Introduction
Bloody Temple
Bloody Mary
Bloody Churches
Figures
Notes ******************************************************************************

Introduction

For ancient Jews, the Jerusalem Temple Mount represented the non-negotiable site of sanctity, the scene of God's presence, and the locus of sacrificial ritual. Moreover, the enormous complex built there by Herod the Great acted as the first-century worship place for Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples, further positioning the Temple as a model for Christian sacred space. Early Christian literary and material evidence reveals, however, an uneasiness in emulating the architectural and liturgical constructs established by the Jewish prototype. Specifically, the nascent Church grapples with certain spatial systems at work in the Jerusalem Temple--such as gendered space, hierarchical space, and sacred vs. profane space--as the Church struggles to forge its own identity in the shadow of the Temple's sacred legacy.

This paper examines early Christian attempts to appropriate, reinterpret, and re-present spatial constructs established by the Jerusalem Temple in early ecclesiastical art, architecture, and liturgy. Of particular interest is the problematic proximity of women to the sacred. In the ancient Jewish model, women associated with the blood of reproduction (menstruants and new mothers) are specifically singled out as extremely dangerous to sacrificial settings. The incompatibility of reproductive blood and sacrificial blood in the same sacred setting gives rise to fixed dictates spatial parameters delegated to women worshipping in the Temple. The dramatic tension that arises from the co-existence of these two types of charged bloods actually the structural configuration of architectural spaces as well as the personages allowed entrance to them. The early Church's preoccupation with these spatial constructs signals the threat that menstruants present to the Eucharist--the symbolic sacrifice--in the Christian tradition as well.

Bloody Temple

TEMPLE SLIDES

The plan of Herod's Temple (Figures 1 & 2) reveals a building decidedly divided into courtyards; these in turn clearly distinguished the genre of substances and people allowed into them./1/ The religious background, gender, and hierarchical status of the participant all worked together to define the nature of these segregated realms. The outer area of the Temple--the Court of the Gentiles--was accessible to non-Jews and surrounded by a special low balustrade with warning inscriptions pronouncing death to pagan visitors who passed its limit. I have shown elsewhere that this balustrade, or soreg, stands as the model for Christian chancel screens cutting off sacred areas within ecclesiastical architecture in the early medieval period./2/ As Jewish men and women moved away from the periphery of the Temple and toward the core of the building complex, they would have entered the Court of the Women where Jewish males and females worshiped together, especially during the major Jewish festivals three times a year. Despite its name, then, the Court of the Women was not gender specific. It did represent, however, the ultimate spatial limit of women's participation in divine ritual. Only Jewish men could proceed from this courtyard into the Court of the Israelites, and only a select caste of priests could move past another low barrier and approach the altar located in the Court of the Priests (Figure 3). Here, gallons of blood were spilled daily in sacred, sacrificial ritual. The ultimate spatial goal of the Jerusalem Temple, the Holy of Holies--the residing place of God--lay in an enclosed space out of bounds to everyone, save the High Priest one day a year.

TEMPLE SLIDES

This cursory tour of the Jerusalem Temple reveals several characteristics of sacred space as it was developed by the Jews. First, the Temple courtyards were associated with gradational levels of sanctity and human participants were structured accordingly. Moreover, two separate areas existed where contact took place between the mundane and divine worlds. Foremost of these was the Holy of Holies, the site of God's presence. Hierophany or "divine appearance" in this place acted as the principal force that gave the Temple its sacred status./3/ The second place connecting the human realm to the heavenly one was in the altar area within the Court of the Priests. Bloody sacrifices to God secured Israel's communication with the powers that governed it. The distinction between these two architectural spaces--site of God's presence and site of sacrifice--will play an important role in the medieval church's reinvention of ancient spatial models and the placement of women in relation to the sacred.

Our main source for descriptions of the Jerusalem Temple is the first-century Jewish writer Josephus. In reference to the spatial limits of women, he states:

The outer court was open to all, foreigners included; women during their impurity were alone refused admission. To the second court all Jews were permitted and, when uncontaminated by any defilement, their wives; to the third, male Jews, if clean and purified; to the fourth, the priests./4/

LEVITICUS SLIDE

The spatial regulations at work here had their roots centuries earlier in Levitical purity laws./5/ In the context of other conduits of pollution (ejaculants and lepers, for example), Leviticus 12 ascribes to parturients, women who have recently given birth, the longest period of purification before she can enter holy grounds--forty days for a boy child and double that for a girl child. The Hebrew text specifies that throughout that time, "she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying are fulfilled." During that period, a woman "shall continue in the blood of her purifying." The root for "purifying" here, tahar, plays a key role in describing not only menses, but in defining sacrificial blood as well. Using the same term, Leviticus 16:14-19 commands Aaron, the High Priest, to splash animal blood all over the altar area to "purify it," v'taharo. According to this and other Biblical passages, the telos or destination of the two bloods seems to be the same. Menses purifies. Sacrificial blood purifies. The two substances are conceptually and linguistically connected as purifying agents that cleanse unclean people and objects.

In addition to their sanctifying capabilities, reproductive blood and sacrificial blood both embody life forces. The life-giving implications of women's menses are evident. It is the stuff from which "being" is forged, offspring are engendered. Sacrificial blood is also figured as a life-embodying substance. In Leviticus 17:10, for example, God states, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes an atonement for the soul." The purifying and life-engendering associations of blood for ancient Israelite culture render blood as a highly charged and overdetermined substance. Even the different types of blood from the same female reproductive system delineate blood's multivalent nature. Menses, a woman's regular, monthly flow of blood, demands up to fourteen days of purification, while lochia, the blood of childbirth, mandates a forty to eighty-day wait. This discrepancy underscores the dangerous powers associated with human forces of procreation. Moreover, a woman who has just produced a girl child--that is to say more life-bearing potential--seems to have done something akin to the divine; her entrance into sacred realms where other supramundane powers are at work potentially creates a rivalry in life-giving forces./6/

Bloody Mary

The early church's appropriation and reinterpretation of ancient temple space signal the important roles that sacrificial blood (the Eucharist) and reproductive blood (menses) play for the Christian tradition. Shaye Cohen has effectively shown that after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., "Christianity excluded menstruants from the church long before Judaism excluded them from the synagogues."/7/ This may be due in part to the church's continuation of the sacrificial tradition once present in the Jerusalem Temple and to the synagogue's discontinuation of this ritual. The inclusion of menstruants in early synagogue space seems to indicate that any competitive relationship between reproductive blood and sacrificial blood, as it existed in the Jerusalem forerunner, was now eliminated. This situation would change centuries later precisely when the synagogue began to model itself after the Temple, taking on more of its sacred characteristics. /8/

The New Testament offers us the first glimpse into Christian anxiety about menstruation and sanctity in the story of the bleeding woman who touched Christ. In all three synoptic gospels (Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:24-34, and Luke 8:43-48), Jesus reverses the purity laws of Leviticus by allowing a woman with an issue of blood to come into proximity with the presence and power of God. Luke states:

And a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years and could not be healed by any one, came up behind him, and touched the fringe of his garment; and immediately her flow of blood ceased. And Jesus said, "Who has touched me?... Someone touched me; for I perceive that power has gone forth from me." And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. And he said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace."/9/

SLIDES

The earliest images we have of women in contact with the Eucharist are connected to this story and come from ancient catacomb art. In the late third-century catacomb of SS. Pietro and Marcellino in Rome (Figures 4 and 5), a fresco depicting the woman with an issue of blood stays true to its textual source and shows no direct physical contact between the woman and Jesus' flesh. Any sense of tension between Christ and the menstruant seems, however, to be abated by Christ's gesture reaching toward the woman, an action that links his divine space with her female-gendered and female-bloodied space.

SLIDES

Another painting from this catacomb figures a woman actually holding a chalice of wine and leading the Agape Feast./10/ Here, an early form of the Eurcharistic sacrifice rests firmly in the hands of a woman. What is missing, however, from both of these images (as well as other catacomb paintings of women leading last supper rites) is a clear sense of architectural context.

SLIDES

Another early art work that does, however, pay a great deal of attention to the spatial circumstances of women in contact with the Eucharist comes from the famous mosaics at San Vitale in sixth-century Ravenna (Figures 6 and 7). Flanking the altar in the East end of the church and within the chancel railings of the sanctuary, stand the images of Justinian on Christ's right and his wife Theodora, on Christ's left.

SLIDES

Within an iconographical program revolving around real and symbolic sacrifice, the royal Byzantine couple bring sacrificial accoutrements to the altar. Justinian presents the golden platter on which the Eucharistic bread will be placed, while Theodora carries the chalice that will hold the Eucharistic wine at the altar. While no telling architectural feature identifies the space that Justinian occupies, Theodora's context is carefully constructed with an elaborate stage set including doorways, a water fountain, an area surmounted by a niche, and another one by a veil. Otto Von Simson has commented:

The implicit assumption is that we are to visualize him (Justinian) in the very place where his image appears, viz., the sanctuary of San Vitale. The Empress, on the other hand, is shown before a doorway and next to a graceful fountain. This setting is not imaginary but reproduces, though in abbreviated form, the narthex which adjoined the apse of San Vitale. The topographical hint has something paradoxical: Theodora's portrait has been placed in the sanctuary, but at the same time the onlooker is restrained from imagining her in this sacred place./11/

SLIDES OF TEMPLE ALTAR

This kind of representational ambivalence shows up a number of times in Christian literary evidence during the early years of the Common Era. The Protevangelium of James from the second century, for example, attempts to reconcile a menstruating Mary with ancient Jewish laws concerning the Temple. The apocryphal story tells of Mary growing up at the foot of the sacrificial altar in the Jerusalem Temple, itself:

The priest...placed her on the third step of the altar, and the Lord God put grace upon the child. And Mary was in the Temple nurtured like a dove and received food from the hand of an angel. When she was twelve years old, there took place a council of priests, saying: "Behold, Mary has become twelve years old in the Temple of the Lord. What then shall we do with her, that she may not pollute the sanctuary of the Lord?" And they said to the high priest: "You stand at the altar of the Lord; enter (the sanctuary) and pray concerning her, and what the Lord shall reveal to you we will do."/12/

SLIDES

This text also establishes another Christian innovation that will determine church space to this day. After situating Mary's childhood years in the precincts of the altar, the Protevangelium of James quotes Joseph as saying to Mary, "You were brought up in the Holy of Holies and received food from the hand of an angel."/14/ In the ancient Jerusalem Temple, God's presence resided in the Holy of Holies while sacrifices were offered to God on an altar in an altogether different courtyard, that of the priests. The narrative's conflation of these two separate areas reflects a radical shift in both Christian theology and liturgical space. The altar area and the Holy of Holies merge as one space in the Christian apse because, for the Christians, God has become the sacrifice. God's presence and sacrifice unite into one and the same essence. This blurring of spatial entities, the conflation of the divine with sacrifice itself, and the transference of God's presence into the area of the priests will all play essential roles in defining Christian sacred space and the relationship of women to it.

Christian attitudes toward the old Jerusalem Temple Mount itself most dramatically point to an uncomfortable relationship to Jewish precursors. Despite the church's obvious desire to imitate and appropriate the sanctity of the Jewish Temple in its liturgy and symbolism,/15/ early medieval accounts tell us that during the fifth through seventh centuries, the Christians not only turned their backs on the sacred spot, building everywhere else in the city, but that they used the ruined Temple Mount as a dumping grounds./16/ Muslim literary evidence claims that when Umar entered seventh-century Jerusalem, he crawled on hands and knees through manure and trash in order to ascend the spoiled Temple Mount. One late Muslim chronicle from 1351, the Muthîr al-Ghîram, recites centuries-old descriptions of Umar's encounter with the future site of the Dome of the Rock:

Now at that time there was over the Rock in the Holy City a great dungheap which completely masked the prayer niche of David and which the Christians had put there in order to offend the Jews; and further, even the Christian women were wont to throw their menstrual cloths and clouts in the place so that there was a pile of them there./17/

Bloody Churches

The late-antique church, still temporally connected with Temple practices, witnessed much concern over the encounter between Christian menstruants and spatial sacrality. Concerning baptism, the Apostolic Tradition written in Rome by Hippolytus in the first part of the third century, states that "if any woman be menstruous she shall be put aside and be baptized another day,"/19/ while Dionysius of Alexandria, a third-century student of Origen, addresses the parameters of ecclesiastical space for menstruants. He writes:

Concerning women in their menstrual separation, whether it is right for them in such a condition to enter the house of God, I think it unnecessary even to inquire. For I think that they, being faithful and pious, would not dare in such a condition either to approach the holy table or to touch the body and blood of Christ./20/

This type of conflicting evidence seems to characterize the early medieval period as well. While Canons 11 and 45 of Laodicea (fourth-century Anatolia) state that "women should not have access to the altar,"/24/ the Testamentum Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, a fifth-century document from Syria, claims that widows did take their place with the clergy within the veiled chancel area during the Eucharistic sacrifice to receive Holy Communion there./25/ The same document prescribes, however, that a widow who was menstruating could neither receive Holy Communion nor approach the altar./26/ Similarly, another Syrian text from 538, Questions Asked by the Priest Sargis, permits women to enter the sanctuary, to touch the holy vessels, and to pour wine into the chalice at the altar. Central in this discourse, establishing the limits of deaconesses, appears the following:

Question: Is she permitted, at the time of her menstruation, to give communion or service the chalice, if it is necessary?
Response: She is not permitted, at the time of her menstruation, to enter the sanctuary nor to touch the sacred Eucharist./27/

In the West, three bishops of North Gaul write letters of admonishment in 511 to the priests of Breton who traveled with women--called conhospitae--and celebrated mass in the country side. The priests set up make-shift altars called tabulae where the women assisted them in the Holy Sacrifice by taking into their hands the chalice and by distributing the Blood of Christ to the people./28/ Here ecclesiastical space is absent. Instead, it is the proximity of the Eucharist to women--menstruating or not--that incites the condemnation of the bishops.

In a revolutionary move at the end of the sixth century, Gregory the Great breaks with ancient and eastern forerunners in his treatment of menstruants and sacred places. Augustine of Canterbury asks whether a woman may properly enter church while menstruating. And may she receive communion at these times? Gregory answers emphatically:

A woman must not be prohibited from entering a church during her usual periods, for this natural overflowing cannot be reckoned a crime... If the woman who was suffering from the issue of blood humbly came behind the Lord's back and touched the hem of his garment... (and) was justified in her boldness, why is it that what was permitted to one was not permitted to all women...? A woman ought not be forbidden to receive the mystery of the Holy Communion at these times./29/

I return now to my initial questions concerning the mimetic rapport between churches and the Jerusalem Temple, blood's role in designing women's liturgical spaces, and the relationship of menses to the Eucharist. In the majority of early medieval sources discussed here, purity laws common to ancient Jewish temple systems define the proximity of Christian menstruants to Christ's sacrificial blood as well. If we take the evidence brought forth here and project it onto the later Middle Ages, some tentative observations might be made. Throughout the 12th to 14th-centuries in the East, Byzantine texts speak out against the presence of menstruating women in spaces that participate with liturgical space./32/ Matthew Blastares from Thessalonika explicitly delineates the spatial limits of fourteenth-century women "that are troubled by the monthly flow" as being excluded "from the altar, into which long ago it was permitted for them to enter."/33/ Blastares substantiates his opinion--like those before him--by calling predictably on the relevant New Testament story, exclaiming the "woman with a flow of blood did not even dare to touch the Lord short of the border of His outer-garments."/34/ Blastares even goes so far as to claim that a menstruant coming into contact with the Eucharist is "dangerous,"/35/ and that women "purify themselves" with their monthly flow and after birth./36/ Such figurations of menses--as a dangerous and purifying substance--strongly resonate with nomenclature in Leviticus and cast reproductive blood in terms comparable to sacrificial blood.

Theodore Balsamon, from 12th-century Byzantium, suggests that some sort of architectural divider be used to separate menstruating women from the rest of the church. He states, "It is fitting then, that these vestibules in which such unclean women are to stand should not directly occupy space in churches...such places should be set apart so that the unclean women may stand in them without condemnation."/37/ Here, reproductive blood actually carves out new spaces in ecclesiastical architecture designed specifically for bloody women. Moreover, Balsamon's directive to marginalize women from the body of the church proper, reveals the vulnerability of not only the altar area to the presence of menstruants, but of the larger environs of the church itself. In fact, the New Testament's symbolization of the church as Christ's body /38/ lays the textual foundation for extending spatial prohibitions connected to sacrificial sites to their larger ecclesiastical contexts as well. To encounter the body of the church itself, then, is already to encounter the very body of Christ.

An analysis of the texts presented here--concerning church architecture, women, and the Eucharist--reveals a specific approach at work in the way in which Christianity deals with its Jewish forerunners. Existing in the shadow of the Temple's legacy, the church does not simply copy and thereby appropriate the ancient Temple's claim to sacred space. Instead, early Christianity employs strategic devices to impart meaning to its own liturgical spaces. One such device is the agency of collapsing. As we have seen, in a series of innovative moves, the church collapses or combines the Temple's separate architectural areas of the altar and the Holy of Holies into the church's single locus of the altar. The impetus for this unification is the continuation and radical reinterpretation of sacrificial ritual. In the church sanctuary, sacrifice is no longer made to God, but sacrifice is God. For the Christian tradition, God and the ultimate sacrifice become one and same entity on the altar.

In addition, the church collapses the concepts of the church and the body of Christ, based on New Testament textual sources. The gesture to extend the presence of Christ's body beyond the site of the altar and Eucharist to the entire church--rendering ecclesiastical space as a metaphor for Christ's body--alters Christian sacred space forever, as well as women's participation in it.

SLIDES

And finally, in the West, medieval authors also seem to perceive a relationship of resemblance between the potent powers of bleeding women and the awesome powers of bleeding sacrifice. By the thirteenth century, works such as the French Bible Moralisée (Vienna Codex 2554 - Figure 10) seem to attest to one final act of collapsing. Historians, such as Carolyn Walker Bynum, have shown that both male and female writers in the Middle Ages seem to link bleeding women with bleeding sacrifice, especially in their descriptions of Christ's painful death on the cross as a mother in labor giving birth. Within the two rondels shown here, this illuminated manuscript shows a typological creation of Eve and Ecclesia from the sides of Adam and Christ./39/ Christ, however, actually "gives birth" to a chalice-bearing church from his vaginal-side wound. Here, the generative and purifying affinities that exist between reproductive blood and the Eucharist take explicit visual form. Ultimately, sacrificial blood and reproductive blood become one.

FIGURES

Figure 1 - Model of the Jewish Temple built by Herod in Jerusalem, 1st century.

Figure 2 - Plan of Courtyards in Jerusalem Temple, 1st century.

Figure 3 - Spatial divisions of Court of the Women, Israelites, and Priests (with altar) in the Jerusalem Temple, 1st century.

Figure 4 - Woman with an issue of blood. Fresco from the Catacomb of SS. Pietro and Marcellino in Rome, late third century.

Figure 5 - Woman with chalice leading the Agape Feast. Fresco from the Catacomb of Pietro and Marcellino in Rome, late third century.

Figure 6 - Emperor Justinian and his Attendants, Mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna, c. 547.

Figure 7 - Empress Theodora and her Retinue, Mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna, c. 547.

Figure 8 - Fourth-century inscription from "virgins' chancel screen," North Africa.

Figure 9 - "The Virgin as a Priest in a Church with Donor Jean du Bos," by Puy d'Amiens, oak panel, 1438.

Figure 10 - The Birth of Eve from Adam and the Birth of the Church from the "reproductive blood" of Christ, French Moralized Bible, (Vienna Codex 2554), thirteenth century.

NOTES

/1/ Probably the most thorough study in one volume on the liturgical and spatial system at work in the Jerusalem Temple can be found in Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1985). Also see E.P. Sanders, Judaism and Belief, 63 BCE -66 CE (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992).

/2/ See my article, "Sacred Space Under Erasure in Ancient Synagogues and Early Churches," The Art Bulletin, vol. 74, no. 3, 1992, 375-394.

/3/ This definition of sacred space based on hierophany was developed by Mircea Eliade and has been revised and elaborated on a number of times. See Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1959 reprint), 25ff.

/4/ Emphasis is mine. Josephus, Against Apion 2.8 nos. 102-105, Loeb 1, no. 186 (London-Cambridge, 1966), 332-335; Jewish Wars 5.5.2 nos. 193-194, Loeb (London, 1928), 256-259. Kelim 1:6-9 in the Mishnah, written over a century later, does not make the exact same distinctions. See The Mishnah, trans. Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 605.

/5/ Shaye Cohen's superb review of ancient Jewish sources on this matter has helped open the scholarly door to this subject. See his "Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity," in Women's History and Ancient History, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 273-299.

/6/ The limitations of space here allow only a brief treatment of an otherwise complex issue. For a more thorough study on the meaning of blood in ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish traditions and the anthropological scholarship on the subject, please see my study (the historical prelude to this essay, one might say), "Blood in Flux, Sanctity at Issue," RES, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 31, Spring 1997, 53-70.

/7/ Cohen, "Menstruants," 287.

/8/ For the change that took place in the spatial definition of synagogues in the early medieval period, see my article, "Vicarious Sacrality: Temple Space in Ancient Synagogues," in Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery, 2, eds. Dan Urman and Paul V. M. Flesher (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 319-345.

/9/ For New Testament translations I am using the sixth edition of Greek-English New Testament (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1992), 183-184.

/10/ For the religious and social contexts of women at this time, see Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests, (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993), 9ff, 154.

/11/ Otto G. Von Simson, Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 reprint of 1948 edition), 30.

/12/ Protevangelium of James, 7.3-8.3 in New Testament Apocrypha I, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 429.

/13/ For conflicting medieval views toward Mary as a menstruant, see Albert Demyttenaere, "The Cleric, Women, and the Stain," in Frauen in Spätantike und Frühmittelater (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1990), 144-65 and Charles T. Wood, "The Doctor's Dilemma: Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought," Speculum 56,4 (1981), 710-27.

/14/ Protevangelium 13.2, Schneemelcher, Apocrypha, 431.

/15/ For just one study of this, see Robert Ousterhout, "The Temple, the Sepulchre, and the Martytion of the Savior," Gesta 29/1, 1990, 44-53.

/16/ For a good, overall survey of the history of the Temple Mount during the early medieval period, see F. E. Peters' chapter, "The Holy of Holies," in Jerusalem and Mecca: The Typology of the Holy City in the Near East (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 80-122.

/17/ Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems, A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500, 1890 (reprinted in Beirut: Khayats, 1965), 139. Here I use the more even translation by F.E. Peters in Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 187.

/18/ For some basic sources on non-Christian medieval women, see the chapter, "Outsiders: Jewish, Muslim, and Heretic Women," in Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A Handbook, ed. Emilie Amt (New York: Routledge, 1993), 279-317.

/19/ Apostolic Tradition, 20,6. Gregory Dix, The Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, (London: SPCK, 1937, reprinted in 1968), 32; Cohen, "Menstruants," 288.

/20/ PG 10:1281-2; see Cohen, "Menstruants," 288.

/21/ Ibid.

/22/ Ibid.

/23/ Didascalia Apostolorum, 26, 62, 5. I have slightly revised the English translation here by R. Hugh Connolly, Didascalia Apostolorum, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 254.

/24/ Roger Gryson, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1976), 53.

/25/ Testamentum Domini, 1, 23, 1; Gryson, Ministry, 64-67; Jean LaPorte, The Role of Women in Early Christianity (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), 126-29.

/26/ Testamentum Domini, 1, 23, 13; Gryson, Ministry, 67.

/27/ A bishop near Edessa, John bar Qursos, responds to these queries concerning ordained deaconesses in female convents. See Aimée Georges Martimore, Les Diaconesses (Rome: C.L.V.--Edizioni Liturgiche, 1982), 139-140.

28/ Gryson gives the account, Ministry, 106. Also, Pope Gelasius in the 5th century writes a letter to a southern Italian bishop who neglected to denounce women charged with altar service who had "performed all the other things which had been assigned to the ministry of men only." See Gelasius of Rome Epistola, 14, 13, 21, and 26; Gryson, Ministry, 105.

/29/ Gregory continues in 597, "If they do not venture to approach the sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord when in their periods, they are to be praised for their right thinking: but when as the result of the habits of a religious life, they are carried away by the love of the same mystery, they are not to be prevented," Gregory the Great, Epistola 64, PL, 77: 1183-1199. See translation in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 1.27, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 88. Also see Wood, "The Doctor's Dilemma," 713.

/30/ For a history of the English church and women's participation, see Joan Morris, The Lady Was a Bishop (New York, MacMillan, 1973), 109-112. Also see Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code 550-1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 36.

/31/ Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicali, 2, PL, 187-188, 106. See Demyttenaere, "The Cleric," 160.

/32/ The canonist Zonaras, for example, forbids church entry to women with a flow of menstrual blood in Canon 44, PG 137: 1400. Henry Maguire led me to this reference when he kindly gave me his paper, "Abaton and Economia," delivered at a conference on Byzantine Cyprus at Princeton University in 1993. Maguire's paper also studies a related topic important to this paper but beyond its bounds: the placement of images of Mary in church sanctuaries near the altar.

/33/ Alphabetical Collection, A. 16: Dionysios 2, quoted in Patrick Viscuso's article, "Purity and Sexual Defilement in Late Byzantine Theology," OCP 57 (1991), 401.

/34/ Ibid.

/35/ Ibid.

/36/ Alphabetical Collection, 28. Laws, from Viscuso, "Purity," 402.

/37/ I refer to Robert Taft's set of translations; PG 138: 465-468.

/38/ See for example, Ephesians 5:23-29 and 4:4, 11-16, Romans 12:4-5, and I Corinthians 12:11-27.

/39/ Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, 40 (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1973), 7, 25. My attention was first drawn to this type of imagery (although in a different version from the Bodleian Library) in Bynum's Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone, 1992), 99.