, the heresiological sources are written ‘from the point of view of self-identified orthodoxy’ and they are written by men, ‘who utilize the figure of the heretical female as a vehicle for the negative expression of their own orthodox male self-identity’.

Women of the earliest Prophecy were not heretical (Burrus' analysis concerned fourth-century women) but sources for much of later Montanism confirm the picture she paints – namely we have the reverse, negative image of the good orthodox woman which the catholics were helping to create and to contain. The female heretic was ‘the threatening image of a community with uncontrolled boundaries’ – allegedly sexually adventurous, verbally and theo- logically untrammelled, divorced from her rightful (private) sphere. There are hints of this even in the earliest sources on the New Prophecy.