Keen customers have noticed that The Disappearing Deaconess appears with different subtitles on different online vendors (Amazon, Alibris, etc.). Is it the same book? It is, except for the subtitle. Some vendors are slow in updating changes in their listings, but the book you will receive from them will have been updated.

Why the difference?

The book originated as my master’s thesis in Orthodox studies at the University of Winchester. The original subtitle was chosen for the thesis to interest and not offend academic reviewers. In 2018, a push was on for deaconesses, I rushed to make the thesis available as a pdf on my website, rather than wait a year or more for it to be published.

In 2021, when I decided to make the thesis available as a book, I kept the thesis’s subtitle, thinking that it might interest and not offend potential buyers. The subtitle was: “How the Hierarchical Ordering of Church Offices Doomed the Female Diaconate.”

This subtitle made sense in expressing part of my argument for why deaconesses eventually disappeared. The book argues that church offices did evolve in early years and that the hierarchical understanding of the clergy introduced by Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth century added the final straw to the case against deaconesses.

The subtitle also pointed to the smoking gun in the book disproving the theory still offered by lobbyists for deaconesses who blame their disappearance on growing concerns for ritual purity. The authorities cited in support of this theory were two Byzantine canonists, the twelfth-century Theodore Balsamon and the fourteenth-century Matthew Blastares.

Writing well after the disappearance of deaconesses, Balsamon theorizes that menstruation “dictated their separation from the divine and holy sanctuary.” Blastares, however, only mentions menstruation in saying what unnamed others have said (presumably Balsamon) before offering his own opinion in these words:

However, it does not appear plausible to me that a woman became a deacon of the Sacred and Bloodless Sacrifice, as there is no sound reason why women, who are not permitted to teach in public, should be raised to the rank of the diaconate, whose work is to purify orally those unbelievers that come forward for baptism.

These words attest to the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius, who assigns deacons the hierarchical duty of “purifying” the faithful in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. But they also attest to the apostolic basis of the exclusion of women from the clergy on the grounds that women are forbidden to teach, exercise authority over men, or even speak in church.

That explains the original subtitle.

I soon discovered, however, that my most likely buyers were sometimes put off by that subtitle, thinking that it blamed the Church for the demise of the female diaconate. So I changed it to “Why the Church Once Had Deaconesses and Then Stopped Having Them.”