On 17 January 1526 the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli wrote a letter to the medical doctor Johannes Vadianus, congratulating him on his recent appointment as mayor of the Swiss city of St Gallen. He also asked him for more detailed information concerning the terrible events which were reputed to have taken place in the vicinity of St Gallen, especially in nearby Appenzell. The Anabaptists in that area were reported to have intercourse with each other’s women, with the approval of the women themselves. A woman of previously unimpeachable conduct was said to have taken to the streets naked, offering herself to all she met, with the words, ‘I have died in the flesh and live only in the spirit; everyone may now use me as he wishes’. And this was said to be but a sample of the incidents which demonstrated how severely the Anabaptists were guilty of misconduct.

On 17 September 1523 a very wealthy widow, Dame Joan Thurscross, made her will in Hull. Her benefactions included £30 for new vestments to her parish church of St Mary’s, £35 to hire a priest for seven years to sing for her soul, the souls of her three husbands, of her parents, and of her son, £4 to the building works at the White Friars’, £12 for a priest to perform an obit in St Leonard’s convent in Grimsby, where she had been born, small presents to her god-daughter and other nuns at Sixhills, £20 for mending the causeway between Beverley and Anlaby, thirteen white gowns for thirteen poor women, and silver masers or standing pieces for Sixhills Nunnery, Kirkstall Abbey, and the Charterhouse of Hull. It is impossible to read this very individual will and not recognize the bequests, however conventional in themselves, as being the carefully thought out intentions of the testatrix. With its emphasis upon Masses for the dead and stress on die necessity of good works it furnishes a poignant example of late medieval piety.

More than twenty years ago, in the Introduction to his influential article which focused upon the life of Anne Locke, Patrick Collinson bemoaned the lack of recognition given to the role of women in the English Reformation. Happily, over the last few years this situation has been somewhat rectified, as modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized the degree of feminine participation in the spiritual upheavals of the period. The problem, however, remains that there is little evidence of personal feminine testimony, especially for the immediate post-Reformation period. The example of Elizabeth Bowes is, unfortunately, a case in point. Mrs Bowes, the wife of a prominent Durham gentleman, is well known to historians as a devoted follower and later the mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer, John Knox. Particularly during the early 1550s, Elizabeth maintained a regular correspondence with Knox. Of this, some thirty of Knox’s letters have been preserved, mainly in the form of a transcript copied from the originals in 1603. These letters, indeed, provide the main source of evidence for the life of the reformer during this period. Yet it is also apparent, from the tone of Knox’s replies, that much of the correspondence was devoted to the discussion and analysis of Mrs Bowes’s religious anxieties and aspirations, as she struggled to come to terms with her conversion to the Protestant Faith.

‘Mistress Glover … you are a woman hearty in God’s cause’, wrote Nicholas Ridley in 1555 to Mary Glover of Baxterley in JL? JL Warwickshire. Hearing that her husband had been incarcerated ‘for God’s word sake’, and that ‘old father Latimer is your uncle’, Ridley commended her own zealous commitment to the reformed faith, and her assistance of others: ‘… you be hearty in God’s cause, and hearty to your master Christ, in furthering of his cause and setting forth his soldiers to his wars to the uttermost of your power’. In the past twenty-five years we have begun to determine why women on the Continent and in England were attracted to, encouraged, or inhibited the spread of religious change, but there is still much to be done to understand the role of individual women and women generally during the Reformation. Mary Glover, despite her association with prominent figures, is almost unknown to historians. The purpose of this paper is to describe a type of patronage which had important local and national implications, and a distinct role exercised by Mary Glover and others in the sixteenth and following centuries: the practical assistance which women offered to itinerant preachers.

This paper considers women’s participation in the congregations of Civil War and Interregnum England. In particular it is concerned with the idea of whether women sectaries in the 1640s and 1650s had a different idea of church polity from their brethren, or whether, within the confines of the sects, they continued to play the role traditionally assigned to women in Christianity: that of the spiritually inspired, the example of holiness rather than the leader. In short, did women even in the sects remain outside the church polity?

When Samuel Clarke’s The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age was published posthumously in 1683, the ‘godly life’ was a well-established genre of Puritan literature. Clarke himself had contributed to its popularity with his various compilations of’lives’ of ministers and laity culled primarily from published funeral sermons and spiritual biographies by other authors. Today such editions would be regarded as blatant plagiarism, but in the mid-seventeenth century, before the advent of the copyright laws, they were widely appreciated, and in the Introduction to this, his last work, Clarke wrote,

In the past the ceremony of churching was the only means by which, after childbirth, a woman could return to the community of the Church, and indeed to society in general. It is a subject that has received very scant scholarly attention, in spite of the existence of a considerable body of source material concerned with the ceremony, as well as with the ideas and circumstances surrounding it. This material includes the works and debates of theologians and reformers, the survivals of the Church administration, its courts and visitations, biographical material, particularly diaries, and, finally and more unusually, parish registers that record the dates on which churchings occurred. This neglect is all the more surprising in an era that has seen so much emphasis placed on investigations into the historical circumstances of women. This paper will attempt to rectify this situation by utilizing these and the focus point of this ceremony in order to determine the interconnection of religious ideas, with those about sex, motherhood, and women in the early modern period. The theological origins of churching lie ultimately in Leviticus 12, but more directly through the story of the purification of the Virgin in Luke 2. These biblical precedents led to the adoption of such ceremonies into western liturgy around the eleventh century. However, the fact that similar beliefs and rites seem almost universal, perhaps suggests that the introduction of this rite was a response to popular feelings, rather than the imposition of a new ceremony on an increasingly Christianized society. Equally it would seem that the survival of churching through the theological upheavals of the sixteenth century indicates that there continued to be, as Keith Thomas has suggested, within early modern English society, a widespread belief that a woman who had given birth was both unclean and unholy.

’Tis not a woman’s place
To say a word of grace
In Church or in the street:
Behind the spinning-wheel is her proper seat.
Ioh. van Beverwiick, Van de wtnementheyt
des vrouwelicken geslacht.

It was beyond dispute what the place of women in the Church ought to be. According to the commandments of the Apostle Paul (I Timothy 2. 11-12, I Corinthians 14. 34-5) the weaker sex should remain silent. However, it remains to be seen if women have always heeded this admonition. Does not the text of the quoted rhyme already show otherwise?

In York Monthly Meeting, women ministers were to become dominant by the end of the eighteenth century, having been outnumbered by men since the beginning of the century. The Meeting for Ministers and Elders appears to have degenerated between 1726 and 1768 under the stewardship of Nathaniel Bell and Daniel Peacock. At the same time, female influence in the Meeting suffered a hiatus, the Meeting ceasing to send female representatives to the Quarterly Meeting in about 1718. This situation continued until 1783, when women once again began to feature strongly in the Meeting of Ministers and Elders; they were appointed to the positions of elder and minister and resumed sending representatives to Quarterly Meetings. From 1706 to 1775, York Meeting had 7 male ministers, of whom 4 were itinerant. There were 5 female ministers; 3 made more than one journey in the ministry. From 1775 to 1860 there were 11 male ministers, 2 being itinerant. There were 20 female ministers, of whom 11 made regular journeys in the ministry.

Twenty years ago, Olive Anderson called for more detailed study of how the role of women changed in the nineteenth century, pointing out that only such careful investigations ‘can show how far the conventional stress upon feminism has been well judged’. She noted the contemporary strength of the churches as ‘the great arbiters of public attitudes toward social issues’ and argued that the beliefs and practices of popular religion (‘the religion of the unsophisticated laity in general’) were ‘full of change and diversity’.

The cultivation of the heart and the moulding of the will…’—these words symbolize the work of the Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India, and the East. This society existed from 1834 to 1899. It was run entirely by women, for educating and evangelizing girls and women in distant lands.

Musical outlets for English women in the medieval Church were generally restricted to convents, where they sang plain-song. Even female participation in liturgical plays like the Easter drama (with solo parts for the Marys at the Sepulchre) was normally not allowed. Singing in cathedral, collegiate, and major parish churches was limited to men and boys; in cathedral and collegiate foundations, only male singers could fulfil the statutory requirements of membership. The Henrician dissolution of religious houses thus put an effective musical damper on women in English church music for several years. (Abolition of chantry foundations in major parish churches, incidentally, caused the disbanding of most of the small parochial male choirs.)

When convents were re-established in mid-nineteenrh-cenrury England, after a break of over two hundred years, they mirrored the developments in religious life pioneered on the Continent during the Catholic reformation and in response to the French Revolution. By 1850 new forms of active and apostolic vocation co-existed with the traditional enclosed and contemplative vocation. Yet even the most traditional convent was novel in early nineteenth-century England, and it is only with benefit of hindsight that we assume the willing response of Irish and English women to the call of a religious vocation. The reestablished Church might promote the virtue of vocation, particularly to the new apostolic congregations which were so useful to hard-pressed priests. But it was not inevitable that the religious life would take root in a culture deeply suspicious of conventual ‘secretiveness’ and, moreover, at a time when the ideology of hearth and home had such vitality. In the event, the active congregations multiplied rapidly and attracted women of all classes. As a result, by the end of the century the Roman Catholic Church in England had found employment for thousands of women as full-time, professional church workers. More than one-third and perhaps as many as half of these women were from working-class families, and it is with the working-class members that this paper is concerned.

This lecture should also have a sub-title, perhaps something like ‘a study in ambiguity’, because I want to use it as a particular example of the great paradox which seems to lie at the core of the relationship between women and the Church. On the one hand, as is well known, most varieties of Christianity have been marked by a more or less powerful misogynist strain which, understandably, has been the focus for feminist denunciations of the Church as one of the principal enemies of women’s rights. On the other hand, as ecclesiastical historians perhaps know better than others, Christianity cannot be viewed crudely as a force invariably responsible for women’s oppression, since from its beginnings it has proved itself specially attractive to women, allowing them to find inner peace and deep fulfilment through Church-related activities. I hope to show tliat the history of women’s involvement in the social Catholic movement in France in the period before the First World War is a perfect illustration of the paradoxical situation in which, within the framework of a potentially restrictive Christian discourse, women have been able to make a distinctive contribution both to their religion and to society in general.

In the evening of Tuesday 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. At the other end of England, the Mothers’ Union branch at Embleton, on the coast of north Northumberland, was listening to a magic-lantern lecture about ‘Mothers in Many Lands’. The report of that meeting provides a touching cameo of that last hour of the Victorian age:

The modern debate about the ordination of women began in the early years of this century and has continued ever since. In the course of that debate, the theology and practice of the Reformed churches are often ignored. This paper attempts to remedy that defect in part by discussing the context of the opening of the ordained ministry to women in this century.