On Aug 29, 2011, at 3:04 PM, Scott Lucas wrote:
> Logan's footnote to this sentence reads "Separation of the sexes in church had been customary since the early Christian centuries" (p. 92).
Peter Brown argues, "Pagan conviction that Christians met in order to indulge in sexual promiscuity died hard" (Body and Society, pp. 140-41). He goes on to quote Eusebius, who refers to a law by the Emperor Licinius in the 320s which "enjoined that men should not appear in company with women the houses of prayer."
Which sort of implies that if the custom of separation existed, it wasn't universal and may have arisen in reaction to what people outside the Church thought was going on rather than anything the Christians themselves initiated. I don't really know the answer to your question about later practices, but any reading I've done has a lot more to say about other separations in the Mass, such as between clergy and laity, or upper and lower classes.
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