Chapter 15: The Counter-Tradition

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Women.

The smell of ink and parchment filled the small chamber as Sarah bas Tovim carefully copied the Hebrew letters onto the page. It was 1705 in Sataniv, a market town in what is now Ukraine, and she was completing a collection of tkhines (Yiddish devotional prayers) for women who, like herself, had been taught to read Yiddish but not Hebrew. Unlike the formal Hebrew liturgy recited by men in the synagogue, these prayers spoke directly to women's experiences: the fear during childbirth, the anxiety of preparing for Sabbath, the grief of losing children. Sarah wrote in the introduction that these prayers came "from the depths of the heart" and were intended for "the dear, pious women who do not understand Hebrew."¹

What Sarah could not have known was that her work represented something unprecedented in Jewish literary history. While male rabbis debated legal minutiae in Hebrew and Aramaic, she was creating a parallel tradition of spiritual literature that would sustain Jewish women for centuries. Her prayers were theological in their own right, offering bold reinterpretations of biblical narratives from women's perspectives and presenting arguments about divine mercy that rarely appeared in rabbinic literature. Yet she published many of them anonymously or under male pseudonyms, understanding that women's religious authority was viewed with suspicion even when it addressed distinctly female spiritual needs.

Sarah's dilemma was shared by countless women across religious traditions who found themselves excluded from formal scriptural authorship and transmission. Rather than simply accepting silence, they created what scholar Judith Plaskow has termed a "counter-tradition": networks of spiritual authority that ran parallel to official religious institutions, often hidden in domestic spaces, oral cultures, and alternative literary forms.² This counter-tradition did not seek to overthrow established sacred texts but to inhabit them more fully, to preserve and reinterpret religious wisdom when formal channels were closed to women's voices.

Strategies of Spiritual Resistance

Where institutional erasure was practiced, creative resistance followed. Women developed sophisticated strategies to participate in religious discourse while navigating the constraints of patriarchal religious systems.

Divine Dictation and Coded Authorship

One of the most effective strategies was to claim divine rather than human authority for religious insights. Julian of Norwich, writing in fourteenth-century England, consistently referred to herself as "a simple creature unlettered" despite demonstrating sophisticated theological knowledge in her Revelations of Divine Love.³ By framing her profound insights about divine motherhood, the nature of sin, and universal salvation as direct revelations from God rather than her own intellectual work, Julian circumvented medieval prohibitions against women's theological teaching.

This strategy appeared across traditions. In medieval Islamic mysticism, women like Fatima of Nishapur claimed their spiritual insights came through divine inspiration rather than scholarly study, allowing them to teach and write despite restrictions on women's formal religious education.⁴ In Tibetan Buddhism, female tertöns (treasure-revealers) like Sera Khandro accessed hidden teachings through visionary experiences, positioning themselves as conduits rather than authors of sacred knowledge.⁵

The rhetorical modesty of these claims should not obscure their theological boldness. Julian's assertion that "all shall be well" represented a radical departure from prevailing Christian teachings about damnation, while Islamic women mystics often articulated doctrines of divine love that challenged legalistic approaches to religious practice.

Oral Networks and Memory Chains

In cultures where women were excluded from formal literacy, oral transmission became a crucial means of preserving and developing religious knowledge. The bhakti poetry of medieval South Asia exemplifies this pattern. Women like Mirabai in Rajasthan, Andal in Tamil Nadu, and Akka Mahadevi in Karnataka composed devotional verses that circulated orally for centuries before being written down.⁶

These poems represented more than personal devotion; they constituted theological arguments about the nature of divine love and the possibility of direct relationship with the divine outside institutional mediation. Mirabai's declaration "I will not live in your palace, my Lord dwells in the streets" rejected both social convention and temple-based religiosity in favor of a more immediate spiritual experience.⁷ Her verses, passed from mother to daughter through generations of women singers, created an alternative scriptural tradition that operated entirely outside formal religious institutions.

In Buddhist communities across Asia, women maintained oral traditions even when excluded from formal monastic education. Despite the absence of full bhikkhuni (nun) ordination in Theravāda countries for over a thousand years, women preserved chanting traditions, taught meditation practices, and transmitted Pali texts through domestic religious education.⁸ Their bodies became repositories of sacred knowledge, maintaining continuity of Buddhist practice across generations.

Islamic women developed parallel oral networks for Quranic preservation and hadith transmission. In regions from West Africa to Southeast Asia, female huffāz (Quran memorizers) taught young girls to memorize the entire Quran, while women's study circles maintained chains of religious learning that complemented formal male scholarly networks.⁹ Though their names rarely appeared in official scholarly genealogies (isnāds), these women ensured the continuation of Islamic education in domestic and community settings.

The fragility and dynamism of oral transmission created both opportunities and challenges for women's religious authority. On one hand, oral traditions could preserve teachings that might have been rejected in written form. On the other hand, they were vulnerable to distortion, loss, and appropriation by later male editors who transformed oral traditions into written texts.

Ritual Embodiment and Domestic Practice

For many women across traditions, sacred transmission occurred not through texts but through embodied practice. Jewish women's roles in maintaining kashrut (dietary laws), preparing for Sabbath, and preserving family religious traditions represented forms of religious authority that were simultaneously essential and invisible to official religious discourse.¹⁰ Their knowledge encompassed complex legal and theological principles, but because it was expressed through domestic practice rather than scholarly commentary, it was rarely recognized as religious scholarship.

Hindu women's performance of domestic pujas (worship rituals), their preservation of festival traditions, and their transmission of religious stories to children represented parallel forms of scriptural authority. In many communities, women were the primary bearers of mythological knowledge, maintaining oral traditions that preserved alternative versions of epic narratives often at variance with written texts.¹¹

Buddhist women throughout Asia developed rich traditions of merit-making activities, temple maintenance, and religious instruction that sustained community religious life. In Thailand and Sri Lanka, upāsikās (laywomen) often possessed deeper knowledge of Buddhist teachings than formally ordained monks, teaching meditation to other women and preserving doctrinal traditions through practical application.¹²

Visionary Authority and Mystical Legitimation

When formal scholarly credentials were unavailable, women across traditions claimed mystical experience as a source of religious authority. This strategy was particularly pronounced in medieval Christianity, where women like Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Catherine of Siena used visionary experiences to justify their participation in theological discourse.¹³

Hildegard's claim to receive divine visions allowed her to write theological treatises, compose liturgical music, and correspond with popes and emperors despite being a woman in a male-dominated church. Her theological innovations—including her understanding of the cosmos as a living entity and her development of a theology of viriditas (greenness or life-force)—were accepted because they were presented as divine revelations rather than human scholarship.¹⁴

Similar patterns emerged in Islamic Sufism, where women like Rābi'a al-'Adawiyya claimed direct divine experience as the foundation for their spiritual authority. Rābi'a's teachings about disinterested love of God (muhabba) represented significant theological innovations that influenced centuries of Islamic mysticism, yet they were accepted partly because she presented them as expressions of mystical experience rather than scholarly argument.¹⁵

In Tibetan Buddhism, the phenomenon of tertöns allowed some women to claim authority over hidden teachings (gter ma) discovered through meditation and dreams. Women like Sera Khandro and Jomo Menmo accessed textual traditions that had supposedly been concealed by earlier masters, giving them access to scriptural authority that would otherwise have been unavailable.¹⁶

Sacred Defiance and Theological Innovation

Perhaps the most radical aspect of the counter-tradition was its capacity to generate theological innovations that challenged prevailing religious orthodoxies. Women's exclusion from formal religious institutions paradoxically freed them to develop alternative theological perspectives.

The Jewish scholar Bruriah, active in second-century Palestine, regularly participated in rabbinic debates and offered interpretations of Jewish law that were preserved in Talmudic literature despite restrictions on women's Torah study.¹⁷ Her approach to biblical interpretation often emphasized divine mercy and human dignity in ways that differed from her male contemporaries, suggesting that women's theological perspectives might have developed along different lines than prevailing rabbinical traditions.

In medieval Christianity, women mystics consistently developed theological emphases that diverged from scholastic tradition. Their focus on divine motherhood, embodied spirituality, and universal salvation represented alternative theological trajectories that might have shaped Christian doctrine differently had women enjoyed equal access to formal theological education.¹⁸

The Tamil poet Andal's self-identification as the bride of Vishnu in eighth-century South India represented both spiritual audacity and theological innovation. By claiming direct divine relationship outside conventional marriage arrangements, she articulated a model of female spiritual agency that influenced centuries of bhakti poetry and theology.¹⁹

Beyond Resistance: Toward Recognition

Understanding the counter-tradition requires recognizing both its limitations and its achievements. While women developed sophisticated strategies for participating in religious discourse, these strategies also reflected and sometimes reinforced their exclusion from formal religious authority. The need to claim divine rather than human authority, while strategically effective, also perpetuated assumptions about women's intellectual limitations.

Moreover, the counter-tradition was not uniformly accessible to all women. Elite women with access to literacy and leisure had greater opportunities to develop alternative religious practices than poor or enslaved women. The preservation of women's oral traditions often depended on sympathetic male scribes or later feminist scholars, creating additional layers of mediation and potential distortion.

Recent archaeological and manuscript discoveries have begun to illuminate the scope of these alternative traditions. The Dunhuang manuscripts revealed extensive evidence of Buddhist women's literary production in medieval China, while the Cairo Genizah preserved hundreds of documents related to medieval Jewish women's religious lives.²⁰ These discoveries suggest that the counter-tradition was far more extensive and sophisticated than previously recognized.

Contemporary religious communities increasingly acknowledge the importance of recovering these alternative traditions. Feminist biblical scholars have demonstrated how women's perspectives might have shaped scriptural interpretation differently, while historians of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism have uncovered extensive evidence of women's religious scholarship and spiritual authority.²¹

The counter-tradition reveals that women's exclusion from formal religious institutions did not eliminate their influence on religious development but channeled it through alternative networks and practices. In kitchens and convents, through songs and stories, via visions and domestic rituals, women preserved and transformed religious traditions across cultures and centuries. Their resistance was often quiet but always persistent, and their contributions, while frequently invisible to official religious history, were essential to the survival and evolution of religious communities.

Understanding this history need not threaten traditional religious authority but can deepen appreciation for the diverse ways religious wisdom has been preserved and transmitted. The counter-tradition demonstrates that sacred knowledge has always been more widely distributed than formal institutions acknowledged, and that recovering these alternative voices can enrich rather than diminish contemporary religious understanding.

Notes

On Sarah bas Tovim and early modern Jewish women's religious literature, see Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 89-123. The specific quotation is from Weissler's translation of Sarah's introduction to her tkhine collection.
Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 53-79.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), 41. On Julian's sophisticated theology despite claims of illiteracy, see Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 14-28.
On women in Islamic mysticism, see Rkia Elaroui Cornell, Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-niswa al-muta'abbidat as-sufiyyat (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1999), 67-89.
On female tertöns in Tibetan Buddhism, see Judith Simmer-Brown, Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), 234-267.
On medieval South Asian women's devotional poetry, see John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85-127.
Translation from A.K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (London: Penguin Classics, 1973), 134.
On women's religious roles in Theravāda Buddhism, see Tessa Bartholomeusz, Women Under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89-134.
On Islamic women's educational networks, see Asma Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 102-156.
On Jewish women's domestic religious authority, see Susan Starr Sered, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 78-103.
On Hindu women's preservation of religious traditions, see Vasudha Narayanan, "Brimming with Bhakti, Embodiments of Shakti: Devotees, Deities, Performers, Reformers, and Other Women of Power in the Hindu Tradition," in Feminism and World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma and Katherine Young (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 25-77.
On Buddhist laywomen's religious authority, see Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed., Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 134-167.
On medieval Christian women mystics, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 13-30.
On Hildegard's theology and authority, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 45-78.
On Rābi'a al-'Adawiyya, see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 42-46.
Simmer-Brown, Dakini's Warm Breath, 234-267.
On Bruriah, see Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman's Voice (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 56-85.
On women mystics' theological innovations, see Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 198-234.
On Andal's theological significance, see Vasudha Narayanan, The Vernacular Veda: Revelation, Recitation, and Ritual (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 87-112.
On manuscript discoveries and women's religious literature, see Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 134-156; and S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 312-345.
For contemporary recovery efforts, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983); Amina Wadud, Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).

Further Reading

Primary Sources and Translations

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing
Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women
John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India

Secondary Studies

Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
Asma Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam
Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction

Comparative and Methodological Studies

Rkia Elaroui Cornell, Early Sufi Women
Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed., Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations
Arvind Sharma and Katherine Young, eds., Feminism and World Religions