Women in Pastoral Office represents a lifetime of careful scholarship and, as such, the book includes several trajectories of investigation. It is not so much an argument for one thesis as it is a treasure trove of Schaefer's scholarship on the Santa Prassede church, the saints Praxedes and Pudentiana (Potentiana), and women's ministries in the early and medieval church. This book gives detailed documentation of the Santa Prassede church in Rome as a study in medieval representation of early Christian female saints' lives and ministries. In so doing, Schaefer contributes to the larger conversation about the historical record of women's pastoral ministry as that record informs contemporary conversations about women's ordained ministry in the Catholic Church. The questions Schaefer poses at the end of the chapter 2 state the book's expanding thesis: “Did the popularity of the Potentiana and Praxedes story about female householders who headed second-century house-churches correlate with real women engaged in ecclesial ministry? Did it perhaps help to provide models for them that overstepped the restrictions of housebound virgin, enclosed nun, or subordinate wife and mother?” (111) It is the afterward that perhaps most clearly states the book's two objectives: first, “to unveil the meaning of Santa Prassede” and second, to situate Praxedes as an “archetype of those ecclesial women who, in every generation, have responded to the call to preach Christ's gospel and collaborate in advancing the reign of God” (375).

In 819 Pope Paschal I dedicated the new Santa Prassede church to the sister saints Praxedes and Pudentiana. In this book, Schaefer begins with the particular history of these saints and this church and moves out to larger questions of women's pastoral ministry in both historical and contemporary contexts. The book begins with the foundation-myths of the saints (chapter 1), then expands the investigation in chapter 2 to the imagery found in the mosaic program of the Santa Prassede with attention to the prominence of women. It next turns to the larger historical record of women's pastoral ministries both in and outside of Rome from New Testament times through the High Middle Ages (chapters 3 and 4). Chapter 5 attends to ordination rites and liturgy in search of evidence of women's ordered ministry. The final chapter considers “the exceptional place given to family and women in Paschal's choice of church restorations, iconography, and dedicatory inscriptions” (313) in order to fully appreciate Praxedes's place in the history of women's preaching and teaching the gospel.

Schaefer offers evidence using archaeology, iconography, hagiography, liturgy, and canon law, among others, leaving no stone unturned as she mounts a tour de force of collected data. Too often, fascinating but extraneous tidbits distract from the line of investigation at hand. Her treatment can shift focus from the particular evidence about the two women or their church to historical questions of gender roles and women's ministry in the early and medieval church to larger questions of women's ordination in the contemporary church. The reader must keep several different destination points on the horizon in mind while reading through vast catalogs of detailed documentation.

To be sure, Schaefer is careful to raise questions as much as to make claims. She is an historian at work, musing occasionally about contemporary implications of some historical findings rather than drawing hard conclusions. Still, there is no doubt that she sees in history a strong record of women's preaching and teaching at least through the high middle ages, that has since been diminished if not erased. The afterward makes clear her agenda for gender parity and for women's pastoral offices in the church today. She argues, at the least, that Paschal's intent was to affirm the ministry of these women in the program of decoration. At the most, Schaefer hopes to convince that such ministerial offices establish a much richer history for women's pastoral functioning than current official Catholic consideration allows. Her death at the last stages of manuscript preparation make the urgency of her investigations all the more poignant.

While this book will be most useful to professional historians, instructors could assign to college or seminary students chapters 3 and 4 to stand on their own as a survey of women's offices and ministries through the thirteenth century.