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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 262.1408209 EAN: 9780195189704 Edition: 1 ISBN: 0195189701 Label: Oxford University Press, USA Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 280 Publication Date: November 30, 2007 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA Studio: Oxford University Press, USA Editorial Review: Product Description: The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How might the current debate change if our view of the history of women's ordination were to change? In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy offers illuminating and surprising answers to these questions. Macy argues that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was understood as the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry in the community. In the early Middle Ages, women served in at least four central ministries: episcopa (woman bishop), presbytera (woman priest), deaconess and abbess. The ordinations of women continued until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries radically altered the definition of ordination. These reforms not only removed women from the ordained ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's ordination in the past. With profound implications for how women are viewed in Christian history, and for current debates about the role of women in the church, The Hidden History of Women's Ordination offers new answers to an old question and overturns a long-held erroneous belief. Average Rating:
 Rating: - An Important Theological Book for Our timeIn this time of radical transition more than forty years after Vatican II, nothing could be more salutary for the Church than Gary Macy's judicious historical study of women's ordination in the Medieval West. Clearly and succinctly written, his history reads more like a masterful medieval mystery rather than ponderous scholarship. Any one, scholar or popular reader, will be nourished by this important work. It is a vade mecum for persons interested in the ordination issue; it also serves as a lucid ... Read More Rating: - What to know how woman got to where they are read this bookAs a non-clergy or professor, I found this book to be a revealing history of woman not only in the church by in society in the twenty first century. Many of the current ideas about the role of woman in society can be traced to the activities described in this well written and easy to read book. It should be required reading by anyone interested in the role of woman then and now, the power of the political church at the time and how the effects of that power continued to have on modern society. Read More Rating: - An Important, Highly Readable Book!In this important volume, Gary Macy makes a clear, compelling case for the long and hidden history of women's ordination. How refreshing to find a book that's at once scholarly, meticulously researched, convincingly argued AND highly readable. And how fortunate for all of us that Macy presents this history in a way that is accessible to lay persons as well as academics. Reading this book is like taking a course with your favorite, most engaging history teacher ever. Highly recommended! Rating: - Groundbreaking HistoryThis is a must read for anyone on either side of the contentious issue of the ordination of women. This is an extremely well-written and well-documented story of the ordination of women in the Catholic Church into the 13th Century -- and it's an easy read as well. Macy separates the historical issues from the theological issues and then does a marvelous job of revealing that the definition of "ordination" used in the early church was different from the definition of "ordination" ... Read More |
