Christian Holy Women and the Exercise of Religious Authority in the Medieval West

Abstract

AbstractThe essay reviews scholarship on female mystics and other holy women in late Medieval Europe (1100–1400), as a collective case study in how religious authority has been negotiated in the history of Christianity. Recent scholars view the firm exclusion of women from institutional leadership by male clerics in this period as an essential condition of the rise of such women to importance as persons with charismatic authority, i.e., in Max Weber’s terminology, an authority rooted in personal gifts and attributes. Some scholars have viewed charismatic women as essentially subversive of, or resistant to, the powers of clerics. Others see them in more positive terms as staking out their own complementary authority. Scholars have also considered the attitude of clerics toward such women, which was often characterized by acute awareness of the ways in which the women’s charismatic powers compensated for the inadequacies of clerical authority. Very recent scholars have further nuanced these insights by asking how the dynamics of the interplay of institutional and charismatic authority may or may not be evident in local situations.