The Westphalian city of Münster is still remembered for its Anabaptist kingdom of 1534–1535, whose leadership, among other reforms, enforced polygamy as a means of controlling its large population of women. One might assume, then, that anyone studying the women of Münster after 1535 would frequently encounter references to the Anabaptist horrors invoked as a means of justifying the ruling bishops’ stringent application of the Council of Trent's Counter-Reformation initiatives. Yet, in this outstanding first book, Simone Laqua-O'Donnell found very few direct references to this infamous event in the impressive array of ecclesiastical and municipal sources she perused. Not only were the civic leaders too busy rebuilding and repopulating their city after the destruction of 1535, but Münsterites—until the bishopric of Ernst von Bayern (1585–1612)—had also renounced all religious extremism, preferring instead a “confessional haziness” (8) that encouraged the mixing of Protestant and Catholic religious practices, e.g., offering wine, as well as bread, for communion. To end this, von Bayern began the process of implementing Tridentine reforms, which would have profound effects on the women of Münster.

Based on her Oxford dissertation under Lyndal Roper, Laqua-O'Donnell's monograph explores the various ways in which the local civic and ecclesiastical authorities both encouraged and resisted the reforms of the Council of Trent, how these reforms affected the lived experience of women, and, most impressively, how some religious and lay women responded to them. To unearth these responses, Laqua-O'Donnell has examined just about all of the archival sources that one could imagine to be useful: municipal records, ordinances, and correspondence; notarial and court records; as well as the ecclesiastical sources of the bishopric, convents, and alms houses. Analyzing these various sets of documents so that one can faintly hear the voices of these women requires a deft touch. Laqua-O'Donnell succeeds, thereby shedding light on the experiences of nuns, laywomen as practitioners of religion or in marriage, deviant women, and priests’ concubines. Her conclusions are in broad strokes consistent with the historiography of women in the Counter-Reformation, but they also include some surprising and noteworthy exceptions.

Nuns were, of course, the women most affected by the Council of Trent's reforms because the insistence on enclosure effectively cut them off from the broader community and therefore from their principal means of service and income. Since enclosure implied that nuns could not be trusted in secular society, most of the orders vigorously opposed it. The contested introduction of new, more compliant orders into the city, such as the Poor Clares, also changed the city's religious landscape, as well as relations between the sisters and their community. Laqua-O'Donnell highlights here the social standing of the nuns. The noble sisters of the Benedictine Überwasser convent, whose predecessors had, in fact, joined the Anabaptist cause, strongly opposed the bishops’ interference and insisted on their jurisdictional independence. Caught “in a web of tensions” (45) among the guilds, magistrates, and cathedral chapter, each of the convents had different levels of success. Thanks to their social status, familial connections, as well as their own skill and determination, the Überwasser sisters wrested significant concessions from the authorities—whereas the Benedictine nuns of St. Aegidii, who appealed to their patrician relatives, and the Beguines, daughters of the non-patrician civic elite, proved less successful. All avoided gendered pleas based on alleged female weakness, however, depicting themselves instead as proud daughters of the city under attack from a foreign bishop.

Far from being passive observers of religious activity, the laywomen of Münster also contributed actively to the city's religious life, as seen in the important if little-known role played by the Lichtmütter (“mothers of light”) in the management of the local churches. The tasks of the Lichtmütter in Münster went beyond just the provision of candles, encompassing instead a number of duties normally in male hands, such as purchasing sacramentals (including the Host, wine, oil, and incense) and overseeing the maintenance of portions of the city's churches. These women “were neither excluded from administrative responsibility nor banned from sacral functions. Becoming a nun was thus not the only way for women to enter into the Catholic religious hierarchy” (66). Women also participated in confraternities, and Laqua-O'Donnell's analysis of wills reveals that when it came to funding specific numbers of intercessor prayers for the dead, “women's prayers counted as much as men's” (69). That said, the alms house records reveal a gendered form of charity that heavily disadvantaged poor women—especially servant girls who found themselves pregnant, since the council believed that “a woman's honour and morality were of such paramount importance” because their bodies were “so easily violated” (132). Rumor and gossip played significant roles in disciplining female transgressions of community standards, although relatively few women were tried as witches here—thanks to the municipal government's retention of jurisdiction over the crime of witchcraft. Despite ecclesiastical pressure, the magistrates approached marital discord in a similarly pragmatic fashion, aiming not to punish either partner but instead to find workable solutions that would provide for the women and children concerned. At the same time, however, ecclesiastical courts dispensed the same “discriminatory punishments” (93) to all women brought before them for cases involving illegitimacy, since, for church officials, sex outside of marriage was primarily a “female weakness” (93). The fathers of the infants were often not even mentioned in these records.

In the end, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the bishops’ reforming efforts had changed Münster's religious culture, but not without considerable resistance, also from women. As a result, Tridentine reforms proved here “less extreme than often assumed” (174). This is illustrated in particular by Laqua-O'Donnell's discussion of priestly concubines who, in court testimony and correspondence, vigorously protested efforts to throw them out of their homes and remove them from loving relationships. Their plight was as heartrending as their resistance, and their assertive claims to their rights as wives seem surprising.

Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster is a model of first-rate social and gender history. Buttressed by impressive research, the book is crisply written and compelling in its revelation of the human face of women trying to survive, pray, and love in one German city. Dispelling a number of misconceptions about early modern Catholic women and religion, Laqua-O'Donnell has crafted a concise and compelling work of scholarship that is also a pleasure to read.