My first trade press book proposal
Sorry, Eerdmans, I never finished it for you....
Last September I had the joy of speaking at Northern Seminary. It was the first time I met
and Kris McKnight in person, not to mention Beth Felker Jones (), as well as the students in Scot’s graduate seminar.But there was one student I had known for quite a long time.
Since 2012, actually. Catherine’s husband (well, fiancé at the time), Brendan, had been accepted to the second cohort of students in our then brand-new PhD program in the History department at Baylor. Because I hosted many of the PhD social events at my house, including the Christmas party, I got to know family members of our students, too. I will never forget that Catherine is allergic to peppermint (this is an important allergy to know for Christmas parties!), and that she worked as a professional editor while her husband completed his PhD.
I was glad to find that she was in graduate school at Northern! We didn’t get to have much of a conversation during my time there (it was too short) but we did manage a few words while waiting to refill water bottles during the afternoon seminar.
“Are you sure,” she asked me, “about the timing of when you started writing The Making of Biblical Womanhood?”
Her question caught my attention. I can’t remember our conversation word for word, but this is the gist. Catherine remembered that I had been working on a trade press proposal while her husband was still in graduate school (he finished in 2017). Yet, when I speak about the origins of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, I state that I hadn’t really thought about writing a book like it until long after my husband’s firing in 2016.
We didn’t get to finish that conversation—we were interrupted and headed back to seminar. But I didn’t forget it. When I got home, I pulled up my pre-2016 files and solved the mystery.
Both Catherine and I were correct. It did not occur to me to write a book about biblical womanhood that centered my story until well after 2016. Indeed, I did not write the proposal for what became The Making of Biblical Womanhood until after Katelyn Beaty (
), who was at the time a new acquisitions editor at Brazos, had reached out to me in December 2018.But I had thought about writing a trade press book before The Making of Biblical Womanhood—a book that I had almost forgotten about until Catherine reminded me!
Sometime in 2015 Michael Thompson, an acquisitions editor at Eerdmans, reached out to me about writing a book on the history of of women in the church. He even met me in Waco to talk about it. In Spring of 2016 he reached out to me again, asking how the proposal was coming along. I responded that it was in progress and I would get it to him soon. It was this book that Catherine remembered me talking about at a departmental party.
But I never finished the proposal.
Only a few months later my husband was fired. My life exploded.
And I forgot.
I forgot about that book proposal for well over a year. It wasn’t until sometime in 2017 that I picked it up again, according to the dates on my computer files, and tried to start writing a preliminary chapter. But I never made it past 4000 words—inclusive of both the proposal draft and the first stab at a chapter. I floated it to my writing group, and the consensus was it needed a lot of work. I dropped it.
I don’t think I thought about the book proposal again until that 2023 conversation with Catherine at a water fountain in Chicago.
I have two takeaways from this experience.
In the age of memoirs, y’all, make sure you have the evidence to back up your recollections. I have a file that I sent out to several people that contains the important evidence of the personal narrative for The Making of Biblical Womanhood. I also made sure to run all of my recollections past my husband and other eye-witnesses—just to make sure I got it right. I was thankful I had gotten everything right after experiencing the grueling fact-checking of The New Yorker! The most wonderful and challenging part about telling stories from your past is that you are not the only one who remembers……
I think I owe Michael Thompson at Eerdmans an apology for never finishing that book proposal.
Just for fun, I have pasted the draft proposal below.
Maybe one day I will get around to writing it.
Also, thanks for being patient while I finish the manuscript for Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. It is coming together and I am so excited. In the meanwhile, though, I have some posts lined up for February that will take us into global Christianity, tell you about my new best friend (Leanne Friesen, the Executive Director for Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec who helped me track down one of the most important stories I tell in Becoming the Pastor’s Wife), and give you a sneak peek from the archives.
Because of Her Sex:
A History of Women and the Church in PreModern England
preliminary book proposal for Michael Thompson, Acquisitions Editor for Eerdmans
Beth Allison Barr, PhD
This is a story of how the changing shape of the church in England from medieval to early modern affected ordinary women. It starts in the thirteenth century when the threads of women’s spiritual and sexual identities were connected but not yet entangled. In the words of one medieval sermon, faith elevated women beyond their sex because, “women in God be men.” This story ends in the seventeenth century when the tapestry of gender in Europe had become more tightly woven; the threads of women’s lives more interlocked. Women, rather than being designated first by their faith, found that they were —even in the church—always defined first by their sex.
Just as the world experienced five centuries of change (economically, culturally, politically), change marked women’s religious experiences. Evidence from didactic religious literature and women’s own accounts show how the gender inclusive call of Fourth Lateran Council—which spoke loudly through the gendered language and gender neutral illustrations of medieval sermons—began to echo hollowly in a world that recognized the authority of ordinary men as higher than that of priest; how outspoken and vigorously active exemplars of female saints and biblical characters faded into obedient wives praised for their pious introspection; how the domestic role of wife transformed from a spiritual liability into women’s highest spiritual calling. Mary Magdalene stunningly encapsulates the religious metamorphosis of women, as she shifted from a preaching apostle and perfect penitent beloved by Jesus to a sexual creature defined by her femaleness and the words of the resurrected Christ, “noli me tangere.” Instead of Mary Magdalene showing male and female parishioners how they too could touch Jesus, she served as a gendered warning for how sex always limits the religious vocation for women.
A desire to touch Christ, like Mary Magdalene expressed, has remained a female characteristic within religious literature. A powerful medieval sermon story tells of a woman who achieved this desire: Jesus pleaded for her to touch him, and so she did, reaching through his wound, touching his heart, and receiving both absolution and restoration. The “bliss of heaven” now belonged to her. Of course, theoretically, women’s access to Christ has always been the same as that of men. The words of Paul assure that Christianity makes no sexual distinctions. Practically, however, the church filters women’s faith lessons. Sometimes women’s access to Jesus has been framed more in gender neutral ways, and sometimes it has been framed more in terms of their sex. Although the ways women acted out their faith in late medieval and early modern England often looked similar, the shift from designating women first by their faith to designating women first by their sex had significant consequences for ordinary women in the church—some of which still reverberate today.
I. Introduction: Brief historical outline
II. Women in the Early English Church—Converting Queens and Saintly Girls
III. Fourth Lateran Council and Women
IV. Women in the Late Medieval English Church—Margery Kempe and her peers
V. The Reformation in England: A Woman’s Perspective
VI. Anglicans, Sectarians, and the Female Sex
VII. Epilogue: Women in the Modern Church
What a fascinating history of how your first trade book came to be written... how you had many directions your book could go before events in your life pushed your own story forward as a thread to be woven in with the history of men's subordination of women. I'm now putting together the book proposal for my memoir.