A Wedding Anniversary
2025 is the 500th anniversary of the wedding of the German noblewoman and ex-nun Katharina von Bora (1499-1552) and the religious reformer Martin Luther, whose actions and writings sparked the Protestant Reformation.
Will there be exhibits, lectures, plays, concerts, study trips, and special church services around the world, as there were in 2017 for the 500th anniversary of Martin’s 95 theses, his arguments against the sale of indulgences offering release from purgatory?
Networks of women related through family, marriage, and friendship shared religious convictions and communicated religious ideas, sometimes across vast distances.
I doubt it, though there will be a recreation of the wedding in Wittenberg, where Katharina and Martin lived, as there has been for several decades. This attracts tourists, who sometimes dress in costume and always spend lots of money.
You can also buy bobbleheads of Katharina, just as you can buy dolls of another sixteenth-century woman significant in the realm of religion, the Spanish visionary and reformer St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), the first woman to be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by the pope. They look remarkably similar.
The New History of the Reformations
Luther year 2017 also saw an outpouring of books, from the scholarly to the inspirational. Most of these were about men, especially Luther, but also other reformers. Among them were a few about women and the Protestant Reformation for general readers or young adults, including several about Katharina von Bora or the Luther marriage.
What there wasn’t was anything that included insights about women’s significant role in the religious transformations of the early modern period, drawn from the explosive growth in research over the last forty years by historians, scholars of religion, art historians, literary scholars, music historians, women’s studies scholars, and others.
Nor was there anything on women that captured the major developments in Reformation history over the last several decades, which have completely transformed the field. Many historians now speak of “the Reformations” in the plural, both to highlight diversity and plurality among Protestants and to incorporate developments within Catholicism.
Just as the 2017 Luther celebrations included congratulatory statements from Pope Francis underlining unity among Christians, scholars focus on what Protestants and Catholics shared as well as what set them apart. They also use a longer time frame to take in the full sweep of early modern religious reform.
Along with expanding chronologically, the Reformations have also expanded geographically, reflecting the fact that while Western Christianity splintered, first Catholicism and then various Protestant denominations spread around the globe. Twenty years ago, this expansion was generally seen as a “spiritual conquest” in which missionaries acted on passive Indigenous people—either destroying or saving them, depending on one’s view.
But increasingly scholars stress connections and blending rather than simply conquest or resistance. They analyze the role of African, Asian, Indigenous, and mixed-heritage people, including the women among them, as important agents in the spread and transformation of Christianity.
Monarchs and Missionaries
So I decided to write this book, which puts women who shaped religious life in this era in the middle of the story instead of at the edges. It considers Protestant and Catholic women together, including women from outside of Europe who were important in the spread and transformation of Christianity.
My decision to emphasize parallels and commonalities meant I could not organize it with the expected chapters on Lutherans, Calvinists, radicals, and Catholics, especially as I wanted to include women who were not Christian, but whose lives were shaped by those who were. The book is organized by type of woman, in a series of M’s: monarchs, mothers, migrants, martyrs, mystics, and missionaries.
The first woman in the book is Queen Isabel of Castile (1451-1504), who strengthened Catholicism through war, patronage, and institution building. In 1492, she and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon issued the Alhambra Decree ordering all practicing Jews to leave Spain, the first mass migration for religious reasons in European history, which Nicolas Terpstra has called the defining feature of the Reformation.
Women rulers told judges, inquisitors, and executioners what to do.
The role of Jewish women such as Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510-1569)—who now has festivals, websites, postage stamps, wine, museums, and street portraits in her honor, and even a Facebook page—in this expulsion is the first part of my chapter on migrants.
The last women in the book are two Moravian missionaries. Rebecca Protten (1718-1780) was an Afro-Caribbean convert who preached, taught, and read from the Bible first in slave quarters on St. Thomas, then in Europe, and finally in theslave-trading colony in the Danish Gold Coast, what is now Ghana.
Margarethe Jungmann (1721-1793) was a German immigrant to Pennsylvania who learned to speak Mahican and Lenape, traveling thousands of mileson the muddy paths and flooding creeks of the American wilderness teaching and conducting services while she had at least ten children.
Protten, the subject of Jon Sensbach’s insightful bibliography, left a few letters in her own words, and Jungmann a memoir written in her own hand, extracts from which are in my book, as are those from the writings of many other women.
Women and Religious Change
In between Isabel and Margarethe are 258 other named individuals, if my counting is correct, plus hundreds of thousands of unnamed other women involved with religious change. Some are women whose stories may be familiar to those in the faith traditions in which they are heroes and models: Katharina von Bora, St. Teresa of Avila, the English martyr Anne Askew, the Peruvian saint Rose of Lima, the Quaker leader Margaret Fell Fox.
Others are women whose stories have only been recovered recently: the Dutch Anabaptist martyr Weynken Claes, the Kongolese visionary Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the Ethiopian abbess and saint Walatta Petros, the Algonquin/Mohawk convert and saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the Japanese catechist Naito Julia.
Many were young when they began actions that would have an impact, starting intense pious practices or helping the poor when they were children or leading convents or nations as teenagers. Networks of women related through family, marriage, and friendship shared religious convictions and communicated religious ideas, sometimes across vast distances.
Remembering and Forgetting
As I was writing, I became interested in how the women who shaped religion in the early modern world are remembered and memorialized. We are all thinking about memorialization more now, as monuments go up and come down, have things added and removed, are melted down or repurposed.
Some of the women have been made saints, have had schools, churches, and parks named in their honor, and are depicted in statues and stained-glass windows around the world. Most have been forgotten, or intentionally written out of the histories of the movements they shaped. A few have been made saints and arelargely forgotten or remembered selectively.
Rose of Lima (1586-1617), for example, who is in my chapter on mystics, was beatified in 1667 and made a saint in 1671, the first person born in the Western hemisphere to be canonized. Since then, countless parishes, churches, hospitals, and other institutions have been named for her around the world. Rose of Lima institutions sponsor events, so there are Rose of Lima basketball tournaments and golf tournaments—one in Nevada is called “Swing for St. Rose.”
I don’t imagine many of those playing in Rose of Lima tournaments think much about Rose’s spiritual practices, which included fasting days on end, scratching and rubbing pepper on her face, whipping herself, hanging herself from her hair, and wearing a heavy silver crown with spikes facing inward to remind herself of Jesus’s crown of thorns.
This extreme ascetism and what today we call self-harm, along with her mystical visions, were signs of holiness to those who raised her to sainthood. Today institutions named after her rarely mention these, but to understand her, we need to comprehend why her willingness to suffer in imitation of Christ’s suffering mattered to seventeenth-century people.
Other than a handful of saints, very few of the women have statues or memorials in their honor. One of the few public statues of an early modern Protestant woman is a very new one of Susanna Wesley (1669-1742), who held community prayer services and Bible discussions and served as a model to her sons John and Charles.
Wood sculptor Simon O’Rourke carved this with a chain saw in 2023 out of a cypress tree stump in the front garden of the East Finchley Methodist Church in northern London.
O’Rourke reports that very few people, including members of the congregation, guessed who she was as he was working, but it has now become popular with tourists and local schoolchildren.
I like the statue of Susanna, with her open arms and tall figure filled with foliage and animals, but my favorite of the memorials is that to Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700), who in the 1650s established a school and a teaching congregation modeled on the Ursulines in the frontier town of Montreal.
There is a museum and historic site dedicated solely to her in the heart of Montreal, which describes her as “a key figure in the origins of Montreal,” and a statuary group in a park nearby.
A Complex Legacy
There are many women I came to admire as I was working on the book, from the young Dutch and Japanese martyrs who refused to recant their faith despite horrific torture, to the aged Spanish nuns examined by Sarah Owens who traveled around the world by ship and donkey to establish convents in new places, to the two queens (Isabella of Hungary and Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre) who were the first Christian rulers in Europe to grant religious toleration in their territories after the Reformations.
But my approach is not celebratory—there are other books for that. Women were not judges, inquisitors, or executioners, as these were official positions held only by men, but women rulers told judges, inquisitors, and executioners what to do, setting the policies that led to forced conversions, migration, and martyrdom. Isabel of Castile was not alone in this.
Women testified against those charged with heresy and were in the crowds watching those who were judged guilty die. Women’s legacies were often mixed, just as were those of men. The world-traveling English Quaker Mary Fisher (c. 1623–1698) defied authorities to preach in Barbados and Boston and met with the Ottoman sultan in Turkey, but at her death in South Carolina, her property included an enslaved African.
Words and Actions
The women I examine do not talk in the language of rights, and their message was often conservative, urging individual repentance, not social change or women’s equal political or legal status. They did not demand that seminaries be opened to women, or that women be ordained. But some used the language of religious texts, the examples of pious women who preceded them, and their own sense of connection with the divine to champion women.
The nun-turned-Calvinist preacher Marie Dentière (1495-1561) asked, “Why is it necessary to criticize women so much, seeing that no woman ever sold and betrayed Jesus?” The Mexican scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95) answered those who wanted to stop her studying by asking, “Do [women] not have a rational soul like men?”
And some urged other women to follow their example. Writing to women whose husbands had been exiled, the Protestant reformer Katharina Schütz Zell (1497–1562) provided inspiration and consolation: “I beg you, loyal believing women, also to do this: take on you the manly Abraham-like courage while you too are in distress and while you are abused with all kinds of insult and suffering.”
Women’s actions were often more dramatic than their words. Some defied their fathers and husbands, leaving home to travel and preach. Others stuffed their ears with cotton to keep from hearing the sermons their political overlords ordered them to attend. Others established female communities for education or care for the ill, shrewdly altering their rules to limit restrictions imposed by male authorities.
Their contemporaries took them seriously. Some praised them, while others denounced them as “false prophetesses” and “poisonous growths in the Church,” language not far away from that of those seeking to limit the roles of women within Christianity and other religious traditions today.
