The post-unification phenomenon of brigantaggio in southern Italy, at once a peasant insurgency, a paramilitary resistance, and a social rupture, offers an exceptional historical case for examining the relationship between gender and religious authority. In the armed bands that resisted the newly formed Italian state between 1861 and 1870, marginality from institutional structures, both civil and ecclesiastical, generated a practical redistribution of ritual roles that ran against the official Catholic gender order. In the absence of clergy, brigantesse assumed de facto priestly functions: they led collective prayers, blessed their companions before military operations, and presided over devotional practices serving as sacred legitimation for the counter-unification cause. This ritual agency did not stem from theological claims or reformist ambitions; it arose as a pragmatic response to an institutional void in which embodied practice quietly redistributed the authority that institutions had withheld. At the same time, the historical record discloses a counter-movement of representational containment. Nineteenth-century pictorial and literary culture systematically recast the officiating brigantessa in patriarchal terms, assigning her the role of redemptive mediator rather than recognizing her as an autonomous subject of ritual authority. The double dynamic of practical transgression and its simultaneous neutralization in dominant representation forms the analytical core of the paper. Drawing on primary sources such as police records, and trial testimonies, the paper develops a historical-anthropological account of women's place in the religious economy of the brigand bands, contributing to the reflection on how gendered inequalities in religious authority are constructed and naturalized through institutional structures — and on the conditions under which embodied practice has historically contested, if only provisionally, the hierarchies it was meant to uphold.