This text challenges the assumption in contemporary discourse that Christianity is exclusively misogynist by documenting the presence of a long, strong, and positive tradition based on women's spiritual equality. In chronological order, references and images of women in church writings and lay culture are explored, as well as the actual lives of women and their vitae. Ranft shows how the accumulated evidence provides data that this positive tradition co-existed with the misogynist tradition. For a millennium and a half, Ranft reveals, Christianity possessed the lone voice in society that posited women's equality in any aspect. She argues that without knowledge of this tradition, our understanding of the history of Western women is significantly incomplete.