Women’s Agency within Feminist Historiography

In commenting upon these essays by three feminist historians of Christianity, I have been struck by how some of the analytical problems that I have been dealing with in my work as an anthropologist of Islam are shared across our disciplinary boundaries, especially given the distinctly different character of “evidence” in our respective fields. If there is one question that is shared across the three articles presented here, it could perhaps be summarized as follows: what are the analytical problems that confront a feminist historian when dealing with accounts of women’s agency within Christian historiography? Ann Braude, Amy Hollywood, and Ulrike Strasser bring very different kinds of issues to the table in addressing this question. Let me start with Ulrike Strasser, who brings her critique of Weberian understandings of religion and politics to bear upon her exploration of the role played by nuns in the creation of the early modern state in Europe in her article, “Early Modern Nuns and the (Feminist) Politics of Religion” (in this issue). While Strasser takes exception to a number of elements crucial to Weberian renditions of early modern European history, her main criticism of this approach is that “Protestantism played at once too great and too little of a part in Weber’s tale of progressive rationalization of state power” (p. 532): too great “because Protestant doctrine . . . is credited with the force to single-handedly propel the inhabitants of the medieval world of ritual and magic into a modern universe of reason, hard work, and capital accumulation,” and too little because once Protestantism is understood to have played its role in the consolidation of the secular state, it loses its force and becomes marginal to the rationalized system of governance it helped create in the first place (pp. 532–33). Strasser goes on to argue that the modernizing state remains the “driving and organizing principle” in this narrative such that it fails to ask how subjects who acted in the