By Anna Redhair Wells
Anna Redhair Wells received her PhD from the Religion Department at Baylor University. Through the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, she is a postdoctoral fellow at Central Seminary. Her research examines the representation of gender in saints’ lives in medieval Ethiopia and Europe. With Ryan Ramsey, she is co-editor of The Five Distinctives of World Christianity: Essays in Honor of Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, forthcoming with Baylor University Press.
Editorial Note, Stephen Di Trolio: For the following weeks, we will explore the theme of women and world Christianity. We will highlight the work of Baylor University PhD students and graduates as they discuss the centrality of women within the discussion of World Christianity and their research. This series provides a path for thinking about the manifold ways in which the theme of women and world Christianity intersect in their research and study. We are grateful for sharing these insights on their ongoing research. This is the second part – please see part I.
Considering the representation of women in connection with their experience of Christianity, as Andrilenas’s research highlights, provides another means of disrupting typically male-centric historical analyses. Atypically for World Christianity (and in contrast to my co-authors), I study medieval Christianity. World Christianity’s insights about the nature of Christianity, particularly its translatability and polycentricity, are not just theoretical frameworks for the modern period. Rather, they can be applied fruitfully to earlier periods of Christian history and help disrupt even the most entrenched narratives.
My work contrasts two medieval Christian centers, the Latin West and Ethiopia. Though similar relationships between church and state developed in these locations, the particularities of the centers shaped how saints’ lives were translated and re-told. The representation of women in two influential collections of saints’ lives provides one example of this divergence. The European Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, and the Ethiopian Senkessar (Book of the Saints), translated by an unnamed scribe, contain several of the same female saints, but the stories’ emphases differ. To take one example, we turn to how it represents Mary of Egypt’s life. When Voragine created his text in the mid-thirteenth century, he showed her to be a saint submissive to the authority of the institutional church. At the time in European Christendom, the greatest concerns were the increasing authority of an (ideally) celibate clergy and the challenges from various heretical groups. In contrast, the Ethiopian Senkessar’s late-fourteenth-century version emphasized her extreme ascetic practices as the source of her sanctity. This focus on asceticism aligned with models of holiness provided by both male and female indigenous Ethiopian saints.
Of course, the earliest version of Mary of Egypt’s life appeared in the sixth century. In that text, her conversion from a previous life of sin and commitment to rigorous fasting and isolation served as a corrective example for a prideful monk. Yet, as her story moved into new cultural contexts—those of medieval Europe and Ethiopia—it was refashioned or reinterpreted in ways that reflected the priorities of each community. Both medieval Catholicism and Ethiopian Orthodoxy operated within a patriarchal ecclesiastical structure, yet patriarchy manifested differently according to each context. In both collections, the stories eliminate Mary of Egypt’s authority as a corrective example for the prideful monk. However, sanctity for women was found in submission in the Latin church, whereas in the Ethiopian church, it was found in ascetic practice.
A broader view of these two collections, arguably representative of each context, demonstrates a diversity of views regarding women and holiness. The Legenda aurea presented women’s virginity and submission as a gendered path to holiness, while the Ethiopian Senkessar offered a variety of models of sanctity applicable to both men and women. Rather than studying these stories in isolation or viewing one of them as normative, a World Christianity approach demonstrates the influence of cultural context on gendered ideals of sanctity and the great diversity of representations of women saints in Christian history. It highlights that translatability—even the translatability of women’s stories—has always been present in the faith.
Since the focus of much World Christianity scholarship considers examples from the sixteenth century onward, collaboration with my colleagues and friends has been invaluable to my own research. Conversations around the relationship between women’s representation and lived experience, the role of translatability, and the various ways patriarchy intersects with Christianity have informed my work. Despite my co-authors’ research interests remaining centuries apart from my own, our shared perspective on World Christianity fuels a mutually beneficial dialogue anchored in both scholarship and friendship. This dialogue has produced new insights and questions that we hope will contribute to the future of World Christianity. The value of doing academic work in the community context cannot be overstated.
