HIEU 164 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Pope Gregory Vii, Pushback, Counter-Reformation
HIEU 164 – Textbook Notes (Wiesner-Hanks) – Chapter 6: Religion
• Hair seen as a sexually attractive factor, so married women were supposed to cover their hair in
order to hide their sexual attractiveness/availability
• Conflict between what men were telling them to do and what God was telling them to do
• Seeing religious actions as only being able to be judged by God
The Role of Women in Late Medieval Christianity
• Abbesses of some convents controlled large amounts of property and had some jurisdiction over
people
o Especially in Germany, where only superior was the emperor
• Administrative duties, counseling carried out by women
• Only elites could become nuns; lower-class women could join, but had to do hard labor and could
not become professed nuns
• Gregorian reform by Pope Gregory VII enforced clerical celibacy, stranding many former
preachers' wives
• Women turning to convent for education
• Most women in convents were there because it was cheaper than dowry, and continued to act
secularly
o Pushback against this with stricter regulations 15th century
• Less power to abbesses and more power to male members of church
• Cut off contact with outside world
• Fostered cohesion and spiritual fulfillment in nuns
• Orthodox nuns living relatively secular lives, just had to live a good life to be a good nun
o Most of them widows, easier than getting remarried and could 'give' possessions to convent
instead of fighting over them with heirs, and them take them with to convent
o Many became powerful elites in communities and entertained powerful guests
• Beguines: unmarried religious women living together in order to survive
o Pushback from church for not being under male supervision, not taking vows
o Pushback due to competition with craft guilds
• More religious women being mothers/non-virgins
• Majority of religious women were laywomen
• Mary increasingly depicted, almost a member of the Trinity
• Female saints being lauded for womanly duties
• Mary's mother, Anne being increasingly discussed since she was a positive, normal woman to look
up to
• Women could not participate in financial charity, so feed the poor, fundraised, female-only
religious ceremonies, helped with daily activities at church
The Protestant Reformation
• Mary a model for being submissive to God's will, rather than a communicator with Christ
• Women and men revolting against Catholic church through violence, writing down their own ideas
o Women writing went directly against Pauline Injunction, so they justified their writing in
their works, saying that the cause was so great that they had to take action
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o Once Protestantism official, women stopped writing and only wrote hymns/guides, mostly
for private use
• 1543 English act of Parliament forbade common women from reading Bible, and elite women
from reading it out loud
• Female rulers/elites converting their followers
• Women participating in religion mostly in the home
• Charity on a case-by-case basis
• Female deacons when they gave to charity so much, but they were not included in church
decision-making
• Relatively common to marry someone of a different religious faith until 17th century, when
governments forbade inter-religious marriages
• Wives of clergy expected to maintain pious households
• Bishops' wives not respected, given status in England
• Anabaptist community in which there was polygamy, enforced marriage for women
• Women 1/5 of religious martyrs during the period
• Coed religious processions banished
• Celebrations of women's religious events restricted
• Female confraternities ended and no all-female groups replaced them
o Women still participated in charity, but often under men
• Closing down of convents
o Some forced to leave, others allowed to stay for the rest of their lives with small pension
• 'Kloppen'
o Trying to convert nuns
• Some convents survived
o Nuns' stubbornness
o No other options for women
o Converting to Lutheranism and continuing to live in convent structure
The Catholic Reformation
• Women feeling called to enter convents, do charity acts in response to Protestant Reformation
• Group of women Jesuits not formally approved of by Jesuits or the Pope
• Council of Trent enforcing cloistering of women and looking down on uncloistered religious work
by women
o Women resisted, ignored
o Church recognized that they were doing good work and ignored it for a while
o Success of women's houses led to their being incorporated in the church, as families feared
their daughters would come back and make claims of inheritance since they took no vows
(taking vows made you dead secularly)
• Mary Ward allowed to open church-funded schools under direction of Pope in order to educate
children, but shut down and arrested a year later
• Women mostly relegated to teaching girls within convents
• Less and less women becoming saints
• Spread of cult of Joseph, replacing Anne as holy figure, as Mary was portrayed as weak adolescent
girl under his protection
• Malmaritate houses for women who were orphans, poor, widows, from failed marriages, etc. who
were at risk of becoming prostitutes
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Document Summary
Seeing religious actions as only being able to be judged by god. Less power to abbesses and more power to male members of church: cut off contact with outside world. Female saints being lauded for womanly duties up to: women could not participate in financial charity, so feed the poor, fundraised, female-only religious ceremonies, helped with daily activities at church. Female rulers/elites converting their followers: women participating in religion mostly in the home, charity on a case-by-case basis. Some convents survived: nuns" stubbornness, no other options for women, converting to lutheranism and continuing to live in convent structure. Protestant women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shakers: second coming would be female, celibacy and chastity. Increasing oppression on jewish people, so gathered in cities that were considered less hostile toward them in italy and other southern european countries: women as well as men punished under spanish inquisition for being jews in spain.
