As Christine Schenk discusses early Christian women, she looks to funerary portraits and epitaphs as well as literary sources, finding vivid evidence of authoritative women who influenced church growth more than is commonly recognized. Schenk does not argue for or against women's ordination but endeavors “to retrieve the memory of influential women whose witness has for too long been invisible or distorted in Christian memory” (xx). She finds that while women exercised governance in some ecclesial roles, they were certainly authoritative in knowledge, piety, and status, exerting influence within their social networks. Material evidence of this survives in depictions of women with scrolls, codices, speaking gestures, listening “apostles,” and biblical scenes that memorialize learned, wealthy individuals—wives, mothers, single women, and widows—who proclaimed and taught scripture.
Schenk's main sources of visual evidence are the (currently) three-volume Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage along with selected catacomb paintings and inscriptions. She analyzes images iconographically and quantitatively, engages literary evidence. and consults secondary sources and prominent scholars in late Roman/early Christian archaeology.
Following an introduction, the first two chapters provide sociohistorical context, discussing women's lives and roles in the ancient world and the early church. By the late fourth century, Christian women had brought about three main social changes: the option to forego marriage; the rescue of thousands of orphans; and evangelization within household networks. Schenk next introduces early Christian art and its representation of a broader population than one encounters solely through texts (chapter 3). The next four chapters discuss women in catacomb paintings and inscriptions (chapter 4), Roman funerary customs and sarcophagi (chapter 5), portraits of women on early Christian sarcophagi (chapter 6, the heart of the book), and sarcophagus portraits of couples, children, and families (chapter 7). Schenk counts three times more female portraits than male portraits and twice as many females as males who appear between “apostle” figures. Her analysis supports the findings of Lampe, Stark, and others that in early Christianity women were often of higher social status than men, and significantly influenced patronage and church growth. A concluding chapter compares the visual analysis with literary evidence and summarizes conclusions (chapter 8). Fourteen appendices present epigraphic and iconographic data. Charts and grayscale photographs appear throughout.
Overall Schenk's project is well conceived, organized, and executed. By privileging visual evidence, she brings to light complexities—female scroll-readers and speakers attracting the respectful attention of “apostles” contrast with texts opposing women's activities in the church. Yet this raises questions. How much contrast is there if female influence was manifest primarily within social networks? Do incongruities between our literary and material sources signal radical disjunctures, or perhaps different elements within a diverse but largely unified faith community? (See Robert Louis Wilken, review of Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400 [2009], Conversations in Religion and Theology 8, 2 [2010]: 120–125.)
Schenk's attention to named, individual women is a particular strength; the reader becomes acquainted with Crispina, Bitalia, Kale, Veneranda, Projecta, and others, who join women known through literary sources—Phoebe, Prisca, Macrina, Olympias, and others. The prosopography is not merely expanded but diversified; the “tomb women” represented in the material evidence are not the ascetics so lauded in literary sources (363). Here we have an intriguing disparity: portraits indicate that non-ascetic women were respected and influential, yet the literary evidence gives disproportionate attention to ascetic women. Schenk might have pursued this more fully, inquiring what early Christian female influence might have looked like in the context of relatively traditional, non-ascetic lives—though her brief discussions of Proba and Projecta are excellent forays into this subject. Surprisingly, Schenk does not discuss Perpetua (who possibly wrote the earliest text by a Christian woman), Perpetua's co-martyr Felicity, or Monica (one of the most fully portrayed early Christian women). These women might have represented closer analogues to the “tomb women” than the ascetics discussed. Reading the lives of those ascetic women, Schenk might have been a bit more critical; as Clark, Lieu, and others have observed, male authors often advanced their own aims by utilizing ascetic women as literary devices.
Though caution is generally one of the book's strengths, Schenk may overinterpret the iconography in places. As visual eulogy, portraits are highly idealized; they represent the virtues with which the deceased wished to be associated but not necessarily lived realities. One wonders whether a scroll really indicates a teacher rather than Christian knowledge or love of scripture. As Janet Huskinson notes, a clutched scroll “probably simply functioned as a sign that its owner claimed some kind of learning and the social status to go with it, and it was probably gratuitously used” (“Women and Learning: Gender and Identity in Scenes of Intellectual Life on Late Roman Sarcophagi,” in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed. R. Miles [London: Routledge, 1999], 199). The combination of a scroll and a speaking gesture more plausibly suggests teaching activity of some sort. Whether it signals ecclesial or social-network teaching (with influence felt in the broader church) is a more difficult question.
Schenk quibbles over Robin Jensen's use of “biblical” (104) and disagrees with her statement on the relative popularity of Old and New Testament motifs in early Christian art (107–8)—but bases her objection on sarcophagi, unaware of their distinctive preference for New Testament scenes. Exploring this could have strengthened Schenk's argument; Jutta Dresken-Weiland has shown that customers of Christian sarcophagi were especially creative, assertive, and wealthy (Sarkophagbestattungen des 4.–6. Jahrhunderts im Westen des römischen Reiches [Rome: Herder, 2003]; Bild, Grab, und Wort: Untersuchungen zu Jenseitsvorstellungen von Christen des 3. und 4. Jahrhunderts [Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2010]). A few other errors, typos, and unnuanced statements distract, and Schenk frequently cites ancient texts using secondary or online sources. But these are relatively minor issues.
Ultimately, Schenk succeeds in demonstrating, with insight and energy, how visual and archaeological evidence preserve the memory of authoritative women in early Christianity. This volume enriches the growing field of scholarship on this subject, joining works by Elizabeth Clark, Carolyn Osiek, Karen Jo Torjesen, Kate Cooper, Nicola Denzey Lewis, Janet H. Tulloch, Janet Huskinson, Stine Birk, and others. Both advanced scholars and nonspecialists will find Schenk's book worth serious consideration.
