Although the title of Gary Macy's study is strictly accurate, it may put off some potential readers, which would be a shame. Read on. This is an important book that brings together and makes sense of a series of recent findings about the history of women's ordination. Such findings have been dismissed by those who have failed to make the careful distinctions between history and theology that Macy makes here. This is a book of history, with implications for its readers about theology—but it is not about theology per se—and although Macy has personal opinions about women's ordination in the present, his presentation of the evidence has all the requisite scholarly detachment that should make it possible for individuals on all sides of the debate to use it as a starting point.

Macy traces the surviving vestiges of a history of women's ordination to particular tasks within the Church from early Christianity to the central Middle Ages. He then shows how that history comes to be hidden by developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—clerical hegemony led to changed meanings for ordination, limiting it to male clergy and service at the altar. While depending on earlier studies such as that in German on Merovingian nuns' liturgy by Gisela Muschiol (Famula Dei: Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern [Munster: Aschendorff, 1994]), not widely known among English speakers, Macy brings a welcome clarity to the evaluation of that evidence.

Most critical and most original for our understanding of women's ordination in the early Middle Ages is an argument in Macy's fourth and fifth chapters in which he collects the various threads that were woven together in the central Middle Ages to deny earlier practices of women's ordination. He shows evidence of a new and selective reading of scripture that became dominant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—a reading that need not have been accepted, but was. In discussing that alternate view he points to and acknowledges the arguments for Abelard's stance on this issue outlined by Mary Martin McLaughlin in her 1975 article, “Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women: Twelfth Century ‘Feminism’ in Theory and Practice” (in Pierre Abélard/Pierre le Vénérable: Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en occident au milieu du XIIe siècle [Paris: Editions du Centre National de la recherches scientifiques, 1975], 287–333). Thus Macy says, “Medieval theologians could have read scripture differently, … [but instead] … men wanted to believe the worst about women and so they found justification to do so” (124).

Macy establishes that such justification was based on two things. First it derived from the increased power of the priest that came with the elevation at the altar as the center of Christian liturgical life and with the transformation of the Eucharist into a relic of Christ. But second, that justification also went hand in hand with a series of selective and misogynist readings (or misreadings in some cases) of the early Church fathers, Church law, Roman law, Greek philosophy, and scripture that would be incorporated into the major textbooks as the standard university curriculum. Thus on page 100 and the following pages, he describes how women were defined “out of ordination,” in the period “from the council of Benevento in 1091 until the publication of Huguccio's commentary some time after 1188.”

This is a careful, well-argued study that justifies its assertive title by its rather slow opening chapters that outline the evidence and earlier interpretations. Macy's arguments about how even the role of abbesses came to be reduced by the combined assemblage of university-trained canonists, theologians, philosophers, and popes are compelling. A minor quibble may lead in fact to further clarification as to the precise dating for all these changes to be in place in the first half of the thirteenth century. In a forthcoming publication I intend to argue that the famous attack on the abbesses of the Cistercian Order in the diocese of Burgos and Palencia (usually identified as those of las Huelgas), which has been famously attributed to Innocent III and then “reiterated” by Innocent IV (as Macy describes it on p. 103) should probably be attributed to Innocent IV alone. The assertion that it is scandalous for abbesses to bless, hear confession, read the Gospels, or preach to their nuns is, as Macy recognizes, an assertion against the last vestige of women's ordination—that of the abbess as deaconess. The document trail to Innocent III is vague and cloudy, while that to Innocent IV is strong. In the considerable regularization of religious women over the course of the first half of the thirteenth century, the reign of Innocent III is too early, preceding as it does by a good decade any other activity in this regard. Innocent IV's concern about all aspects of religious women's lives was much stronger than that Innocent III. Moreover, it is documented (in Les Registres d'Innocent IV, ed. Elie Berger [Paris: 1884–1921], 4 vols., no. 589, given at the Lateran, March 14, 1244, and addressed to the abbot of Cîteaux):

This is not well known in the literature, but indeed something I came across when looking for something else. But in my mind that this accusation against abbesses happened twice in two reigns of popes both named Innocent seems extremely unlikely, and the reference to Berenguela is clearly to the later time period. If we knew nothing else, the tendency would be to associate it with Innocent IV as the papal register does.

This should not detract from, but indeed confirms, the findings about canon lawyers, Aristotle, theologians, and others whose denial of women's ordination had become such a tight web in the mid-thirteenth century that it was possible to ignore a thousand years of earlier history, which Macy lays out so well. The book is beautifully produced and will change how we teach and think about the medieval church. It already has for my classes.