Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100 by Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg (review)

BOOK REVIEWS65 most nine full pages of names). The lack of names of women before 1800 and the proportionately fewer names after that is not the fault of the editor. He and his colleagues have done their best to include as many significant women as possible, but the sources are lacking. This is often evident in the bibliographies attached to the biographies of women. But from these listings it is obvious that the work will be more useful to historians of the modern mission period than those of the ancient, medieval, or Reformation periods. It has been estimated that there have been over ten million persons who have served as foreign missionaries or cross-cultural home missionaries down through the ages, and therefore a choice had to be made. The editor consulted with fifty scholars from around the world before settling on the 4,500 included in the volume. The criterion used for choosing these was that they made a significant contribution—often in a pioneering role—to the advancement of Christian missions. Some readers may find some of their "favorite" names missing , especially in the earlier periods, but in reading the articles they will see that each entry deserves to be there. It is often said that the era of missions is over. However, the editor points out that there are far more missionaries working today than ever before in history (403,000 in 1997), many of these coming from non-Western Churches. This is a resource that will need to be up-dated regularly. Gerald Anderson has done a great service to missiologists and missionaries throughout the world. By making his choice so ecumenical and so global he has made it possible for scholars and missionaries to become more aware of the richness of the diverse Christian traditions and to be inspired by the generosity and commitment of missionaries down through history from all traditions. He has done more than provide a valuable resource; he has made an important theological statement. Lawrence Nemer, SVD. The Missionary Institute London Medieval Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100. By Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 587. $40.00.) This book represents nearly twenty-five years of research into the lives of female saints for the years 500 to 1 100. In addition to the introduction which outlines her methodology and sources, Schulenburg describes the various aspects of saintly women in eight chapters before her concluding epilogue titled "The Celestial Gynaeceum." As might be expected, the saints from this time in the 66BOOK REVIEWS early Christian Church became saints because of local, popular support rather than through a formal process of papal canonization. In her identification of over 2,200 female and male saints in western Europe reviewed by the author to write this book, Schulenburg found that about one in seven were women or around fifteen percent of the total for the years of her study. But the book is more than just a "nimbus count," although the statistical data are there for those who are interested. If Schulenburg's account about holy women sounds familiar it's because portions of Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 appeared in previously published collections of essays. The author was drawn to the field ofhagiography with its disadvantages and limitation as source material because her focus on women's history for the early medieval period is one where documentation on women is notably scarce. Schulenburg acknowledges the problems of authenticity but claims that social historians can find in these holy vitae incidental facts that are impossible to find from any other source. Moreover, the sheer volume on the holy dead provides rough data that can be useful to make comparisons between saints both male and female over the time period of the book's focus. Schulenburg argues that she was more successful by studying the vitae collectively rather than in isolation, but she needed to apply textual criticism when reading each life as well as comparing information from other sources like calendars and liturgies when available. Early Church Fathers are cited by the author to establish the standards required ofwomen to be saintified. Practices...