In her new book, feminist theologian Dr Shé M Hawke examines the leadership roles of women of founding significance in the evolution of the Church and why they have often been forgotten or minimised.
From 1974-79, Sister Agnes Farrugia (formerly Sister Jean Marie) was Deputy Principal at Catholic Girls’ High School (now St Clare’s College) at Griffith in the ACT where she taught a young and spirited Shé Hawke. Fast forward to 2026, a still spirited Shé Hawke has written a book called Seeking Matrology: Recovering the Female Co-founders of Christianity.
In line with the school motto, Seek Wisdom, life’s journey travelled through peace, environmental and social justice activism, teaching, motherhood, academia, and later pastoral care. Seeking wisdom remained at the forefront, but most of it seemed to come from men.
Libraries were full of the works of the Fathers of the Church, or Patrology. Yet Mothers of the Church didn’t exist as their own category. Finding those very early Mothers of the Church was a challenging and scattered undertaking. Where were they, who were they, and why have they been forgotten or minimised? It turns out others had also asked these questions.
A matrological genealogy
Students at the General Theological College New York in the US asked their class tutor about the history of interpretation in the Church, particularly gender interpretations. The question then found itself with the librarian, an episcopal priest called Andrew Kadel.
He saw that women were indeed missing in Church literature and that there was no reference book available that “enumerated women authors at all”. He subsequently compiled a bibliography of women so that students could be directed properly to sources that preserved the wisdom of the Church Mothers and their sayings.
He was the first to proffer the term Matrology in his book Matrology: A Bibliography of Writings by Christian Women from the First to the Fifteenth Centuries (Continuum 1995). I came across his work after writing an embryonic paper called ‘Matrology’ as a Graduate Student in Theology.
Aside from Kadel’s Matrology, there was a Norwegian scholar of Women’s Studies of Religion, Kari E Børresen, who penned a book called From Patristics to Matristics: Selected Articles on Gender Models (Herder 2002). She had earlier mentioned ‘Ancient and Medieval Mothers’ in an article from 1993.
In 2000 years of Christianity, we now had two authors that referred to Matrology as the study of the sayings of the Mothers of the Church, who were part of a distinct era of antiquity – Matristic Era (period of the Mothers) equivalent to the Patristic Era (period of the Fathers). No previous naming of Matrology or a Matristic Era appears to exist in the West.
When we spoke in 2025, Kadel was unsure why. He hoped that his Matrological bibliography might spur on further research, perhaps of a more interdisciplinary nature that extended patrological writings (i.e. Quasten 1950) through a more inclusive prism that recognised early Church women.
It did.
In 2020, I wrote ‘Seeking Matrology: A Reconsideration of the Under-/Misrepresentation of Early Church Women’ Studies in Spirituality Vol. 30, 229-251. I gathered as many names of Mothers as I had discovered that legitimately belonged in a house of Christian Mothers.
This early survey of Mothers has grown immensely. Under the umbrella term Church Mothers, it has necessitated the use of subcategories such as Antique Mothers of the Church, Female Doctors of the Church and Desert Mothers about whom feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether had talked about in the 1980s.
In 2021, scholar Claire K Rothschild (CUP) compiled a list of women housed under her umbrella term ‘Apostolic and Post Apostolic Mothers of the Church’. A less versatile category, it does however perform critically important work. She refers to such women as:
leaders of the church … not referred to in the NT as an “apostle” but acting in a parallel fashion … in a direct line of succession (real or fabricated) from Jesus’ apostles … and contemporaneous with the purported authors of the “apostolic fathers” (i.e. first and second century CE) P. 175.
As of 2025, there are now four scholars who have enacted a poiesis of Christian history-making to include, name and house the antique Mothers of the Church under the broader umbrella of Church Mothers.
The journey to legitimisation of any Church Mothers has been beset with historical and gender bias. Key women have often been minimised, erased, hereticised or appropriated by male contemporaries.
Finding key texts that provided evidence from Fathers of the Church, such as Tertullian, Methodius, and Gregory of Nyssa was important for correct endorsements, along with more recent patristic studies from scholars such as Hubertus Drobner (2007).
Yet, the obstacles of androcentric Christian history-making have continued to obscure wider versions of history. This necessitated a turn to feminist theologians such as Anne Jensen (1996), Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y MacDonald (2006), Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Mary T Malone (2000), along with the many works of key Christian history scholars such as Peter Brown, TD Barnes and William Tabbernee.
Finding, naming and housing the Church Mothers
By examining key texts and Fathers of the Church it was possible to find irrefutable evidence about women who met sufficient patristic criteria to be named as Mothers of the Church.
Building on from the women of the Apostolic (Rothschild 2021), we meet Thecla the Christian companion of Paul the Apostle in the Iconium region in the first century. Thecla was converted upon hearing Paul preach in a street below her window.
Their spiritual story The Acts of Paul is not considered a canonical text. It is however referred to by several Fathers of the Church who succeeded the life and times of both Paul and Thecla.
Methodius for example, in his Symposium (Discourse 11. 2 NA, ANF 6:351-353) dedicates a dazzling hymn of praise to Thecla. This was followed by the praise of other Church Fathers such as Ambrose in his De Virginibus (Concerning Virgins).
Arena at Carthage where Perpetua and Felicitas perished. Amphitheatre, Carthage. Photo by William Tabbernee.
A century later we meet Perpetua and Felicitas from Carthage, compatriots of Latin Father of the Church Tertullian, who dispersed and introduced The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (Passio) among other religious. Augustine also writes up the story of these two Mothers in his Di Anima (Tert. An., in ANF 3.1.1:231). Finding archaeological and written evidence about Mothers is testimony to their significance at the time.
Tertullian’s later endorsement of the Passio, of which the diary component was written in Perpetua’s own hand, lends ever more weight to their naming as Mothers of the Church.
In the fourth century we turn our attention to Macrina the Younger, older sister and teacher of Gregory of Nyssa and co-founder of monasticism in Cappadocia. The evidence supporting Macrina the Younger as Mother of the Church is irrefutable, having been written up by her younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, one of the three Great Cappadocian Fathers.
Other Mothers lived in between and beyond these three. This is but a beginning that advances Kadel’s original bibliography and other rich surveys of women, which might house them permanently under the banner of Matrology.
On 8 May this year, the case for Matrology was presented in a seminar at The University of Sydney to an interdisciplinary audience. It was met with both relief and surprise that such work was only now being advanced towards a theological field called Matrology. Women it seems have been hidden in plain sight, which contributed to the historical fiction that only men were founders of Christianity.
As Madigan and Osiek (2005) have pointed out in their book Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History, women such as Phoebe (Romans 16:1-2) have always been considered deacons (diakonos).
Author Shé Hawke with Sister Agnes Farrugia SGS. Image supplied.
After the seminar, I had the opportunity to meet with Good Samaritan Sister Agnes Farrugia and Presentation Sister Mary Walsh to discuss the future of Matrology and what work it could do.
Agnes recalled that in the late 1970s:
“Shé Hawke was a spirited student … always open to stretching her mind. I am not surprised and am greatly impressed by Shé’s qualifications and the achievement of this groundbreaking theme of Matrology in her recent research, now shared with a wider audience.”
Building a theological house for the Mothers of the Church is crucial now and into the future, for women and all religious. To do this, we must carefully examine the early foundations of their work – and keep finding, naming and housing early Church Mothers.
References:
Kadel, Andrew, Matrology: A Bibliography of Writings by Christian Women from the First to Fifteenth Centuries (Continuum 1995).
Rothschild CK, The Apostolic Mothers. In: Bird MF, Harrower S, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge University Press; 2021:175-185.
Kari Børresen, From Patristics to Matristics: Selected Articles on Gender Models (Herder 2002).
SM Hawke, ‘Seeking Matrology: A Reconsideration of the Under-/Misrepresentation of Early Church Women’ Studies in Spirituality Vol.30, 229-251.
K Madigan and C Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Johns Hopkins 2005).
