Clarissa W. Atkinson

This is a very interesting and eminently readable book which, despite its title, stretches both back to the Classical world and forward into the period immediately after the Reformation in its consideration of how motherhood has been thought of in a Christian context. Atkinson argues that motherhood is a historical construction, one which is profoundly shaped by the social, economic and political contexts and the prevailing gender ideologies of each era. The earliest Christian women, for example, took pride in rejecting maternal ties when offered the opportunity for martyrdom; the High Middle Ages are marked by their devout Mariolatry and focus on affective, tender piety at the same time as virginity was prized even above chaste marriage; by the early modern period, the only good and irreproachable Christian woman was a mother. The majority of Atkinson's sources are, of course, written by men, and given the nature of the sources she must focus more on the ideology of motherhood than on the practical, daily lived experiences of medieval mothers. She does however provide many case studies of individual women, and her analysis of the texts is clear. Some of her conclusions about women's/gender roles in the very early church may be quibbled with slightly (perhaps in light of later research? this book was published in 1991), but this is regardless a very useful work.… (altro)