Recommended listening: One Hour of Medieval Italian Songs by Arcana
Story
"Exaudi, domini preces nostras et super hanc famulam tuam spiritum tuae benedictionis emitte, ut caelesti munere ditata, et tuae gratiam possit maiestatis acquirere et bene vivendi aliis exemplum praebere. Give heed, Lord, to our prayers, and upon this your servant send forth that spirit of your blessing in order that, enriched by heavenly gifts, she might be able to obtain grace through your majesty, and by living well offer an example to others."
So said the bishop as he ordained a woman to the role of deaconess. From now on, she would no longer be considered a member of the laity - after he anointed her with the sacred oil and lay his hands upon her head, she would join the ranks of the Church as an ordained woman.
The job of a deaconess, according to the ordination rite in the 10th-century Romano-Germanic Pontifical whence this prayer comes, was to live a life of chastity and to instruct young women in the faith. The pontifical instructed the bishop to explain to his congregation that this role had been instituted by the apostles. Deaconesses certainly had existed since the early Church, possibly even referenced in the Bible itself, but by the turn of the first millennium, the position was not uniformly available to women across Christendom. Various ecclesiastical councils had condemned the ordination of women as deaconesses and argued that bishops should not allow women in their dioceses to serve at the altar.
Other councils, though, were not so deadset against the role. The Council of Chalcedon, one of the most important Christian councils in the 5th century, decreed that deaconesses must be at least forty years of age at the time of their ordination. Other councils imposed penalties on men who tried to marry ordained women. Some deaconesses were married, but only if they had been so before their ordination - and after becoming a deaconess, they were instructed to live in chaste separation from their husbands. Some of them were the wives of men who themselves had become priests, monks, deacons or bishops, and were in a sense joining their husbands in their vocation. Others were widows or unmarried virgins.
As the first millennium of Christianity wore on, fewer and fewer bishops were willing to ordain women in their dioceses. Certain councils had already tried to forbid it, and theologians in the 11th century would soon start writing all manner of theological tracts about how women were not physically or intellectually capable of receiving the sacrament of ordination, and that deacons should only be men who are en route to becoming priests. The 12th and 13th centuries would see a narrowing of the term "ordination" to mean only those who were destined to perform the sacrament of the Eucharist, excluding all women as well as monks as never having really been ordained. As Gary Macy puts it in his book The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, "In a mere one hundred years [...] teaching on the ordination of women had been dramatically transformed. Despite opposition from Abelard and a few other writers, canonists moved from conceding that women were once ordained, to teaching that women were never ordained, to teaching, finally, that women never could and never would be ordained. This final position is what canon law students would be taught for the rest of the Middle Ages." Men such as Gratian, Rufinus, Huguccio of Bologna, Guido de Baysio, Raymond of Peñafort, Peter Lombard, and Richard Fishacre redefined ordination as a permanent spiritual transformation that women were physically and intellectually incapable of receiving, even if someone attempted to ordain them, due to the "impediment of sex".
The Romano-Germanic Pontifical, however, shows that some bishops still saw value in ordaining deaconesses in the 10th century and later, as it was copied from manuscript to manuscript for liturgical use. These bishops clearly did not agree that women were fundamentally incapable of being ordained. The bishops of Lucca are said to have ordained deaconesses into the 12th century, long after most had abandoned the practice, so this illustration is set in Lucca, an ancient Tuscan city on the western coast of Italy. They would have been using the Romano-German Pontifical or something very close to it. As a former part of the Frankish kingdom, Italy had plenty of deaconesses in its history who could serve as role models to any women aspiring to the role - most famously, the Merovingian queen Radegund, whose dramatic demand to be ordained a deaconess against the wishes of the king and his nobles was memorialized in hagiography.
The woman in this picture is kneeling at the altar. The bishop has just anointed her with holy oil and laid his hands on her. While he goes to fetch her orarium, the stole he will put around her neck to demonstrate her new ordained status, her head is bowed in prayer. This moment, where she takes on a new role she has been studiously preparing for, is between her and God. Behind her stretches a mesmerizing mosaic, inviting reflection amongst its marble patterned swirls. The Romanesque church has little natural light, creating an intimate atmosphere of prayer lit only dimly by small windows and candles.
When the bishop returns, he will give her the orarium, which may have symbolized that she would preach to young women as part of her new role. The next part of the ordination, where she receives the veil, ring, and crown, are identical to the rite of consecration for a nun - with one crucial difference. While the nun has the bishop veil her, the deaconess walks to the altar and veils herself. The veil symbolized a rejection of sensuality - while lay brides wore their hair long, ordained women who were pledging chastity cut theirs short in a tonsure that hung only to their ears. The woman here has hair that is greying with age, a sign of the experience she hopes to pass on to younger women. After more prayers, communion, and a reading from the Gospel of Matthew, the bishop will present her to the order of veiled women who stand in the congregation, waiting to welcome her to their ranks. Finally, he ends the Mass with a pastoral proclamation, announcing her new status to the community. She will spend the rest of her days devoted to life in the Church, teaching young women and perhaps even preaching and assisting the priest during Mass.
The story of deaconesses in the early medieval Church is one that reveals the diversity inherent in the Church's history, a diversity that is often masked by anachronistic narratives which seek to present ecclesiastical decisions as being in line with a long, unbroken tradition. In reality, women deaconesses were just as ordained as priests, bishops, and male deacons in a time when ordination meant being anointed to carry out a special role in the Church, not only one that would involve leading the Eucharist. In a world where abbesses preached and heard their nuns' confessions, kings and queens went through rituals of divine ordination, and the wives of priests helped out in the parish, there was nothing fundamentally incongruous about a deaconess who could trace her heritage to the earliest days of the Church. The deaconess of Lucca, like generations of women before her, was consecrated by a bishop into a holy office just as legitimate as that of the man who ordained her.
So said the bishop as he ordained a woman to the role of deaconess. From now on, she would no longer be considered a member of the laity - after he anointed her with the sacred oil and lay his hands upon her head, she would join the ranks of the Church as an ordained woman.
The job of a deaconess, according to the ordination rite in the 10th-century Romano-Germanic Pontifical whence this prayer comes, was to live a life of chastity and to instruct young women in the faith. The pontifical instructed the bishop to explain to his congregation that this role had been instituted by the apostles. Deaconesses certainly had existed since the early Church, possibly even referenced in the Bible itself, but by the turn of the first millennium, the position was not uniformly available to women across Christendom. Various ecclesiastical councils had condemned the ordination of women as deaconesses and argued that bishops should not allow women in their dioceses to serve at the altar.
Other councils, though, were not so deadset against the role. The Council of Chalcedon, one of the most important Christian councils in the 5th century, decreed that deaconesses must be at least forty years of age at the time of their ordination. Other councils imposed penalties on men who tried to marry ordained women. Some deaconesses were married, but only if they had been so before their ordination - and after becoming a deaconess, they were instructed to live in chaste separation from their husbands. Some of them were the wives of men who themselves had become priests, monks, deacons or bishops, and were in a sense joining their husbands in their vocation. Others were widows or unmarried virgins.
As the first millennium of Christianity wore on, fewer and fewer bishops were willing to ordain women in their dioceses. Certain councils had already tried to forbid it, and theologians in the 11th century would soon start writing all manner of theological tracts about how women were not physically or intellectually capable of receiving the sacrament of ordination, and that deacons should only be men who are en route to becoming priests. The 12th and 13th centuries would see a narrowing of the term "ordination" to mean only those who were destined to perform the sacrament of the Eucharist, excluding all women as well as monks as never having really been ordained. As Gary Macy puts it in his book The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, "In a mere one hundred years [...] teaching on the ordination of women had been dramatically transformed. Despite opposition from Abelard and a few other writers, canonists moved from conceding that women were once ordained, to teaching that women were never ordained, to teaching, finally, that women never could and never would be ordained. This final position is what canon law students would be taught for the rest of the Middle Ages." Men such as Gratian, Rufinus, Huguccio of Bologna, Guido de Baysio, Raymond of Peñafort, Peter Lombard, and Richard Fishacre redefined ordination as a permanent spiritual transformation that women were physically and intellectually incapable of receiving, even if someone attempted to ordain them, due to the "impediment of sex".
The Romano-Germanic Pontifical, however, shows that some bishops still saw value in ordaining deaconesses in the 10th century and later, as it was copied from manuscript to manuscript for liturgical use. These bishops clearly did not agree that women were fundamentally incapable of being ordained. The bishops of Lucca are said to have ordained deaconesses into the 12th century, long after most had abandoned the practice, so this illustration is set in Lucca, an ancient Tuscan city on the western coast of Italy. They would have been using the Romano-German Pontifical or something very close to it. As a former part of the Frankish kingdom, Italy had plenty of deaconesses in its history who could serve as role models to any women aspiring to the role - most famously, the Merovingian queen Radegund, whose dramatic demand to be ordained a deaconess against the wishes of the king and his nobles was memorialized in hagiography.
The woman in this picture is kneeling at the altar. The bishop has just anointed her with holy oil and laid his hands on her. While he goes to fetch her orarium, the stole he will put around her neck to demonstrate her new ordained status, her head is bowed in prayer. This moment, where she takes on a new role she has been studiously preparing for, is between her and God. Behind her stretches a mesmerizing mosaic, inviting reflection amongst its marble patterned swirls. The Romanesque church has little natural light, creating an intimate atmosphere of prayer lit only dimly by small windows and candles.
When the bishop returns, he will give her the orarium, which may have symbolized that she would preach to young women as part of her new role. The next part of the ordination, where she receives the veil, ring, and crown, are identical to the rite of consecration for a nun - with one crucial difference. While the nun has the bishop veil her, the deaconess walks to the altar and veils herself. The veil symbolized a rejection of sensuality - while lay brides wore their hair long, ordained women who were pledging chastity cut theirs short in a tonsure that hung only to their ears. The woman here has hair that is greying with age, a sign of the experience she hopes to pass on to younger women. After more prayers, communion, and a reading from the Gospel of Matthew, the bishop will present her to the order of veiled women who stand in the congregation, waiting to welcome her to their ranks. Finally, he ends the Mass with a pastoral proclamation, announcing her new status to the community. She will spend the rest of her days devoted to life in the Church, teaching young women and perhaps even preaching and assisting the priest during Mass.
The story of deaconesses in the early medieval Church is one that reveals the diversity inherent in the Church's history, a diversity that is often masked by anachronistic narratives which seek to present ecclesiastical decisions as being in line with a long, unbroken tradition. In reality, women deaconesses were just as ordained as priests, bishops, and male deacons in a time when ordination meant being anointed to carry out a special role in the Church, not only one that would involve leading the Eucharist. In a world where abbesses preached and heard their nuns' confessions, kings and queens went through rituals of divine ordination, and the wives of priests helped out in the parish, there was nothing fundamentally incongruous about a deaconess who could trace her heritage to the earliest days of the Church. The deaconess of Lucca, like generations of women before her, was consecrated by a bishop into a holy office just as legitimate as that of the man who ordained her.
Artist's Comments
I'm very pleased to bring you this illustration, which took a lot of long, hard work to research and draw. After reading Gary Macy's The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, I knew I had to draw a woman being ordained. Women's ordination remains a contentious issue to this day, so it is important to spread awareness of the historical facts of what ordination meant in the medieval period and how that changed to exclude women. Sometimes I got so angry while reading what medieval theologians wrote about women that I had to throw the book down. I hope that this illustration can help correct some of the misogynistic misrepresentations of women's long history of actively seeking official roles in the Church.
I'm very grateful to my sister Ellie for her help with this illustration. I was stuck on it for a long time and her comments helped me realise exactly why and turn the picture around in a new direction. Thank you, Ellie! I'm also grateful to my dad for helping me with interpreting some of the Latin text of the ordination rite. And thank you to everyone else who offered advice and encouragement during the course of this picture. The deaconess's outfit is based on the image of Mary wearing a dalmatic on the cover of Macy's book, and the floor is based on the one at the church in Torcello. ~ October 17, 2020
I'm very grateful to my sister Ellie for her help with this illustration. I was stuck on it for a long time and her comments helped me realise exactly why and turn the picture around in a new direction. Thank you, Ellie! I'm also grateful to my dad for helping me with interpreting some of the Latin text of the ordination rite. And thank you to everyone else who offered advice and encouragement during the course of this picture. The deaconess's outfit is based on the image of Mary wearing a dalmatic on the cover of Macy's book, and the floor is based on the one at the church in Torcello. ~ October 17, 2020
Resources
Want to learn more about ordained women in the medieval Church? Here are some recommended resources.
The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West by Gary Macy
I looked long and hard for a reputable book that could bring me up to date on the evidence for women's historical ordination, and this one fit the bill. It's published on Oxford University Press by a respected academic. Although Macy argues strongly for his conclusions, it does not feel like a book with an overbearing modern agenda. His key point is to show how the meaning of ordination changed throughout the medieval period, with a special focus on how that affected women's roles in the Church - but he leaves the debate about whether that means women should be ordained today to the theologians.
"The Robe of Simplicity: Initiation, Robing, and Veiling of Nuns in the Middle Ages" by Désirée Koslin
This chapter goes into the significance of nuns' clothing. Although deaconesses aren't directly discussed here, Koslin explains the symbolism behind the ring and the crown of a nun's ordination, and these elements were also present in the ordination of a deaconess (with the difference that the deaconess put her own veil on). A lot of what is written here about religious women's clothing would have also applied to deaconesses. The chapter is part of a book called Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, edited by Stewart Gordon.
"'Et utroque sexu fidelium tres ordines' - The Status of Women in Early Medieval Canon Law" by Eva M. Synek
This article provides a good overview of the varied statements in canon law regarding women's status. Deaconess are discussed, touching on some of the same points that Macy raises in his book (which came out after this article was published). Synek mentions that the evidence for the continuation of women's ordination in the early medieval Church is strongest in Frankish and Italian contexts, suiting the setting of this illustration. Some useful comparisons to the situation in the Byzantine Church are made throughout, and Synek explores the blurred boundaries between laypeople and clerics that canon lawyers sought to iron out.
Women's Ordination Worldwide
If you're interested in the issue of women's ordination in the modern Catholic Church, this organisation is a good way to get involved. It's an ecumenical network with the goal of getting women ordained as Catholic priests. The group has been campaigning since 1996 and is particularly keen to highlight historical evidence of women's participation in ordained ministries as a justification for changing current practice.
The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West by Gary Macy
I looked long and hard for a reputable book that could bring me up to date on the evidence for women's historical ordination, and this one fit the bill. It's published on Oxford University Press by a respected academic. Although Macy argues strongly for his conclusions, it does not feel like a book with an overbearing modern agenda. His key point is to show how the meaning of ordination changed throughout the medieval period, with a special focus on how that affected women's roles in the Church - but he leaves the debate about whether that means women should be ordained today to the theologians.
"The Robe of Simplicity: Initiation, Robing, and Veiling of Nuns in the Middle Ages" by Désirée Koslin
This chapter goes into the significance of nuns' clothing. Although deaconesses aren't directly discussed here, Koslin explains the symbolism behind the ring and the crown of a nun's ordination, and these elements were also present in the ordination of a deaconess (with the difference that the deaconess put her own veil on). A lot of what is written here about religious women's clothing would have also applied to deaconesses. The chapter is part of a book called Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, edited by Stewart Gordon.
"'Et utroque sexu fidelium tres ordines' - The Status of Women in Early Medieval Canon Law" by Eva M. Synek
This article provides a good overview of the varied statements in canon law regarding women's status. Deaconess are discussed, touching on some of the same points that Macy raises in his book (which came out after this article was published). Synek mentions that the evidence for the continuation of women's ordination in the early medieval Church is strongest in Frankish and Italian contexts, suiting the setting of this illustration. Some useful comparisons to the situation in the Byzantine Church are made throughout, and Synek explores the blurred boundaries between laypeople and clerics that canon lawyers sought to iron out.
Women's Ordination Worldwide
If you're interested in the issue of women's ordination in the modern Catholic Church, this organisation is a good way to get involved. It's an ecumenical network with the goal of getting women ordained as Catholic priests. The group has been campaigning since 1996 and is particularly keen to highlight historical evidence of women's participation in ordained ministries as a justification for changing current practice.