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Visual Reminders of Feminine Wisdom

This Rock Volume 19, Number 3   March 2008     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   Are the Gospels Myth? By Carl E. Olson   Further Reading   Baptism Saves You By Fr. Dwight Longenecker   Is the Education of Women a Modern Idea? By Catherine Brown Tkacz   Early Christian Education   Co-Ed Religion: the Double Monastery   Visual Reminders of Feminine Wisdom   Further Reading   The Sin of Greed: When We Worship the Golden God By Christopher Kaczor   Greed Leads to Other Sins   Lottery Winners Come Down to Earth   The Angelic Doctor on the Virtue of Liberality   Further Reading   Damascus Road The Fall, Revisited By Deacon Bill Turrentine   By the Book The Divinity of the Holy Spirit By Tim Staples   Eyes to See Everyone's a Critic By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told Convent Horror Stories By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

By the late third century, artists commonly depicted women with books. We see such women in frescoes, on sarcophagi, and on glass medallions. Susanna and other holy women were often depicted holding a scroll or book, to represent their religious learning and wisdom.

Later Christian art continued to show women such as St. Catherine of Siena with books or holding scrolls on which their own words were written. Church decoration depicted these women for everyone to see, and illustrated manuscripts portrayed them to the merchant and noble classes. These were familiar visual reminders that women could be learned and wise. A consequence of the Protestant Reformation, with its wide-sweeping destruction of religious art, was to reduce radically the visibility of educated women.