A Short History of the Reformation by Parish Helen L.;

Author:Parish, Helen L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Subject Value
ISBN: 9781786724700
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

‘MARRIED TO CHRIST’: CLOISTERED WOMEN AND THE REFORMATION

Cloistered women were among the first to encounter the Reformation. The appeal of the liberation motif lay in the assumption that the medieval Church had forced women, even children, to embrace an ascetic existence that might be either demanding or luxurious, but which either way amounted to a rejection of what it meant to be female and a denial of any position in family and society. Nuns were women who brought no benefit to their families, and were committed instead to a lifetime of spiritually and materially worthless activities, which made no meaningful contribution to society. In theory, the contribution of these women to society came through their commitment to the labour of prayer, but in evangelical polemic convent life prevented women from marrying, bearing children and honouring their responsibilities as wives and mothers in a godly household.42 But an analysis of the extent to which this freedom to marry and bear children was welcomed with open arms paints a rather mixed picture. As Merry Wiesner has pointed out, the Protestant prioritization of marriage and family had the potential to impose an alternative form of confinement upon women, tying them to the home and preventing the articulation of a distinctive or communal form of spirituality in an all-female context.43 Protestant family life did not necessarily present women with the freedom to exercise their physical desires within the framework provided by godly marriage, but simply created a different, but ultimately still restrictive set of obligations and requirements that left women no more free than in convent life. Religious debate and discussion, particularly in the urban environment, was a masculine conversation, and one from which women were, by and large, excluded.44 In this sense, there was a loss of female voice. Communal female religious life was not necessarily the imposition of chastity and obedience upon the unwilling, but rather presented opportunities for an awareness and articulation of a physical and spiritual identity among women. Ulrike Strasser’s analysis of the experience of women, and women religious, in post-Tridentine Munich makes a similar point from a different context, suggesting that ‘the enduring emancipatory potential of the Catholic ideal of virginity […] could enable women to utilize the space of the convent and their virginal bodies for their own purposes’.45

Convent life, as Amy Leonard has shown, presented an opportunity for a form of self-assertion through obedience and asceticism.46 At the point at which the Strasbourg religious houses were instructed to close, there were some 200 cloistered women in the city. Three houses survived, largely, Leonard argues, because they had already undergone a process of internal reformation and regeneration. As a result, their members were better placed to resist the demands of the council and to map out a new form of existence in the reformed city. These female religious houses were able to maintain much of their original way of life and devotional activity within their walls, while presenting an outward face and function that rendered them useful

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