Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past

Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy’s past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Teresa Berger looks at liturgy’s past through the lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of ＂men＂ and ＂women＂ but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men. Demonstrating what a gender-attentive inquiry is able to achieve, Berger explores both traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and also new ways of studying the past, for example by asking about the developing link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. Drawing on historical case studies and focusing particularly on the early centuries of Christian worship, this book ultimately aims at the present by lifting a veil on liturgy’s past to allow for a richly diverse notion of gender differences as these continue to shape liturgical life.

Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. She holds doctorates in both liturgical studies and in systematic theology; her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of those fields with gender history. Teresa Berger has written extensively on liturgy and gender in the past. Her previous publications include Women’s Ways of Worship (1999); Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (2001); Fragments of Real Presence (2005); and a video documentary called Worship in Women’s Hands (2007). She has also published monographs on the hymns of Charles Wesley and on the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival, and co-edited, most recently, the volume The Spirit in Worship-Worship in the Spirit (2009). Professor Berger joined the Yale faculty in 2007, after teaching at Duke Divinity School. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Mainz, MÃ1/4nster, Berlin, and Uppsala. An active Roman Catholic, she received the distinguished Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church in 2003.