Sandra Glahn
I take a class of students every other year to Italy to study medieval art and spirituality. I started noticing how much of the visual record of women in the church I had not picked up on because I had only studied the written record. But the visual record has a seventh century woman holding a shepherd’s staff, a crozier, and that was a very common visual thing. Apparently, women shepherd people in the early Christian churches. In the super-early church, even before we had church [buildings] in the catacombs, you would hear about women that were bone collectors. Part of a loving Christian community was providing a decent burial to someone who was martyred for their faith. Someone who cared about them would risk their life going and collecting their head or their hands or whatever mangled parts of the body they could recover and then wash them. And because Christianity takes such a high view of physicality, that was important to the early church. I thought that was just really beautiful.
And some women lost their lives over doing that. Some women were tortured for doing that. Then I would see an example of a sixth century Christian women carrying the elements of communion. And, you know, in churches where I’ve worshiped, that would have been something that only the elders did. So, it opened my eyes that the visual record says things that the written record does not. And I realized there was really no one clearing house that I could find that put all of those artifacts in one place. I might go to the church of Mary Maggiore. And there might be a book on the art of that church. There might even be a book on the women in Ravenna. But nobody that I could find had gathered all the information in one place so that we could see what the church in the ninth century was doing, or what was the church in the seventh century doing.
And since the church has been pre-literate throughout much of its history, much of our history has been told in pictures, in mosaics and frescoes. The three of us (Dr. Cohick and Dr. George Kalantsis at Wheaton, and me at DTS) are collaborating to create what Lynn has named the Visual Museum. visualmuseum.gallery. We’re starting to collect photos of these objects, and she has been assigning her master’s and doctoral students to do vetted research on these people. We’re not just getting somebody’s opinion. We’re getting really good, solid academic work attached to the project.
David Capes
That sounds really interesting. It strikes me particularly that the visual record is so different from what you get in the written record.
Sandra Glahn
Sometimes I compare it to looking at the church’s town hall meeting notes compared it to the church bulletin. Town hall meeting notes are going to record all the conflicts, who the difficult elders were, but the bulletin is going to say who was playing Bunko and when there was a youth retreat and who brought casseroles and who we need to pray for, who got a hospital visit. It’s a much more accurate record of the day-to-day workings of the church. I think the Visual Museum does record more of that sort of activity.
Lynn Cohick
One of the things is Sandra and I’ve teamed up to take a group of students over to Italy. We did this earlier this year. We got many students’ reaction of: I never knew this. I never saw this. Who is this woman that seemed to play such a role within the church’s imagination of her generation and beyond. And I don’t even know her. I come at this from the textual standpoint, looking at the early women martyrs of the church, and what women have done as they helped shape Christianity in the early centuries. And I was just astonished at this visual record that supports the little bit that we have in the text and goes beyond that. And it’s our Christian history, it’s our church’s history, and we really wanted
a way for it to be accessible for free. As Sandra said, it’s hard to find a comprehensive book or access. Oftentimes it cost money to be a part of museums, to get online, to see what they have, and we really wanted this Visual Museum to be free for the church,
Sandra Glahn
One of our pleasant surprises has been the gender parity. So ,it’s not just been to discover women’s roles. It’s been to see that in the early centuries, women and men are always represented together, you would have a man and a woman at the altar in a couple different artifacts, whether it’s mosaics, or whether it’s in the marble. If you would have an arch with the 12 Apostles. On the inner arch, you would have eight women. So, we see how much the earlier centuries of the church were emphasizing this partnership of men and women,
David Capes
When you look at the Virtual Museum online, you’re seeing more than the images. I read yesterday a number of the stories that are associated with them and some of the details about the artwork itself. Maybe an art historian has helped you with some of that. I don’t know, because it’s not always self-evident when you’re looking at an image as to what you’re looking at or what the significance of it is. As you said, a woman carrying the elements that sure seems like an important priestly role. Or having the Crozier, that’s like being a bishop! So all of these things are pretty important, but they do need a little
explanation along the way.
Lynn Cohick
And the graduate students have been really excited to do. They’ve enjoyed digging into the world of art history, the world of theology, that so often is demonstrated in what figures are shown to be doing or what they’re wearing. So, the students have researched as well as scholars. I want to stress that as we look at these women from the early centuries, this is the history of all Christians today. This is not orthodox or Catholic history. This is church history. This is our history. And that’s something I feel is important for Christians to know today, these are part of the great cloud of witness, the global church. In the ancient world, like Augustine, for example, has done a couple of sermons on the martyrs, Perpetua and Felicity. These women lived in the life of the early church. They were household names. We’d like to bring them back into the household again.
David Capes
Yes, that’s a great vision.
Sandra Glahn
I would love to share briefly. We had a student of color who had never seen herself depicted in the art, and she was with us on the Italy trip. She burst into tears and said,” I was here”.
David Capes
I wish you both well in this, I think it’s a great project, bringing to light these saints from the past. Some of who’s stories we know very little about. But we need to know. We need to know the history much more precisely than we’ve been able to reconstruct simply from the written records. Sandra Glahn, Lynn Cohick, thanks for being with us today.
Lynn Cohick and Sandra Glahn
Thank you very much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
