Women's Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History

The richness of recent research on womens worship gives witness to the scholarly interest in its contemporary practice reflection and construction. On the other hand feminist scholarship has had little impact on liturgical historiography. In Womens Ways of Worship Teresa Berger reconstructs liturgical history from the perspectives of women. She shows that the invisibility of women in the traditional liturgical narrative draws into question the credibility of that narrative especially at a time when research into womens history has unearthed much material relevant to womens liturgical lives.Berger focuses on thirteen key interpretative principles that guide the reconstruction of women at worship - from a re-configuration of the canon of sources and a re-Visioning of liturgical periodization to re-interpretation of anthropological basics and of liturgical texts. On the basis of these principles she analyzes liturgical dynamics in two time periods crucial to the history of women at worship: the early centuries of the Christian Church and the twentieth-century liturgical renewal. Within the twentieth-century liturgical renewal Berger focuses on two specific foci of renewal: the classical liturgical movement of the first half of the century and - as a case of history-in-the- making - the womens liturgical movement of the present day.Womens Ways of Worship narrates both past and present liturgical developments from the perspectives of womens lives heeding such dynamics as the genderization of liturgical space women- specific liturgical taboos gender-specific devotional practices and the emergence of feminist liturgies. An epilogue confronts the question of a future liturgy beyond gender.Convinced that reconstructing the history of women at worship will offer a new Vision of the place of the womens liturgical movement within liturgical history as a whole Berger puts this movement on a continuum of women at worship which is a continuum of struggle against the historic marginalization of women in most liturgical contexts. As this struggle has come to the forefront today Womens Ways of Worship provides a context for change with women themselves being agents of both the questioning and the transformation.Chapters are Reconstructing Womens Ways of Worship: In Search of Methodological Principles Liturgical History Re-Constructed (I): Early Christian Women at Worship Liturgical History Re- Constructed (II): Women in the Twentieth-Century Liturgical Movement and Liturgical History in the Making: The Womens Liturgical Movement.Teresa Berger is associate professor of Ecumenical Theology at the Divinity School of Duke University Durham North Carolina. She is the author of numerous books and contributor to a variety of journals including Worship published by The Liturgical Press.