Women and the Reformations: A Global History, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Yale University Press, £25

In 1605, a Spanish noblewoman named Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614) arrived in Dover. Mendoza was a woman on a mission: as a devout Catholic she wanted to convert English Protestants to the true faith – and, having taken a vow of martyrdom seven years earlier, she was happy to die doing so. For the next decade, she devoted herself to furthering the Catholic cause, proselytising in the shops and streets of early Jacobean London, building a network of recusant women, and visiting priests in jail. She also organised missions to retrieve the remains of martyred co-religionists from graveyards, keeping them in her house as ‘guests’ before sending them to the Continent as relics.

Mendoza’s provocative behaviour certainly riled the English authorities, and she spent a brief period in prison. But she was denied the chance to make the ultimate sacrifice, dying peacefully in her bed in January 1614. Nevertheless, Merry Wiesner-Hanks argues, she managed to make her mark on history, as one of the many women who helped to reshape Christianity during a turbulent period of religious change.

The argument presented in Women and the Reformations is a simple one: women made up half the population, they played an active role in early modern religious life, and we should take notice of them. Wiesner-Hanks (a professor-emerita of history and women’s studies as the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) focuses her attention on 261 named women who acted as ‘Monarchs’, ‘Mothers’, ‘Migrants’, ‘Martyrs’, ‘Mystics’ and ‘Missionaries’ between 1450 and 1800, combining their stories with the experiences of many other nameless women to build a wide-ranging and extremely readable history of the Reformation from a female perspective.

In line with recent scholarship, Wiesner-Hanks suggests that we should think in terms of Reformations (rather than a single Protestant Reformation), and thus considers women from the Catholic, Protestant and radical traditions. Some were fiercely resistant to religious change, such as the German nuns who stuffed their ears with cotton and wax when forced to attend Lutheran sermons, but others embraced the new ideas. Some brave women even chose to embrace a reformer, including Katharina von Bora, wife of Martin Luther. He was surprisingly uxorious, peppering his letters with fond references to the woman he nicknamed ‘Professor Katie’ for her intellectual tendencies. But, for many clerical wives, life as a trailblazer was hard. When Catherine Dammartin (wife of the Italian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli) arrived in Oxford in 1548, she was denounced as a whore; a few years later, during the reign of Mary I, her corpse was dug up and thrown on a dung heap.

Religious divisions meant that people of all denominations were at risk of persecution, and Wiesner-Hanks estimates that around 20 per cent of those executed for their religious beliefs in early modern Europe were women. Although the burning of heretics was sometimes justified by the need to eradicate their memory, their stories were widely circulated – and tales of female martyrdom were especially powerful. John Foxe’s lurid account of the death of Perotine Massey, a Guernsey heretic who was killed despite being ‘great with child’, included a gruesome image of her belly bursting as she burnt, so that her newborn son fell into the fire.

Religious upheaval also had a significant impact on non-Christians, fuelling repeated waves of persecution against Jews and Muslims. Many were executed or enslaved; others (including a group of Morisca women who threw themselves and their children from a Valencian mountain when Philip III [1598-1621] announced his intention to expel them from Spain) chose suicide over a fate worse than death. Those who fled were often forced to lead itinerant lives: Gracia Nasi (1510-69), a Jewish merchant driven out of her native Portugal by the Inquisition, moved first to Antwerp and thence to Venice, Ferrara, and Constantinople, running the family business and helping other Iberian Jews to relative safety.

Indeed, Wiesner-Hanks argues, to truly understand the impact of the Reformations we also need to look beyond Europe to the many corners of the globe settled by Europeans during the early modern period. The impulse to colonise was typically accompanied by an equally powerful urge to Christianise: the first convent in the Americas was established in New Mexico in the 1540s, with such establishments being staffed by intrepid women such as Sor Jerónima de la Asunción (1556-1630), a Spanish nun who travelled halfway round the world to found a convent in the Philippines.

Many of these missions were extraordinarily successful, and some of the most engaging parts of this book focus on converts such as Naito Julia (1566-1627), a Buddhist abbess who became a Christian, founded a female community in Kyoto, and dedicated herself to ‘teaching Christian Doctrine to pagan ladies’ – even though she was tortured, and later exiled, for doing so. Of course, many women resisted conversion efforts, so that French evangelists in the North American colonies complained that ‘it is you women who are the cause of all our misfortunes – it is you who keep the demons among us’. In Ethiopia, a woman named Waletta Petros (1592-1642) led the resistance against Jesuit missionaries, leaving her husband in order to travel around the country preaching against ‘the filthy faith of Leo’.

Even those who converted were not always well treated. By the 17th century, 20 per cent of Lima’s female population lived in convents, including Ursula de Jésus (1604-1668), a Black woman who was born into slavery. Finally freed in her forties, she began to have visions and gained a reputation for exceptional piety. Nevertheless, as a non-white woman she was not allowed to take full vows, and still had to cook for the proper nuns – leaving her so exhausted that she struggled to stay awake during her nocturnal visuals, once waking before the altar on Maundy Thursday to tell God: ‘Hello, I have been lazy all night long.’

Female visionaries from all backgrounds faced hostility from those who struggled to believe that God would choose to speak through a mere woman. According to the Spanish cleric Gaspar Navarro, women’s visions could not be taken seriously because ‘the feminine sex is weaker in the head’, and thus more susceptible to dreams, imaginings and the deceptions of the Devil. Catholic mystics such as Luisa de la Ascensíon (a Franciscan abbess who was famed for her ability to bilocate, once simultaneously blessing Spanish forces in the West Indies and the Netherlands) and St Teresa of Avila attracted countless devotees, but they were also investigated by the Inquisition. And while Ann Lee’s Shaker followers claimed she was the Second Coming of Christ, her unorthodox beliefs (she had visions of Adam and Eve having sex, which led her to conclude that only universal celibacy would lead to the Kingdom of God on Earth) meant that she was repeatedly arrested for blasphemy.

Wiesner-Hanks’ approach to her subjects is empathetic rather than celebratory; she seeks to understand these women in their own terms, and resists the temptation to turn them into heroines. But it is hard not to feel that their actions – even those which are unpalatable to modern sensibilities – were remarkable, given the misogyny they faced. Of course, some women were extremely powerful: Wiesner-Hanks identifies at least 30 women who exercised sovereign authority in major European states, all of whom put their own stamp on religious policy. Most came down firmly on one side of the Catholic-Protestant divide, though two 16th-century queens – Isabella of Hungary and Jeanne of Navarre – made the unusual decision to grant religious toleration to their Christian subjects.

The majority of early modern women could only dream of such power, and many who tried to speak or write about religion were silenced. The German noblewoman Argula von Grumbach (1492-1564) produced a flurry of pro-Lutheran treatises in 1523-4, then published nothing for the next 40 years, her Catholic husband having been pressured to stop her writing. In England, Anne Askew’s opponents were upset not just by her heretical views, but by her decision to leave her husband in order ‘to gad up and down the countrey a ghospelling & ghossiping where she might, and ought not’. In the small German town of Memmingen, women were even forbidden to discuss religion while drawing well water.

And while new religious movements often promised equality, most quickly sidelined their female members. Women were, for example, prominent in the early Methodist and Moravian movements, but were marginalised in the late 18th century, as male leaders sought to make their movements more respectable. In the Catholic Church, there was increasing emphasis on the enclosure of nuns; when Mary Ward (1585-1645) left her convent and founded a female community dedicated to education, a papal Bull of Suppression denounced these ‘idle and garrulous women’ as ‘poisonous growths in the Church’.

While many women simply accepted this as their lot, a brave few openly challenged prevailing attitudes: the nun-turned-Calvinist preacher Marie Dentière (1495-1561), asked ‘Why is it necessary to criticise women so much, seeing that no woman ever sold and betrayed Jesus?’ and the Mexican scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95) responded to attempts to stop her studying by asking ‘Do [women] not have a rational soul like men? Why should [they] not then enjoy… the privilege of enlightenment in an education?’ Others turned stereotypes to their advantage: when Elizabeth Vaux was questioned about her involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, she retorted that surely no man would be so foolish as to ‘put their lives and estates in the power and secrecy of a woman?’

And yet, as this excellent book shows, some did – and many more took the threat posed by women like Vaux seriously. Despite the limitations placed on women, they had enough impact for the Lutheran theologian Johann Feustking (1672-1713) to fill a 700-page denunciation of ‘false prophetesses, Quakeresses, fanatics, and other sectarian and frenzied female persons through who God’s church is disturbed’. By turning the world upside-down and showing us a familiar story from the perspective of these troublesome creatures, Women and the Reformations provides a timely reminder of the importance of taking women seriously.