Abstract
This work considers how French women participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. It examines how they contributed to the culture, meanings and developments in institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters over the course of the century. It seeks to understand what mattered in religious life for women, why women acted in the ways they did, and how they perceived their activities. Significantly, this study shifts the focus from what men said about women’s religious participation1 to what women themselves said about their contributions to religion as this can be interpreted through their writings, speech and deeds.
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Notes
For examples of how the opinions of the key theologians about women have been fruitfully analysed, see L. Roper, ‘Luther: Sex, Marriage and Motherhood’, History Today, 33, 1983, 33–8.
S. C. Karant-Nunn, ‘The Transmission of Luther’s Teachings on Women and Matrimony: The Case of Zwickau’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 77, 1986, 31–46.
J. D. Douglass, ‘Christian Freedom: What Calvin Learned at the School of Women’, 53, 2, Church History, 1984, 155–73.
J. D. Douglass, Women, Freedom, and Calvin, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1985.
M. Potter, ‘Gender Equality and Gender Hierarchy in Calvin’s Theology’, Signs, 11, 4, 1986, 725–39.
See recent discussions by S. Rosa and D. Van Kley, ‘Religion and the Historical Discipline: A Reply to Mack Holt and Henry Heller’, French Historical Studies, 21, 4, 1998, 611–29.
M. P. Holt, ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, French Historical Studies, 18, 2, 1993, 524–51, 551.
T. Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle, Paris, Champion, 1997, p. xiii. Disappointingly, Wanagffelen’s survey includes only one detailed study of a woman, Marguerite de Navarre, largely analysed from the perspective of commentators and historians on her work.
Here I follow Moi’s adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu in arguing for ‘the immense variability of gender as a social factor’. Emphasis in the original. Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 288.
M. U. Chrisman, ‘Women and the Reformation in Strasbourg, 1490–1530’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 62, 1972, 143–67.
M. E. Wiesner, ‘Women’s Responses to the Reformation’, The German People and the Reformation (ed.) R. Hsia, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1988, 148–72.
N. L. Roelker, ‘The Appeal of Calvinism to French Noblewomen in the Sixteenth Century’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2, 1972, 391–418.
Roelker, ‘The Role of Noblewomen in the French Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 63, 1972, 168–95.
N. Z. Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, Society and Culture in Early Modem France, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1975, 65–95.
S. Marshall Wyntjes, ‘Women and Religious Choices in the Sixteenth Century Netherlands’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 75, 1984, 276–89.
L. Roper, The Holy Household: Women and morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989.
K. Norberg, ‘Women, the Family, and the Counter-Reformation: Women’s Confraternities in the Seventeenth Century’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 6, 1978, 55–63.
B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Les Divisions religieuses dans les families parisiennes avant la Saint-Barthélemy’, Histoire, Economie et Société, 7, 1, 1988, 55–77.
B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Houses Divided: Religious Schism in Sixteenth-Century Parisian Families’, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, (eds) S. Zimmerman and R. F. E. Weissman, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1989, 80–99.
B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter-Reformation France’, Journal of Modem History, 68, 2, 1996, 1–43.
E. Macek, ‘The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the Book of Martyrs’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 1988, 62–80.
J. Umble, ‘Women and Choice: An Examination of the Martyr’s Minor’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 64, 1990, 135–45.
M. E. Wiesner, ‘Ideology Meets the Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation’, Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modem Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss, (eds) A. C. Fix and S. C. Karant-Nunn, Kirksville, Missouri, Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies, vol. 18, 1992, pp. 181–95.
M. E. Wiesner (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Nuns in Germany, (trans.) J. Skocir and M. Wiesner, Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1996.
M. Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1998.
See Diane Willen’s argument on the futility of assessing the advantages and disadvantages of the Reformation for women in ‘Women and Religion in Early Modern England’, in Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Private and Public Worlds, (ed.) S. Marshall, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 158.
R. A. Mentzer Jr, ‘La Place et le rôle des femmes dans les églises réformées’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions. 46, 113, 2001, 119–32, 119.
L. Roper, The Holy Household; Roper, ‘Gender and the Reformation’, Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, 92, 2001, 290–302.
As an example of this argument, see Luebke’s summation of the current research, in The Counter-Reformation: The Essential Readings, (ed.) D. Luebke, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, p. 9.
S. Karant-Nunn, ‘Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 13, 1982, 17–42.
P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720, London, Routledge, 1993.
S. M. Johnson, ‘Luther’s Reformation and (un)Holy Matrimony’, Journal of Family History, 17, 3, 1992, 271–88.
See, for example, in the French context, B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Discerning Spirits: Women and Spiritual Authority in Counter-Reformation France’, Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modem Women, (eds) M. Mikesell and A. Seeff, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2003, 241–65.
Wiesner (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation; P. R. Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan, New York, Routledge, 2002.
G. Zarri, Le sante vive: cultura e religiosita femminile nella prima età modema, Turin, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990.
N. Z. Davis, Women on the Margins: Three seventeenth-century lives, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995.
E. Arenal and S. Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works, (trans.) A. Powell, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
E. Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2000; S. Broomhall, ‘Women as First Nations’ Missionaries in France’, forthcoming in a collection being prepared by Nora Jaffary, Gender, Race and Religion in the New World.
C. Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret, Doubleday, New York, 1994, p. xii.
See, for example, P. D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983.
G. Reynes, Couvent de femmes: la vie religieuse contemplative dans la France des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Fayard, 1987.
E. Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-century France, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990.
E. Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.
B. B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Besides a number of long histories of individual monastic communities, I am aware of only one survey of sixteenth-century female monastic life: C. Blaisdell, ‘Religion, Gender, and Class: Nuns and Authority in Early Modern France’, Changing Identities in Early Modem France, (ed.) M. Wolfe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997, 147–68.
M. E. Wiesner, ‘Beyond Women and the Family: Towards a Gender Analysis of the Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18, 3, 1987, 311–21.
L. Roper, ‘Gender and the Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 92, 2001, 290–302.
A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-century Champagne, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 2.
C. Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modem Germany, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002; Wiesner (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation.
K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge, University Press, 2003.
J. Bilinkoff, ‘Woman with a Mission: Teresa of Avila and the Apostolic Model’, in Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento, (eds) G. Barone, M. Caffiero and F. Scroza Barcellona, Turin, Rosenberg and Sellier, 1994, 295–305.
A. Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990.
P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.
L. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modem Europe, London, Routledge, 1994; Witchcraze: Tenor and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2004.
On the value of the predominance of the printed book in understanding sixteenth-century religion generally, see A. Pettegree, P. Nelles and P. Conner (eds), The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001.
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© 2006 Susan Broomhall
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Broomhall, S. (2006). Introduction. In: Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501508_1
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