Jewish female religiosity as a matrix of Christian models: rethinking women’s religious polymorphism in longue durée perspective (Antiquity–Modernity)

This paper proposes to explore the genealogical links between Jewish and Christian forms of female religiosity, with particular attention to the ways in which Jewish women’s religious agency contributed to shaping Christian paradigms of women’s religious life. Contrary to the widespread image of passivity, Jewish women in antiquity were engaged in diverse forms of ritual, exegetical, and social practices—prophetesses, sages, patrons, and participants in synagogue life—that reveal a spectrum of freedom and influence (Baskin 1991; Ilan 1995). These forms of agency offered implicit models that early Christianity partially re-appropriated in constructing its own figures: virgins, widows, martyrs, and eventually religious women living at the margins of monastic institutions.Building on Gabriella Zarri’s concept of the “third status” (1990) and on global Catholic historiography such as Simon Ditchfield’s theorisation of “local Catholicisms” (2019), the aim is to situate these genealogical dynamics within a longue durée perspective, extending to the modern period (1400–1900). In fact, many debates surrounding beatas, tertiaries, penitents, or devout laywomen in early modern Europe and beyond reproduce, in different contexts, the same ambivalence already present in Jewish and early Christian models: the tension between freedom and ecclesiastical control, between recognition and marginalisation (Van Deusen 2004; Weber 1990).The paper will address three dimensions: (1) the relationship to the Church, by analysing how Christian authorities reinterpreted or constrained Jewish-inspired female models; (2) the relationship to society, through women’s roles as cultural mediators, patrons, and agents of local religiosity; and (3) the relationship to the world, by considering the transmission of these paradigms in missionary and colonial contexts, where women’s ambiguous agency re-emerged.By highlighting the Jewish roots of Christian female figures and their long-lasting reconfigurations, this contribution seeks to rethink women’s religious polymorphism as a trans-confessional and polycentric phenomenon, and to question the boundaries of Catholicity from a comparative and diachronic perspective. This paper will follow a structured itinerary, moving from biblical and Jewish legacies to Christian reinterpretations, in order to show how these female paradigms were reactivated in European and missionary contexts (Americas, Asia, Africa, Oceania) between 1400 and 1900. This perspective will be illustrated by a case study: the recogidas of seventeenth-century Lima, whose experience can be interpreted as a reactivation of biblical models of religious marginality.