ABSTRACT
This chapter examines efforts by the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century women and men to soften or revise many of the more patriarchal aspects of the monotheistic faiths by emphasizing women believers, female spiritual headship, traditionally 'feminine' styles of worship, female religious figures from the past, and even female messiahs. As the Church's temporal power slipped it shifted course yet again, and sought new accommodations with women's traditional apotropaic and healing interests. In the eighteenth century some Catholic women began taking up what they saw as a more 'rational' and 'modern' approach to the faith that emphasized morality, charity, education, and a more disciplined, inward, and individualistic faith. Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism had split apart in the eleventh century, but continued to share a great deal in theological terms. Despite the prominence of women in its early history, Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, clearly favours men.
