Vital to the current debate about women and the church, this landmark book discloses clearly for the first time that women played prominent leadership roles in

This landmark book reveals not only that women were priests, bishops, and prophets in early Christianity, but also how and why they were then suppressed.

Madigan and Osiek assemble relevant material from both Western and Eastern Christendom.--Robin Jensen, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, author of Face to

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license. This book reveals exciting early Christian evidence that Mary was remembered as a powerful role model for

Two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage, parish priests in the late medieval period continued to form unions with women that were marriag