It has become an epistemological given that gender is a discursive construct. The authors of Eine Löwin im Kampf gegen Napoleon? fully embrace this insight to explore the invention of the South Tyrolean peasant girl Katharina Lanz as an enduring local symbol. Her rise to fame was no foregone conclusion because of how little is actually known about the historical “maiden of Spinges.” However, this dearth of verifiable facts did not discourage a proliferating range of actors and movements in South Tyrol, Austria, Italy, and even farther afield from claiming her after the Napoleonic Wars. In fact, the blank canvas of the maiden's life became ripe for the taking in a border region marked by competition over people's national and religious allegiance. The title of the book is somewhat misleading because along with the gradual embellishment of the legend grew the number of dragons Lanz slayed with her pitchfork, Napoleon being just one of many.
The analysis of the maiden's journey in collective memory is divided into six parts. The introduction sets out the intellectual stakes by asking how the fashioning of a martial heroine differs from that of a male hero. The myth of the young girl who spontaneously joined the male defenders of her village against the citizen-soldiers of revolutionary France, armed with nothing but a repurposed farming implement, has long been an object of fascination. Her patriotism, devotion to her community, and piety made the maiden of Spinges the embodiment of a discrete kind of feminine virtue, even if her militancy transgressed the association of military service with male citizenship that the French Revolution had forged. To offset these subversive undertones, Margareth Lanzinger and Raffaella Sarti posit, admirers of the maiden were forced to adapt her image to conventional tastes. In this they succeeded because Catholic conservatives and monarchists found more to applaud in the myth than the champions of progressive causes, as the rest of the book bears out.
The first chapter delves into the mysterious origins of the maiden. Scant contemporary testimonies exist that a young woman even climbed the cemetery wall of Spinges to repulse advancing French troops on April 2, 1797, though the historical “battle” involving Tyrolean militia forces in that locality was real enough. The next three chapters trace the consolidation of these disputed fragments of evidence into a solid fixture in Tyrolean memory culture over the next century and a half. A first high point was reached in 1869, when the Tiroler Volksblatt attributed a name and putative life dates to the faceless maiden. The timing of this move was significant, for it coincided with the Austrian “culture war,” which centred on attempts to bring the Catholic Church under greater state control. Catholic conservatives were quick to adopt Katharina Lanz (1771-1854), the pious housekeeper of a priest and scourge of France's Jacobin apostates, in their struggle with the state. Lanzinger and Sarti show deftly that Lanz's transformation into the poster child of Catholic conservatism was not an exclusively Tyrolean phenomenon but extended to Catholic southern Germany and the United Kingdom, where High Church Anglicans connected to the Oxford Movement also developed an interest in her exploits.
Katharina Lanz remained in the public limelight partially because of the continuing strength of the Sacred Heart of Jesus cult in Tyrol, partially by absorbing the symbolic capital of other patriotic viragos from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and partially thanks to her cultural liminality. Most often portrayed as a Ladin (Romance) speaker, the question of her national allegiance provoked controversy at the turn of the twentieth century. The Habsburgs, Italian patriots, and Ladin nationalists all recognised traits in her militant stand that they could appropriate. In the process, Lanz morphed into a Jeanne d'Arc-like figure. However, the transfer of South Tyrol to Italy after Austria's defeat in the First World War initiated the slow decline of her hero(ine) worship. Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime had no desire to indulge such sentiments, preferring instead to import Italian culture into the region. Nevertheless, chapter 5 demonstrates that memorials to Lanz litter the South Tyrolean imagination to this day, especially among the Christian Right and champions of Ladin autonomy. The final chapter brings the discussion full circle by comparing the maiden of Spinges with other prominent female warriors during the Age of Revolutions. While sufficiently numerous to constitute a distinct genre, women that bore arms in defiance of prevailing gender norms tended to end up on the margins of collective memory. Their fiery patriotism was lauded up to a point but proved difficult to integrate into bourgeois standards of propriety. Lanz defied the odds, the authors conclude, on account of her versatility as a mnemo-political vehicle. Her myth found wide acceptance not because it threatened the existing order but rather because “opposition-traditionalists” (a term coined by Claudia Ulbrich) honed in on her defence of the status quo against the forces of change.
Although some important analytical observations could have been better signposted to make them stand out from the shrubs of “thick description,” the wealth of material Lanzinger and Sarti present is truly impressive. Almost every conceivable medium, from letters to representations of Lanz on tarot cards, is covered. It is evident that the book is the product of many years of research. Napoleonic-era Amazons have received increasing attention from gender historians in recent years, but the comprehensiveness of this case study is exceptional. One can therefore only hope that Eine Löwin im Kampf gegen Napoleon? finds a wide readership.
