Christine Schenk, in Crispina and Her Sisters, draws evidence from multiple epigraphic and literary sources to trace the significance of women leaders in the first four centuries CE. The breadth of this volume is truly impressive. Beginning with a discussion of the sociocultural context of the Christian communities in the early Roman Empire and a review of the literary evidence for women leaders, Schenk then surveys images of women in early Christian art, evidence from catacomb frescoes and inscriptions, Roman funerary customs and memorials, and portraits of women from Christian sarcophagi, concluding with a discussion of Christian women in the fourth-century literary sources. But Schenk does not sacrifice depth when presenting this broad survey. Details abound at every stage, and the volume concludes with fifteen substantial appendices providing data on inscriptions, portraiture, and other material remains relevant to the topic.
Starting with the sociocultural context of early Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, Schenk outlines the factors that, on the one hand, fostered women's leadership in the early churches and, on the other hand, led to the opposition and eventual suppression of such leadership. She persistently points to the literary and epigraphic evidence for women in various ecclesiastical ministries and other leadership roles, simultaneously highlighting the recurring polemic against women exercising such leadership roles—including the previous tendentious interpretations of inscriptional and iconographic data that have obscured the clear evidence that women functioned in such roles.
Attributing the opposition to women's leadership to culturally conditioned views of women as inferior and subordinate to men (e.g., Epiphanius, 143), Schenk observes, “It is therefore all the more remarkable to find literary and inscriptional evidence that women did exercise such roles despite the constraints imposed by an increasingly misogynist clerical culture” (147). Rather than viewing repeated literary prohibitions as descriptive of the situation (which has been one of the chronic dynamics for misreading the evidence), she applies the form-critical standard of reading “legal” prohibitions as prescriptions developed to arrest existing behaviors. Thus, each time someone like Epiphanius writes against women exercising leadership and clerical functions, we know that women were functioning in precisely those roles. And the epigraphic and iconographic evidence of the period provides substantial corroborative data for these claims.
Christine Schenk has brought together the findings of a number of previous studies to create the backdrop for a narrative of key women figures ranging from first-century Pauline church leader Lydia of Thyatira, to fourth-century aristocrat Crispina of Rome. Her detailed analysis of the types of roles and authority borne by Christian women in the first four centuries CE demonstrates the ubiquity of women's leadership in early Christianity and the significance of those women leaders for the developing church. As other recent scholars have suggested, the story of women's leadership in the early churches is not a marginal phenomenon; rather, it comprises a central strand of early Christian history. Thus, Schenk's study problematizes not only the eventual suppression of women's ecclesial leadership in the Constantinian period, but also the persistence of such misogynist structures today.
