In the early seventeenth century, the Englishwoman Mary Ward received papal approval for an order of women religious. She founded communities across Europe from Cologne to Naples to Vienna. As Mary and her associates approached secular and lay donors, she noted the public role these women played, marvelling that it was ‘a course never thought of before’. Despite resistance to her advancement of Catholicism, she maintained that there ‘is no difference between men and women that women may not do great things as we have seen by the example of many saints’ (p. 145).
Herein lies the objective of Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s book. Packed with the stories of 261 named women and ‘hundreds of thousands of unnamed others’ (p. xiii) whose lives shaped – and were shaped by – the transformation of Christianity between 1450 and 1800, the book offers an important corrective to existing male-centred histories. As a leading scholar of early modern gender history, few people are as well-equipped as Wiesner-Hanks to write this book. Readers will be left with little doubt that without women, a history of these four centuries of global Christian reformations can only ever be a partial account.
The book is divided into six chapters, each exploring the ways in which women participated in or shaped Protestant and Catholic reformations. Weisner-Hanks is critical of the ‘add women and stir’ (p. xvii) approach to writing gendered history (i.e. slotting women into traditional histories). Instead, female forms of participation in early modern global reformations – alliteratively categorised as monarchs, mothers, migrants, martyrs, mystics and missionaries – cast its overall shape and give the book its chapters.
In its interrogation of religious change across the globe, Women and the Reformations is ambitious in scale. Female power in shaping religion is scrutinised in myriad ways. Women are crucial to the establishment and advancement of religious reform. Familiar female rulers like Isabel of Castile (Spain) and Maria Theresa (Central European Habsburg territories), Weisner-Hanks argues, were pivotal in shaping the religious landscape. These women defined religious inclusion and exclusion, determined war and peace, and established Catholic and Protestant networks across Europe. For prominent female religious reformers like Martin Luther’s wife, Katharina von Bora, the metaphor of ‘motherhood’ gave women authority and legitimacy to act as spiritual mothers.
For others still, power lay in establishing and advancing Christian thought and communities in new places: Weisner-Hanks tracks a group of nuns leaving their cloistered convent in 1620 in Toledo, and boarding a ship. Forming a small, segregated cloister on board, they were initially bound for the Caribbean, but travelled on to Mexico City and Acapulco. Finally, they boarded a cargo ship to Manila in the Philippines where they established the first women’s convent in East Asia. The power of Christianity across the world is showcased through the lives of these women. Wiesner-Hanks takes us to seventeenth-century Lima (Peru) where a vibrant and intensely Catholic community was flourishing and where one fifth of the city’s women – both free and unfree – lived in religious institutions. We learn of the legacy of the Kongolese mystic Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, who in 1704 saw visions of her own embodiment of the spirit of St Anthony, and is today celebrated for challenging African colonial authority.
Weisner-Hanks is careful to point out that not all these women were admirable; in some cases, far from it. In telling the histories of thousands of female religious migrants (including Jews and Muslims banished from Spain, Catholics exiled from England and Protestants from France), Weisner-Hanks traces both deliberate and forced footsteps. For some non-Christian women included within this history, theirs is a story of resistance to female persecution. The early sixteenth-century forceable conversion and expulsion of Muslims in Isabel’s Spain, for example, receives careful consideration. For those who remained and outwardly converted, public expression of Islamic faith was forced into the home, where women took over ceremonies and rituals and – crucially – changed them. Newborn babies had traditionally been welcomed with readings from the Qur’an; now, female-led rituals focused on bathing the infant to wash away the baptismal oil. Women covertly passed on Muslim songs and food preparation methods to their daughters at home.
The global perspective of this book brings into focus the sheer scale of religious change worldwide – of the shifts, divisions and fractures within European Christianity, the different degrees of religious tolerance and persecution, and the dynamism of religious movements and communities that both persisted and drew breath across the world. Women are undoubtedly critical agents within this global history of religious reform. The hundreds of thousands of unnamed women that are glimpsed in this comprehensive, accessible and engaging book and the many more we have yet to even glimpse await the scrutiny of future scholars. Women and the Reformations is sure to be an excellent primer for those interested in picking up the torch.
