The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West

Gary Macy's The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Female Clergy in the Medieval West, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, is a scholarly study arguing that women held roles the medieval Church itself described using the language of ordination, including as deacons and presbyters, before a later, deliberate theological and terminological shift redefined ordination narrowly in ways that retroactively erased that earlier practice from view. Macy is a historian of medieval Christianity building the argument from close reading of the actual medieval liturgical and canonical texts. Its strength is that direct textual grounding, tracing how specific words changed meaning over time rather than assuming medieval terminology meant then what it means in later Catholic canon law. Its limit is that Macy's central argument, that this redefinition was substantially deliberate, remains contested among other medieval historians who read the same textual shift as gradual theological development rather than an intentional erasure, so the book's strongest claim should be presented as his interpretation of a real and debated textual pattern.