Women and the Reformation

The historiography of the Reformation era, roughly 1517–1650, was long dominated by scholarship that focused on theological developments, religious debates, and major reformers, such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola. The late 20th century, however, saw an expansion in areas of scholarly inquiry, with many new works on the period’s extraordinary cultural, social, economic, and political transformations and conflicts. Scholars increasingly argued, moreover, that the era had weathered not a single, traumatic “Reformation,” but multiple and diverse “Reformations,” whose impacts had rippled throughout early modern society in a variety of ways. Part of this historiographical shift involved the exploration of new perspectives and voices, which included a growing interest in the role of women as active participants in and contributors to historical change. Scholars thus began to investigate the ways in which women had experienced the Reformation, perhaps differently from men, and how the Reformation had influenced women’s social roles, marriages, family lives, faith and religious expressions, and all other aspects of their everyday lives. In the process, there emerged what became a long-running controversy, often with confessional overtones, over whether the Reformation was “good” or “bad” for women. This has thankfully now died down, since partisans on both sides have mainly accepted that the question was not only overly simplistic, but also tended to lump together all women as an undifferentiated mass. Nevertheless, readers cannot fail to find signs of the old battle everywhere they look. To explain it briefly, therefore, the argument on the one side was that Protestants, and particularly radical reformers, had benefited women by elevating them as equal to men in spiritual worth, introducing a more egalitarian form of marriage, which they had praised as a noble institution, and freeing from their bondage the nuns previously forced into involuntary celibacy and enclosure. The argument on the other side, however, was that Protestants had, on the contrary, harmed women by toppling the Virgin Mary from her seat as Queen of Heaven and frowning on her veneration, and by discouraging women from turning to Mary or the female saints as intercessors and models of strong and influential women. By closing the monasteries and emphasizing marriage and motherhood as women’s highest calling, moreover, Protestants had limited the independence and freedom formerly enjoyed by women religious, ended the political and social power of abbesses, and removed women’s ability to choose the unmarried life.

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