Used with permission from 
https://hanandgrace.blogspot.com/2026/06/remembering-emile-grace-briggs.html 

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Remembering Emilie Grace Briggs

By Lee, Cho Hee

Well it is official. Professor Han said there was nothing more I could do to improve it. So I 
have officially submitted my thesis for review. Yes, it is complete. Now I wait for the 
committee. There will still be much to do between now and final acceptance by Korea 
University, but this part, the long inward part, is finished.

Mr. Coo and I celebrated this morning over tea. My pigeon friend helped me through many long 
hours.

And today I realize just how fortunate I am to be here, at KU, in this moment.

This afternoon, Seung-Min and I were going through some of Professor Morgans books. We were 
down in one of the basement storage areas of the faculty office building. University basements 
all seem the same: tiled floors, humming fluorescent lights, white walls, storage doors 
painted the same dark gray. The air holds the same stillness no matter what the weather is 
doing aboveground. You never know whether it is morning, noon, or night. The light never 
changes.

There are a few offices down there. Muffled voices echoed through the corridor. One room, 
though, glowed with colorful paintings and warm light, bringing life into the monochrome.

Professors storage space is neat, well organized, and larger than my apartment. Which, 
admittedly, is not a high bar.

Seung-Min had a list of books to retrieve. Professor is sending them back to Wales for a 
friend. Everything was easy to find. But two curious minds alone among curious materials 
linger longer than planned. At one point Seung-Min slipped out with her stack, leaving me 
alone among the shelves.

I pulled down a book and began paging through it, lectures delivered by Charles Augustus 
Briggs during the winter of 1912 to 1913 to a select group of graduate students at Union 
Theological Seminary.

I was soon absorbed, reading about Charlemagne, the Carolingian Renaissance, and Alcuin of 
York, and the revival of Greek and Latin learning, before I finally looked at the title page.

The book had been prepared for publication by his daughter, Emilie Grace Briggs, B.A.

Who was Emilie Grace Briggs?

Fortunately, my phone had a strong signal. A few searches led me to her story.

Emilie served as her fathers amanuensis, his secretary and scholarly assistant, and is listed 
as a co author on several of his works, most notably the two volume A Critical and Exegetical 
Commentary on the Book of Psalms (1906).

After her fathers death in 1913, she took on the immense task of managing his estate and 
completing his unpublished manuscripts. This was the role in which she prepared History of the 
Study of Theology for publication.

Emilie was herself a Ph.D. student at Union. She completed every requirement for the degree. 
Yet she never received it, because she was unable to secure publication for her dissertation, 
a special condition imposed by the graduate faculty on her alone. A nearly impossible 
condition, especially within a male dominated academy.

Her monumental, unpublished dissertation, over seven hundred handwritten pages, was titled The 
Deaconess in the Ancient and Mediaeval Church: A Study in the History of Christian 
Institutions. It traced womens leadership roles in the church from the time of Jesus through 
the medieval period. She spent more than a decade revising it.

In the early twentieth century, deaconesses were widely understood as pious social workers and 
nurses, explicitly barred from ordination and stripped of sacramental authority. Emilie argued 
otherwise. She demonstrated that in the early church, deaconesses held liturgical, teaching, 
and officially ordained roles. Her work directly challenged the modern churchs decision to 
erase that authority.

She did this while facing an openly hostile academic world, one that prized masculine 
objectivity and treated womens scholarship as suspect by definition. In some ways, her 
argument outpaced even her famously progressive father. He pushed theological boundaries. She 
took his historical and linguistic tools and aimed them directly at dismantling the churchs 
gender hierarchy.

Her timing made the work even more volatile. She revised the dissertation during the height of 
the womens suffrage movement, completing it just five years after the ratification of the 
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. She ended with a prophetic call for the contemporary church to 
restore womens full participation, explicitly linking ancient evidence to modern political 
struggle.

If she was right, and her evidence was formidable, then the institutional justification for 
male only ordination in the Western church was historically indefensible. That was not a truth 
church authorities in the 1920s were prepared to accept.

So yes. I am fortunate.

Seung-Min is fortunate. We may still encounter resistance, here in Korea, in our academic 
lives. But it is nowhere near the degree of prejudice Emilie Grace Briggs faced.

Today, in a basement that felt outside of time, I felt her standing quietly beside me among 
the shelves.

Joy

#fortunate #JoyLee #gradlife #EmileGraceBriggs #UnRealGirl