16
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Steven Ozments 1982 Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, now a quarter-century old, includes a chapter by Joyce Irwin titled “Society and the Sexes” that makes one almost nostalgic for the good old days. In a four-page bibliography, Irwin includes almost everything available in English that even touches on women, marriage, and the family, some of which was still in the form of unpublished conference papers. Ten years later, in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research II (edited by William Maltby), the bibliography for my article covering similar topics was three times as long, and this did not include materials that had been covered in Kathryn Norberg’s article on women in the Catholic Reformation that appeared in John O’Malley’s 1987 Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research. I began that article by noting that “perhaps no area of Reformation studies has seen more expansion than research on women and the family,” but I had no idea of what was to come. If 1983 through 1992 saw an expansion, the 1990s and 2000s have seen an explosion. In 1994, a group of scholars from many disciplines formed the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, which now sponsors book prizes, travel scholarships, sessions at various meetings, a listserv, triennial specialized conferences, and has just started a separate print journal.1 In 1996 the University of Chicago Press began publishing a series of translations of works by (and a few about) women titled The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret King and Albert Rabil Jr. This series has published almost forty books, including more than ten on religious issues, and many more are on the way. In the same year, Marquette University Press began the Women of the Reformation Series, edited by Kenneth Hagen and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, which publishes parallel texts of original language and English translations of works by women. In 2001, with the sponsorship of Erika Gaffney, Ashgate Press began publishing the series Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, edited by Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger, and it now has more than thirty titles. Every major journal in the field has had special issues or thematic sections on women, gender, marriage, or sexuality, and sometimes on all four. Books on these topics are in every series that publishes in English on Reformation or early modern issues. It is now nearly impossible to even know about all the new scholarship, to say nothing of reading it. Thus, in an attempt to keep the bibliography for this article manageable, I have included only books that have appeared since 1991; a complete bibliography would have hundreds and hundreds of items.2
Though the bibliography in Irwin’s article can make one yearn for the day when it was possible to read everything, the article itself makes one realize how far we have come. Irwin calls for study of “those women who remained Catholic, whether by choice or circumstance”; the many studies of convents and women religious have been one of the great strengths of recent research. She calls for work that “concentrates on analysis” rather than “polemical arguments” in which one side “paints a rosy picture of the Reformation’s bringing about a better life for women, while others bemoan the reformers’ elevation of married life.” Recent research has certainly done this; indeed, few scholars working in the field today would answer the question, “Was the Reformation a good thing or a bad thing for women?” with anything other than “It depends” followed by a long discussion about differences in women’s experience. Irwin ends her article with an appeal that has proved prophetic, calling on Reformation historians to “claim the decades between 1580 and 1630,” because a “crucial chapter is missing when the story ends with an earlier date.” The enormous amount of work on the later Reformation, particularly on confessionalization and social discipline, has certainly filled in much of this missing chapter, as has work that has begun to analyze the Reformation in global terms as missionaries and settlers, male and female, took their faiths with them as they left Europe.
Convents and Women Religious
The great attention to women religious over the last several decades is in part a function of sources, for convents housed literate women, controlled property and people, and were often linked with powerful families, all of which means they frequently left extensive records. These records were often transferred as a body to some larger archives, but remain a manageable group of sources for a dissertation project. In Italy, Gabriella Zarri at the University of Bologna has directed teams of researchers exploring convents, holy women, and hagiographical texts, and sponsored regular conferences on these topics.3
In Germany, convents in areas becoming Protestant often fought the Reformation through letter writing, family influence, physical bravery, and what one might call sheer cussedness—stuffing wax in their ears so as not to hear Protestant sermons and refusing to leave their houses unless they were physically dragged out. In some cases, authorities finally gave up and the convents remained islands of Catholicism for centuries. Others supported the Protestant Reformation theologically on some issues, but ignored its message about the value of convent life and remade themselves into institutions that were acceptable to Protestant authorities, educating girls and providing an honorable place for women who could not, or chose not to follow the Protestant injunction to marry.4
Research on convents and religious women in Catholic Europe has also focused on those who challenged boundaries. Not surprisingly, Teresa of Avila has been explored from the most angles: her milieu, her political influence, her spirituality, her sense of authorship and of self.5 These studies have been joined recently by several that focus on her predecessors and contemporaries. They make it clear that, though Teresa is unique, she also followed a pattern found in other Spanish and Italian women: close relationship with a confessor, physical manifestations of her piety, doubts about her own self-worth, and effective alliances with local (and sometimes national) political leaders.6 Some of these women were able to retain reputations as holy women—beatas—throughout their lives or even, like Teresa, make it somewhere on the ladder to sanctity. Others were judged to be false saints, accused of faking their stigmata or ability to live without food, and exerting malicious influence over their followers and confessors, ultimately ending up before an Inquisition or other type of religious court, which is how their stories became known.7
Along with Catholic women who walked the (narrow) boundary between sanctity and heresy, there were also those who challenged the boundaries between lay and religious life. Mary Ward (the eventual founder of the English Ladies), the Ursulines and Daughters of Charity in Italy and France, and other so-called Jesuitesses have all received scholarly attention in the last decade for their attempts to create an active religious vocation for women out in the world.8 The older opinion about such efforts is that they were either a failure or insignificant—what are a few hospitals or a few schools for girls?—but there has been increasing recognition that their actions and those of women religious in Protestant areas disrupt standard narratives about the Reformations. It is difficult to make the claim that “the Reformation led to the closing of the convents in Protestant areas” (which is standard in textbooks and more specialized studies) when they survived in Saxony, Braunschweig, Strasbourg, and who knows yet where else. It is difficult to say that “convents in Catholic Europe after Trent were all enclosed” (another standard statement) when the convent walls were permeable in so many places. The activities of early modern women religious also disrupt standard narratives in women’s history; it is difficult to say, for example, that “Florence Nightingale was the first female nurse,” or even that “Florence Nightingale made nursing respectable for women,” when completely respectable middle-class Frenchwomen had been nursing as Ursulines for several centuries.
Studies of women religious have not only examined those who broke boundaries, but have also broken boundaries themselves, particularly those between disciplines. Art historians have explored how convents acted as patrons of the visual arts, ordering paintings and sculpture with specific subjects and particular styles for their own buildings and those of the male religious institutions they supported, thus shaping the religious images seen by men as well as women. Music historians have shown how women sang, composed, and played musical instruments, with their sounds sometimes reaching far beyond convent walls. Religious historians have examined the ways in which women circumvented, subverted, opposed, and occasionally followed the wishes of church authorities. Social historians have explored the ways in which women behind convent walls shaped family dynamics and thus political life. More importantly, scholars in all these fields have thought about the ways their stories intersect, as art and music both shape devotional practices and are shaped by them, as family chapels and tombs—often built by women—represent and reinforce power hierarchies, as artistic, literary, political, and intellectual patronage relationships influence and are influenced by doctrinal and institutional changes in the church.9 This scholarship has thus changed the narrative of the Catholic Reformation and also provided a good example of how problematic the notion of a clear public/private dichotomy can be in women’s history. Even in post-Tridentine Europe, convents and their residents were very much part of the public realm of power politics and culture.
Many of the abbesses and other female religious wrote extensively, and their works are beginning to see modern editions and translations, or in some cases the first appearance of their words in print.10 This scholarship parallels the explosion of editions and reprints of the works by early modern secular women, particularly women in England.11 These texts have deepened our understanding of convent life and female spirituality, for they contain plays that nuns wrote for their sisters to perform, as well as letters telling of attempts at converting Protestants in the street and of supporting Catholics in prison, along with polemics praising convent life for its richness and attacking it for its shallowness. These newly discovered or newly made available sources have provided excellent examples of women’s religious opinions and spiritual creativity, and they have further increased the complexity of our analysis of the Catholic Reformation.
Laywomen’s Experience
Though in sheer numbers, studies of religious women have been far more numerous than was their share of the female population, research into laywomen has also expanded. Historians have looked at Protestant pastors’ wives creating a new ideal for women, and at other Protestant women preaching and participating in iconoclastic riots. They have looked at both Protestant and Catholic women defying their husbands in the name of their faith, converting their husbands or other household members, and writing and translating religious literature.12 Research from many parts of Europe has made it clear that women’s experience of the Reformation, as of any historical development, differed according to categories already set out based on male experience (social class, geographic location, rural or urban setting), but also categories that had previously not been taken into account, such as marital status, position in the family, and number of children. Statements about the impact of particular religious ideas on women have been replaced by more nuanced observations. Older scholarship on the radical Reformation, for example, often made generalizations, with some authors arguing that the radical groups offered women more opportunities, and others contending that they were more restrictive and patriarchal. More recent research has emphasized the differences among radical groups, thus fitting with the general stress on difference and diversity in women’s history.13
This same attention to nuance has shaped studies of the ideas of male reformers about women. Though, like other early modern writers so often caught up in the debate about women, reformers often made categorical statements about women in the abstract, they also spoke specifically about certain individuals or groups of women—Mary, Old Testament matriarchs, Eve, nuns. Recent analyses have focused on these more specific comments, and they have also discussed the ideas of reformers other than Luther and Calvin.14 Studies of reformers’ ideas about men as men are still relatively few, though some of the many works on the construction of early modern masculinity include religious writings in their analyses.15 Judging by the upsurge of interest in men’s history, this will no doubt be a growth field in the future.16
Editing, analyzing, and translating women’s religious writings have not been limited to convent residents. Though the names of a few Protestant women writers have been known for decades, only within the last several years have their whole works finally been made available. The model of such scholarship is Elsie McKee’s magisterial two-volume work on Katharina Schütz Zell, a woman who used to be described as “the wife of the reformer Matthias Zell,” but for whom a better description, following McKee, would be “a Strasbourg reformer.”17 Most of this work has so far concentrated on previously known works and figures, such as the German noblewoman Argula von Grumbach, the Genevan abbess Marie Dentière, or the English martyr Anne Askew, but the works of lesser-known writers, such as Dutch Anabaptist women who wrote hymns and letters, are beginning to see the light of day.18
While current work on the radicals reinforces the emphasis on difference and diversity, research on women in the English Reformation and English Puritanism fits with another strong theme in women’s history: the questioning of periodization. Such questioning has led many women’s historians to dump the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the golden age of Athens, or at least to put quotation marks around them when they use them in reference to women. In this instance, examination of the ideas of Christian humanists on such issues as marriage, spousal relations, and proper family life has led historians of England to question whether the Protestants or Puritans were saying anything new.19 They might have emphasized spousal affection and the importance of stable families to the social order more loudly and at greater length than their predecessors, but these were hardly new ideas. More recently, Christine Peters finds continuities in patterns of Christocentric piety and ideals for women extending from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.20 Recent surveys of women or gender in early modern England similarly do not see the Reformation as changing very much.21
These same doubts about the novelty of the Protestant message also emerge in the work of Heide Wunder, though she looks to a different source for their ideas than do those who point to Christian humanism. She sees changes in family life and ideas about marriage as a result not of changes in religious ideology, but of social and economic changes that allowed a wider spectrum of the population to marry, and made the marital pair the basic production and consumption unit. This “familialization of work and life” happened, in her view, in the High Middle Ages, which means Reformation ideas about the family did not create the bourgeois family, but resulted from it.22 Medieval historians, most prominently Judith Bennett, have similarly questioned the significance of this great divide; some have suggested that the twelfth century might be a better choice for a major turning point, whereas others have rejected the idea of significant transformations altogether in favor of a focus on continuity.23
These doubts about the significance of 1500, and the resulting pre-modern/modern dichotomy, have emerged at just the same time that this dichotomy has been reinforced in another exploding area of historical research, the history of sexuality. Because of the influence of Michel Foucault, or better said, because of the influence of a particular way of reading Foucault’s work on sex, much research has explored the development of modern sexuality or simply taken modern sexuality as its topic. Foucault, in the first volume of History of Sexuality, locates the beginning of the transformation of sex into discourse with the practice of confession, and recognizes that this expanded after the Reformation as Catholics required more extensive and frequent confession, and Protestants substituted the personal examination of conscience for oral confession to a priest.24 This discourse about sexuality was later taken over by medical, political, and educational authorities, and it is this point that most of Foucault’s successors (and disciples) see as the beginning of what interests them, going on to explore the mechanisms that define and regulate sexuality, and investigating the ways in which individuals and groups described and understood their sexual lives. Even those who do look at earlier periods and who stress the socially constructed and historically variable nature of all things sexual tend to accept this notion of one clear break, terming their work the study of premodern sexuality.25
This notion of a decisive break sometime in the eighteenth century works fine for medievalists, whose era has always been before the break anyway. For Reformation scholars, however, this is more problematic; the Reformation has always been on this side of the great break, part of what made the early modern period modern. So how is it that the modern family emerged from the Reformation (or, following Heide Wunder, even earlier and then was strengthened by the Reformation), but modern sexuality did not develop until several centuries later?26 If 1500 is dethroned and the break is moved later, does that make Reformation scholars all late medievalists? Or should the notion of a Middle Ages be junked entirely (as a few medievalists themselves are suggesting) as yet another piece of Renaissance intellectual baggage, so that those who study the thirteenth century are as much modernists as those who study the sixteenth?
Social Discipline and Colonial Christianity
The thought of dumping 1500 in favor of an earlier, a later, or no break is frightening (or perhaps better said, anathema) to many early modernists, as well as to textbook publishers and department chairs who would have to revamp their entire offerings. There are also two lines of research related to women and the Reformation that suggest that such a dethroning may be premature.
The first of these are studies of social discipline, the reform of popular culture, or the civilizing process (whatever term one uses) that recognize there were two sexes (or more, given the new scholarship on third sexes and transgendering). Early scholarship on these issues, though very aware of class and geographic differences, was largely blind to gender, which seems particularly odd given the fact that so much about social discipline is related to sex. That has changed for many scholars. Though most of this newer gendered scholarship on social discipline recognizes the medieval roots of such processes as the restriction of sexuality to marriage, the encouragement of moral discipline and sexual decorum, the glorification of heterosexual married love, and the establishing of institutions for regulating and regularizing behavior, it also emphasizes that all of these processes were strengthened in the sixteenth century, and that this had a different effect on women than on men. Laws regarding such issues as adultery, divorce, “lascivious carriage,” enclosure of monastics, and interdenominational and interracial marriage were never gender neutral. The enforcement of such laws was even more discriminatory, of course, for though undisciplined sexuality and immoral behavior were portrayed from the pulpit or press as a threat to Christian order, it was women’s lack of discipline that was most often punished. The newer scholarship on marriage, divorce, the family, and sexuality in the context of the Reformations makes clear that the roots of this strengthening are complex and include much more than theology; though most studies are not directly comparative, as a whole they suggest that these changes occurred in Catholic areas as well as Protestant, and that they involved church bodies such as the Inquisition, as well as secular courts and other institutions.27
Differences in the timing and intensity of measures of social discipline have meant that most historians are unwilling to draw up grand schema and timetables—no one is currently setting dates for the rise of the restricted patriarchal nuclear family for example, as Lawrence Stone once did—but this scholarship does suggest that there was enough of a break with a pre-1500 past to retain this date as significant. It also underscores the fact that this break is a process that takes many decades or even centuries, but that it is just as significant as and also tightly interwoven with the more familiar early modern processes such as the rise of the nation-state and the growth of protoindustrial capitalism.
The second line of research is one that is only beginning to be related to the Reformation but will clearly be a key area of research in the coming decades—the expansion of Christianity beyond Europe with the first wave of colonialism. Viewing 1500 as a great gulf came not only from the chain of events that began in 1517, but also from the events that began in 1492. Were it reviewing recent and looming developments in early modern economic or cultural history, or English literature, this essay would certainly have started rather than ended with this. Viewing European women in the sixteenth century in a global context has begun, not surprisingly, for scholars of Iberia, who now regularly hold conferences, publish article collections, and carry out their own research from a transoceanic perspective.28 This has been joined by research on French Catholic women in Canada, some of whom continued the fight for a noncloistered life on the other side of the Atlantic.29
This wider geographic perspective should not be limited to those countries that actually founded colonies in the early modern era, however. Many of the descriptions of the New World so favored by cultural analysts in their analyses of “othering” and “orientalizing” were printed in Germany, as were the maps both armchair and real travelers examined. Though America was named by an Italian, the name stuck because of the influence of the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, who wrote, “I see no reason why, and by what right, this land of Amerigo should not be named America after that wise and ingenious man who discovered it, since both Europe and Asia had been allotted the names of women.”30 Ursulines and Jesuits from all over Europe thought the wider world needed their services, and reformers of all confessions were concerned about social, religious, ethnic, and racial mixing, whether it was Anabaptists marrying Lutherans, wives continuing their Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, or pagan practices without their husbands’ approval, or Catholic wet nurses suckling Calvinist babies. European men and women carried their notions of proper and godly gender roles, marriages, families, and sexual activities, as well as their plans for salvation, with them, whether they actually traveled or simply read about other lands. Studies of “society and the sexes”—Irwin’s forward-looking title—have reshaped the way scholars view the origins and impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in Europe over the last thirty years, and will no doubt be key to understanding the role of religion as Europeans established colonial empires in the centuries after Luther. Studies that explore the intersection of gender and empire have overwhelmingly focused on the later British experience, but it is clear that analysis of this intersection in the early modern period has much to offer both Reformation studies and wider world history.
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