Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg

by Lyndal Roper

This is a fascinating study of the impact of the Reformation idea of "civic righteousness" on the position of women in Augsburg. Roper argues that its development, both as a religious credo and as a social movement, must be understood in terms of gender. Until now the effects of the Reformation on women have been viewed as largely beneficial--Protestantism being linked with the forces of progressivism, individualism, and modernization. Roper here argues that such a view of the Reformation's legacy is a profound misreading, and that the status of women was, in fact, worsened by the Reformation.

A number of themes are explored: the economic position of women in the household economy; the nature of "civic righteousness" and how it applied a "reform moralism" to the role of marriage and the household; the efforts of civic authority to reform sexual deviance; the attempts to control marriage and the breakdown of marriage; and the role of convents and nuns.

The Holy Household is the first scholarly account of how the Reformation affected half of society. It combines sound application of feminist theory with careful, open-ended archival research to advance our understanding of the Reformation, of feminist history, and of the place of women in modern European society.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Feminism, Christian, Christianity, Germany

306 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 1990

About the author

Lyndal Roper, FRHistS, FBA, is an Australian historian and academic. She was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2011. She is a fellow of Oriel College, an honorary fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and the author of a variety of groundbreaking works on witchcraft.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about women in Reformation Augsburg. It focuses on wives, and disputes the book "When Fathers Ruled" by Steve Ozment. Ozment claims that the Reformation was really quite good for women, because it liberated them from oppressive convents and put them into loving marriages. Roper blows him out of the water through an examination of Augsburg court records. She examines the new religious significance of the household, and the constrictions of women's opportunities that comes out of the "husband as supreme ruler" model. More importantly, she shows that attitudes towards women changed dramatically - as the extremes of the category of "woman" were expelled from society (nuns and prostitutes), more and more women were mentally categorized as one or the other, and since very few could live up to the standards of holy women, most were categorized as sexually dangerous.

[Yige Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a thorough and comprehensive overview of the religion, socio-political and cultural position of women and the femininity in the Reformation Augsburg. The parallels and contrasts between pre- and post-Reformation attitudes on women have demonstrated a variety of social and ecclesiastical shifts regarding the regulation of gender and sexuality during the Reformation in Germany. Instead of deconstructing the pre-Reformation gender hierarchy, the Reformed faith reconstructed an even more hierarchical and binary system in which women’s role was largely confined within the domestic space. The ‘emancipation’ of nuns from convents was, paradoxically, a way of regulating women into the institutional structure of marriage and nuclear household, and a ‘solution’ to the increasing power of women within ecclesiastical institutions that would potentially threaten the position of their male counterparts. The Reformation ideal of women and femininity reinforced the gender inequality that existed throughout antiquity and the medieval times by promoting the ideas that women are physically and spiritually weaker, less than, and easier to be deceived.

The view on the female sexuality of the Reformation church is paradoxical. It celebrated the idea of virginity, a perfect, pure band holy status, as the paradigm and standard of morality, which culminated in the life of the Virgin Mary. At the same time, women, as the descendants of Eve, were seen as evil, seductive sexual predators who seek to tempt their male counterparts into lust and sexual sins. The ideology behind the epistemic ambivalence, obviously, remains rooted in the inherently misogynistic and heteronormative attitudes toward women and their sexuality throughout history, whether before or after the Reformation.

[Mikkel Uhre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the way Roper challenges the view og the women's place in society in the post reformation. Instead of being 'free' in a marriage, the woman is being held 'locked'. The book in generel works with te reformation's impact on the marriage in Augsburg.

[Mirthe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stuk gelezen voor PWS

[Avital]

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[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated but still pretty interesting look at the ways in which the reformation did not, in fact, help women.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important book, if dated. Argues that the Protestant Reformation was not good for women, as champions of Protestant religious equality (cf. Steven Ozment) would have (had) it. Rather, while men and women may have had spiritual equality before God, their kingdoms on earth were very different. Protestantism championed the secular institution of marriage, and forced both men and women into patriarchal unions that were meant to keep society orderly and disciplined. A very dated argument in 2010 to be sure, but in 1989 it was a revolutionary approach to use descriptive sources like these (Council records: complaints, trials, etc.) in conjunction with the highly idealized Protestant theological texts which prescribe a very different world than reality.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

In addition to being poorly written, this book is one of those works that makes feminist historians look like raging madwomen. Roper complains that 16th-century women didn't make as much as men (hello, they still don't), and that domestic labor was 'naturally' assumed to be women's work (um, still is). While both of these may be true, merely ranting about it does not do anything. Why not contextualize it within a larger patriarchal society? Also, I'm very unclear as to how or why Protestantism caused any of the "changes" discussed in this book. Seems like they existed long before (and after) Luther.