Conclusion

Women have experienced succour and support as well as denial and restriction within the religious communities into which they were born or, less often, those they had chosen. In spite of official rhetoric and the emphasis on restriction of opportunity and a domestic ideology that has characterised the major religious traditions in Europe in the past three hundred years, women have shown themselves to be resourceful and enterprising in using - occasionally subverting - the structures in order to further their ambitions for faith-inspired service or personal development.

Remarkable similarities exist between the three major monotheisms. But whether their allegiance is to an Abrahamic religion or to a tradition more recently arrived in Europe, faced with what purported to be God-given instructions for their behaviour, women who wished to remain within their religious tradition while adapting to social norms have had to adopt a stance that permitted them to demonstrate their orthodoxy while challenging ways in which that orthodoxy had traditionally been defined. Using the scriptures as their starting point and acknowledging their importance at the same time as revisiting the hermeneutic traditions associated with them has sometimes enabled women to question views and practices to which long usage has given an authority they may not originally have possessed. It is a tightrope from which many have fallen, and while those who have succeeded in their challenges may not have been representative of their contemporaries, they have helped in the process of defining new orthodoxies, which are gradually affecting women in the European manifestations of all three monotheistic religions. The societal and individual consequences of declining institutional influence, particularly of European Christian churches, of ‘believing without belonging’, and the growth of religious traditions associated with immigrant communities, together with the emergence of greater freedom to experiment, make it certain that the religious landscape of the Continent for the next three hundred years will have little in common with that from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.