Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T09:20:17.786Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

25 - Women and religious change

from Part V - Religion, Society, and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Edited by
R. Po-chia Hsia
R. Po-chia Hsia
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Get access

Summary

Every religious tradition has ideas about proper gender relations and the relative value of the devotion and worship of male and female adherents; every one stipulates or suggests rules for the way men and women are to act. In many religions these messages are contradictory and ambiguous, providing ideas that support gender hierarchy as well as complementarity and equality. This was true in Christianity from New Testament times onward, and was certainly true in the early modern period. On the one hand, God was thought of as male, the account of creation was understood to ascribe or ordain a secondary status for women, women were instructed to be obedient and subservient, the highest (or all) levels of the clergy were reserved for men, and religious traditions were used by men as buttresses for male authority in all realms of life, not simply religion. On the other hand, women used the language of religious texts and the examples of pious women who preceded them to subvert or directly challenge male directives. For Christian women of all classes and all denominations, religion provided a powerful justification for independent action; women who were not Christian also found support in their own religious traditions – Judaism, Islam, and in colonial areas indigenous religions – for actions opposing or undermining Christian authorities.

The Protestant Reformation

Scholars differ sharply about the impact of Protestantism; some see it as elevating the status of most women in its praise of marriage, others see it as limiting women by denying them the opportunity for education and independence in monasteries and stressing wifely obedience, and still others see it as having little impact, with its stress on marriage a response to economic and social changes that had already occurred, and not a cause of those changes.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 465 - 482
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Apóstoleslos, Francisca, The inquisition of Francisca: a sixteenth-century visionary on trial. Ed. and trans. Ahlgren, Gillian T. W. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arenal, Electa, and Stacey, Schlau (eds.), Untold sisters: Hispanic nuns in their own works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Baernstein, P. Renée, A convent tale: a century of sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York: Routledge, 2002).Google Scholar
Beilin, Elaine V. (ed.), The examinations of Anne Askew (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Bilinkoff, Jodi, Related lives: confessors and their female penitents, 145 0–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Brewer, Carolyn, Shamanism, Catholicism, and gender relationsin colonial Philippines,1521–1695 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).Google Scholar
Collett, Barry, A long and troubled pilgrimage: the correspondence of Marguerite D’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna 1540–1545 (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000).Google Scholar
Conrad, Anne, Zwischen Closter und Welt: Ursulinen und Jesuitinnen in der Katholischen Reform-bewegung des 16./17. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: Zabern, 1991).Google Scholar
Conrad, Anne (ed.), ‘In Christo ist weden man noch weyb’: Frauen in der Zeit der Reformation und der katholischen Reform (Münster i. W.: Aschendorff, 1999).Google Scholar
Crawford, Patricia, Women and religion in England, 1500–1750 (London: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar
Dentière, Marie, Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and preface to a sermon by John Calvin. Ed. and trans. McKinley, Mary B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diefendorf, Barbara, From penitence to charity: pious women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Dinan, Susan E., and Meters, Debra (eds.), Women and religion in old and new worlds (London: Routledge, 2001).Google Scholar
Ferrazzi, Cecelia, Autobiography of an aspiring saint. Ed. and Trans. Schutte, Anne Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forster, Marc R., and Kaplan, Benjamin J. (eds.), Piety and family in early modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).Google Scholar
Giles, Mary G. (ed.), Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Greer, Allan, and Bilinkoff, Jodi (eds.), Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar
Haliczer, Stephen, Between exaltation and infamy: female mystics in the golden age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Joel F., Reordering marriage and society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Irwin, Joyce (ed.), Womanhood in radical Protestantism (New York: E. Mellen, 1979).Google Scholar
Joldersma, Hermoine, and Grijp, Louis (eds. and trans.), ‘Elisabeth’s manly courage’: testimonials and songs by and about martyred Anabaptist women (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Karant-Nunn, Susan C., and Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. (eds. and trans.), Luther on women: a sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karant-Nunn, Susan C., The reformation of ritual: an interpretation of early modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997).Google Scholar
Kendrick, Robert, Celestial sirens: nuns and their music in early modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Kingdon, Robert, Adultery and divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Kobelt-Groch, Marian, Aufsässige Töchter Gottes: Frauen im Bauernkrieg und in den Taüferbewegungen (Frankfurt: Campus, 1993).Google Scholar
Kreitzer, Beth, Reforming Mary: Lutheran preaching on the Virgin Mary in the sixteenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehfeldt, Elizabeth, Religious women in golden age Spain: the permeable cloister (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).Google Scholar
Leonard, Amy, Nails in the wall: Catholic nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Lowe, K. J. P., Nuns’ chronicles and convent culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Marshall, Sherrin (ed.), Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: public and private worlds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Matheson, Peter (ed. and trans.), Argula von Grumbach: a woman’s voice in the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995).Google Scholar
McKee, Elsie Anne, Katharina Schütz Zell. 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1999).Google Scholar
Monson, Craig (ed.), The crannied wall: women, religion and the arts in early modern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Perry, Mary Elizabeth, The handless maiden: Moriscos and the politics of religion in early modern Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Peters, Christine, Patterns of piety: women, gender, and religion in late medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Ranft, Patricia, Women and the religious life in premodern Europe (New York: St Martin’s, 1996).Google Scholar
Rapley, Elizabeth, A social history of the cloister: daily life in the teaching monasteries of the Old Regime (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Rapley, Elizabeth, The dévotes: women and church in seventeenth-century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Rhodes, Elizabeth (ed. and trans.), ‘This tight embrace’: Luise de Carvajal y Mendoza (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Riccoboni, Bartolomea, Spiritualletters.Ed. and trans. Bornstein, Daniel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Roper, Lyndal, The holy household: women and morals in ReformationAugsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Russell, A., Lay theology in the Reformation: popular pamphleteers in southwest Germany 1521–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Snyder, C. Arnold, and Huebert Hecht, Linda A. (eds.), Profiles of Anabaptist women: sixteenth-century reforming pioneers (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Sperling, Jutta Gisela, Convents and the body politic in Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Strasser, Ulrike, State of virginity: gender, religion, and politics in an early modern Catholic state (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).Google Scholar
The life of Teresa of Jesus: the autobiography of Teresa of Avila. Trans. Peers, E. Allison (New York: Image Books, 1991).Google Scholar
Thompson, John Lee, John Calvin and the daughters of Sarah: women in regular and exceptional roles in the exegesis of Calvin, his predecessors and his contemporaries (Geneva: Droz, 1992).Google Scholar
Walker, Claire, Gender and politics in early modern Europe: English convents in France and the Low Countries (London, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watt, Diane, Sectaries of God: women prophets in late medieval and early modern England (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 1997).Google Scholar
Weaver, Elissa B., Convent theatre in early modern Italy: spiritual fun and learning for women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Weber, Alison, Teresa of Avila and the rhetoric of femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Weissler, Chava, Voices of the matriarchs: listening to the prayers of early modern Jewish women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Westphal, Siegrid.Frau und lutherische Konfessionalisierung: Eine Untersuchung zum Fü rstentum Pfalz-Neuburg, 1542–1614 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994).Google Scholar
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., and Skocir, Joan (eds. and trans.), Convents confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant nuns in Germany (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Christianity and the regulation of sexuality in the early modern world: regulating desire, reforming practice (London: Routledge, 2000).Google Scholar
Wood, Jeryldene M., Women, art, and spirituality: the Poor Clares of early modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Woodford, Charlotte, Nuns as historians in early modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Wunder, Heide, ‘Er ist die Sonn’, sie ist der Mond’: Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche, 1992).Google Scholar
Zarri, Gabriella, Le sante vive. Profezie di corte e devozione feminille tra ’400 e ’500 (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990).Google Scholar
Zarri, Gabriella, Recinti: Donne, clausura, e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).Google Scholar
Zell, Katharina Schütz, Church mother: the writings of a Protestant reformer in sixteenth-century Germany. Ed. and Trans. McKee, Elsie Anne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×