Cover -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Part I Gendering Liturgy's Past: The Trouble, the Task, and the Tools -- 1 Gender History in Liturgy's Past-Why Not? -- Liturgy's Past: History, Historiography, Tradition -- The Traditional Writing of Liturgy's Past: Gender-Challenged -- Contesting Conventional Histories -- Women: Beginning to Make Liturgical History Gender-Attentive -- 2 From Women to Gender Differences in Liturgy's Past -- Gender History: Beyond Women's Ways of Worship -- Why Gender History for Liturgy's Past? -- Methodological Principles: Gender History and the Writing of Liturgy's Past -- Lifting a Veil on Liturgy's Past: What for? -- Part II Tracing Gender in Liturgy's Past -- 3 Sacred Spaces and Gendered Bodies -- Egeria: Gender and Sacred Sites -- Interpreting Gender in Sacred Space -- Fragments from the Biblical Foundations -- Entering the Earliest Christian Sanctuaries: The Household as Sacred Space -- Entering Public Sanctuaries -- Gender Separations in Liturgical Space -- Gender Separation, Set in Stone -- Why Gender Separation in Sacred Space? -- Beyond Sanctuary Binaries -- Outside the Bounds of the Nascent Public Church -- Leaving the Sanctuary -- 4 Eucharistic Fragments: Gender on and under the Table of Tradition -- Introduction -- Jesus as Both Host and Food -- The Eucharist as Mother's Milk -- Breaking Bread and Blessing It, in Women's Hands? -- Gathering the Fragments, "that nothing may be lost" (John 6:12) -- 5 Presence at Worship: Bodily Flows as Liturgical Impediments -- Liturgical Anxieties about Bodily Flows -- Liturgical Constraints Related to Menstruation -- Liturgical Anxieties over Nocturnal Emissions -- Sexual Relations as an Impediment to Prayer -- Liturgical Prohibitions Related to Birth-giving -- Conclusions -- 6 Liturgical Leadership: Gender-Troubled -- Introduction.

Liturgical Leadership and the Politics of Gender -- Circumscribing Priestly Masculinity -- A Priestly Womb and Priestly Breasts: Mary, the Mother of God -- Part III Gender, History, and Liturgical Tradition -- 7 The Lasting Presence of Liturgy's Past -- The Challenge: Writing Liturgical History without Veiling Gender -- Liturgical Tradition: What Happens When Lex Orandi and Gender History Meet? -- The Past's Presence, or Offering a History of Gender Trouble to Liturgical Life Today -- Finally, "To Be within the Veil" -- Bibliography -- Scripture Index -- General Index.

Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy's past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Berger looks at liturgy's past through the lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of "men" and "women" but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men. Drawing on historical case studies, Berger explores traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and new ways of studying the past.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.