The idea for this edited volume on women's leadership in early Christianity grew out of a panel presentation, organized by Joan Taylor and Ilaria Ramelli, that took place at a 2015 congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in Erfurt, Germany. While some of the essays in this volume grew out of this panel's papers, others were invited. Three of the fourteen contributors are affiliated with the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research (WICR), which promotes gender equality in the Catholic Church. Another provocative context for this book, discussed by Taylor and Ramelli (Introduction) and Wijngaards (chap. 10), is the 2016 Study Commission on the Women's Diaconate, established by Pope Francis, that failed, in 2019, to reach a “unanimous conclusion” on whether Catholic women could serve as deacons. The essays in this volume present ample evidence of women's leadership in the church from the first century to the early medieval period by examining a variety of materials and documents, from gospels, letters, councils, and heresiological tractates to archeological remains, inscriptions, catacomb frescoes, and mosaics. This volume is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and others who want to understand more about the variety of ways in which women held positions of authority and shaped practice and theology in the early church.

Although many of the chapters attest to the fact that early Christian women held specific ordained offices, including as prebytera (chaps. 10, 13), episcopa, and apostle (chap.7), often the authors complicate the notion of leadership and encourage readers to think beyond the idea of ordination and office. Taylor and Ramelli argue that women leaders were partners of apostles and priests, going out to preach “two by two” (as male-female pairs), according to Mark 6:7 (chap. 1), or syzygoi (apostolic partners) attested in the Pauline letters, Acts of Paul and Thecla, Acts of Philip, and Gregory Nazianzen (chap. 2). Harry Maier and Margaret Butterfield (chaps. 3 and 4) shed new light on the economic status and symbolism of widows in early Christian communities. As independent actors, widows were benefactors, enterprising artisans, leaders, intercessors, ritual officiants, and “altars of God,” whom some male leaders attempted to control and regulate (as in 1 Timothy). William Tabbernee examines the literary and epigraphical evidence for women prophets and officeholders among Montanist communities in Phrygia. From Epiphanius's writing and numerous local inscriptions, he concludes that “at least one group of Montanists had women clergy by the third quarter of the fourth century CE” (177). Kevin Madigan analyzes inscriptions and conciliar and episcopal prohibitions of the Byzantine period and concludes that, although the “story of female presbyters is an elusive one” (289), discourse about women in clerical offices stretches from the fourth century into the Middle Ages, in both East and West (with clearer evidence for women presbyters in the West).

Several essays in this volume examine women's roles in extent Coptic texts, such as those from the Nag Hammadi Library (chaps. 5, 6) and the Gospel of Mary (chap. 7). Nicola Denzey Lewis notes that the Nag Hammadi documents give little information for “reconstructing a social history of women religious teachers and leaders” (113). However, these texts do attest to “startling plays on sexual politics in the spiritual realm” (129). Using a third-wave feminist lens that focuses on “the complexity of gender” and constructions of masculinity, femininity, queered identity and intersectionality (117), Denzey Lewis charts a way forward for the study of women and the representation of gender in the literature called “Gnostic.”

One of the pleasures of reading this edited volume is that it looks beyond the literary sources to consider the roles of women in ritual space, material culture, art, and the built environment. Tabbernee considers evidence from tombstones (chap. 8); Ally Kateusz and Luca Badini Confalonieri analyze the ample visual evidence for women's authority and leadership in liturgical space from the wall paintings, sarcophagi, mosaics, and ivory reliquary from Rome, Pola, Ravenna, and Naples (chap. 12). In the final chapter, Taylor explores the “gendered space” of the Megiddo church in Palestine (c. 230 CE) as a way to illuminate Eusebius of Caesarea's reading of Philo on the Therapeutae (whom Eusebius interpreted as Egyptian Christians).

Teresa Berger, in her essay on women's leadership in ritual practices in the home (chap. 9), aptly summarizes the diverse findings of this volume when she writes of the expanded notion of leadership that is necessary for the student of early Christianity. She writes: “[W]omen's ritual leadership in early Christianity is insufficiently mapped when the focus is on ordained leadership at the altars of the public basilicas alone. Liturgical practices have always been much broader than what takes place in public sanctuaries. Ritualizing the faith also takes place in houses, private chapels, cemeteries, and on pilgrimage routes, to name just a few sites. And Christian women ritualized their faith in all of these” (194).

For those looking for in-depth discussions of feminist theories and methodologies, the construction of gender, the questioning of categories of “woman,” or the contextualization of early Christian practice in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Jewish histories, this volume may come up short. The editors, for example, state that they “consider Christianity from Jesus onwards” while recognizing that Christianity was, at first, a Jewish movement (1). That said, this volume is a valuable and significant collection of up-to-date historical evidence for a variety of forms of women's leadership in the early church from a diversity of sources. The bibliography will prove beneficial for students and scholars of women in the ancient and early medieval worlds and for those interested in the history of Christianity. In addition, the chapters include detailed summaries of the scholarly literature on the subject of early Christian women's leadership. Finally, this volume, with its thorough presentation of historical evidence, is an invaluable intervention in the recent papal study of the “Women's Diaconate.” As Taylor and Ramelli remind their readers, “Ancient women validly exercised leadership in numerous ways” (4), even if these ways do not always map easily onto twenty-first-century understandings of Christian leadership.