Handmaids of God

There is substantial evidence that the Near Eastern cult that became Christianity held particular attractions for women across the late Roman empire. The church offered an optimistic view of life after death, especially for the poor and virtuous.

The names of Christian women worshippers have sometimes survived as inscriptions: Innocentia and Viventia on a spectacular silver cup from the Water Newton hoard (very probably the plate collection of a local church), discovered in Cambridgeshire in 1975; and Iamcilla, from the same hoard, who ‘has discharged the vow which she has promised’. A bone plaque from a late Roman grave in York bears an inscription that reads (in Latin) ‘Hail sister may you live in God’. The life of Marcella, a Roman scholar and Christian patron of the late fourth century, was celebrated in many letters by Jerome, author of the Latin Vulgate Bible whose text she helped to edit. Another of his intimates, Paula, was the founder of a celebrated monastic community at Bethlehem and an inspiration for the ascetics of the desert; she may have met Egeria.

At Lullingstone in Kent, a wealthy Romano-British family lived in a luxurious villa at the centre of a substantial estate.

Tertullian, the third-century Carthaginian Christian author, in a typically conservative and patriarchal diatribe, has much to say about Christian women’s coiffure, inadvertently providing invaluable evidence for precisely the sorts of hair-dressing and adornment that Christian women, much to his disgust, were sporting in his day. Whether anyone paid attention to Tertullian’s pompous finger-wagging is harder to say:

What service, again, does all the labour spent in arranging the hair render to salvation? Why is no rest allowed to your hair, which must now be bound, now loosed, now cultivated, now thinned out? Some are anxious to force their hair into curls, some to let it hang loose and flying; not with good simplicity: beside which, you affix I know not what enormities of subtle and textile perukes; now, after the manner of a helmet of undressed hide, as it were a sheath for the head and a covering for the crown; now, a mass [drawn] backward toward the neck. The wonder is, that there is no [open] contending against the Lord’s prescripts! It has been pronounced that no one can add to his own stature. You, however, do add to your weight some kind of rolls, or shield-bosses, to be piled upon your necks! If you feel no shame at the enormity, feel some at the pollution; for fear you may be fitting on a holy and Christian head the slough of some one else’s head, unclean perchance, guilty perchance and destined to hell.

Fashionable women, then, might be overtly Christian; or perhaps one should say that Christian women might be overtly fashionable. In any case, their faith was no mere passive observance. Christian communities across the Empire demanded very serious commitment from the faithful, as Egeria’s experience in Jerusalem shows.

From fourth-century Britain, a number of lead baptismal ‘tanks’ or portable fonts survive, four of which bear a characteristic Constantinian chi-rho monogram (chi X and rho P, being the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, or Christ; when combined they form a cross thus: ☧). Of these, the most intriguing is the fragment of a tank turned up, and damaged by, a farmer’s plough in Walesby, Lincolnshire. The tank had been cast in a sand mould into whose sides had been pressed a wooden relief carving, which appears to depict an actual baptismal ceremony. The main figure in what must have been the central panel of the frieze is a naked woman, a catechumen or prospective convert, flanked by robed and veiled women – deaconesses or companions, perhaps. The panel is separated from those on either side by depictions of columns. Charles Thomas, the pre-eminent expert on Christianity in Roman Britain, considered that the image was a two-dimensional, flattened depiction of an actual baptistery, whose walls had been, as it were, pictorially folded out onto the side of the tank. The candidate in question must, we suppose, have stepped into the real, physical tank, filled with holy water, for the ceremony.

Women played a significant social and spiritual role in the adoption of Christianity in the last century of the Empire. But the stories of Egeria and the Christian women recorded on lead tanks and inscriptions raise the question of what official positions women might have held in the functioning and spread of early Christianity. By the sixth century, deaconesses were common in the church and the frieze on the Walesby tank probably reflects one of their principal functions: to prepare women for baptism.^Ω But female deacons,^≈ who were ordained so that they could officiate among church members of both sexes, were increasingly proscribed – officially, at least. Even so, female church patrons, widows, virgins and those who presided over monastic communities were all actors in the complex functioning of a sophisticated ecclesiastical institution. Every attempt by the church hierarchy to impose canonical orthodoxy in matters of theology, liturgy or administration shows, paradoxically, a kaleidoscopic variety of ideas, practice and organisation in which women were fully integrated.