Gender, Church and State in Early Modern Germany

Essays by Merry E. Wiesner

Merry E. Wiesner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317886877
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

This text brings together eleven important pieces by Merry Wiesner, several of them previously unpublished, on three major areas in the study of women and gender in early modern Germany: religion, law and work. The final chapter, specially written for this volume addresses three fundamental questions: "Did women have a Reformation?"; "What effects did the development of capitalism have on women?"; and "Do the concepts 'Renaissance' and 'Early Modern' apply to women's experience?" The book concludes with an extensive bibliographical essay exploring both English and German scholarship.

Chapter One
Women’s defence of their public role¹

The question which Joan Kelly posed a decade ago, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’, is one which has led to a great deal of re-examination and rethinking of that particular period. Kelly examined courtly love literature, Castiglione’s The Courtier, and the experience of Italian upper-class women to answer the question with a resounding ‘no’. Instead of expanding opportunities and increasing liberation from ideological constraints, she argues, these women ‘experienced a contraction of social and personal options that men of their classes … did not’.² Kelly further describes this contraction as a ‘new division between personal and public life’, a division which also relegated women to the personal, private realm.³

Kelly primarily uses prescriptive literature written by men to make her points, but the voices of actual women from the period indicate that they were aware of what was happening to them. They felt both the shrinking of opportunities in a variety of areas and the increasing split between public and private life. Their objections to this growing constraint took on many different forms but generally centre on women’s right to a public role. While male writers, officials, theologians, workers, and professionals were attempting to limit women’s activities to the private realm, women consistently defended their public role.

These defences are closely linked to the question of the nature and degree of women’s freedom in the Renaissance. Most scholarly discussions of female freedom focus on male definitions and limitations of that freedom – law codes, sermons, guild restrictions, prescriptive treatises, literary models. In all of these, the word ‘free’ would rarely have been used when referring to women. Classical authors, to whom the Renaissance writers looked for models of thought and language, would not have done so, as ‘free’ meant to them enjoying the rights and privileges of a citizen and possessing an educated capacity for reason, neither of which was possible for women. Italian humanists, while occasionally allowing women some rational capacity, sharply restricted the avenues by which a woman could develop that capacity; her course of study was to be neither as ‘free’ nor as ‘freeing’ as a man’s. It is only in a religious sense that the word ‘free’ is applied to women in the Renaissance. According to Erasmus, a woman had the same ‘free will’, the same moral responsibility to do good, that a man did. According to Luther, of course, no one had free will, but a woman could receive God’s grace and come to faith the same as a man, participating thereby in the ‘freedom of a Christian’ which resulted from this faith.

Philosophical discussions of ‘freedom’ as it was defined by male authorities may be leading us somewhat astray, however. While Renaissance women used a variety of philosophical, legal, rational, and religious justifications to argue their case, they in fact had a much more pragmatic definition of the word: ‘freedom’ to them meant the ability to participate in public life. Their voices tell us a great deal about female self-conception during the Renaissance, which never emerges when listening to male voices alone. It is true that women’s sphere in most cultures has been defined by men, as have the limits of what is considered ‘public’ and what ‘private’; but women have often objected to or ignored those limitations, and at no time more than during the Renaissance when they were aware that restrictions on them were increasing.

The contraction of women’s public role, and their responses to it, occur in a variety of realms of life during the Renaissance and may best be explored realm by realm. It will also be instructive to look at examples from somewhat later periods, for this process continued over centuries, eventually restricting not only the upper-class women who are the focus of Kelly’s study, but middle- and lower-class women as well. As Natalie Davis has noted, ‘Women suffered for their powerlessness in both Catholic and Protestant lands in the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as changes in marriage laws restricted the freedoms of wives even further, as female guilds dwindled, as the female role in middle-level commerce and farm direction contracted, and as the differential between male and female wages increased.’⁴

The theoretical limits of female freedom in economic, political, and familial life were set by a variety of municipal, national, and regional law codes. These differed widely from area to area throughout Europe, but some general trends can be seen by examining changes in them from the thirteenth through to the seventeenth centuries.

In regard to the basic obligations and duties of citizenship, little distinction was made betvyeen men and women; all heads of households were required to pay taxes, provide soldiers for defence, and obey all laws. Beyond that, however, there were clear legal restrictions on what the female half of the population could do. Women differed from men in their ability to be witnesses, make wills, act as guardians for their own children, make contracts, and own, buy, and sell property. These limitations appear in the earliest extant law codes and were sharpened and broadened as the law codes themselves were expanded.

A good example of this process can be seen in the restrictions on women buying and selling goods, or loaning, borrowing, or donating money without their husbands’ or guardians’ approval. The earliest law codes (for example, Liibeck 1220-26) simply prohibited any woman from engaging in these transactions unless her occupation required it, an exception so broad as to make the law meaningless.⁵ As the occupations that were to be excluded were described more specifically, this list shrank gradually over centuries. When one goes beyond law codes to actual court proceedings, however, it is apparent that women were making contracts, buying, selling, and trading goods all the time. Perhaps because theoretical restrictions were bypassed, evaded, or ignored in so many cases, we can find few objections by women when they were added or expanded.

Other types of legal restrictions began to appear in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were opposed both by women and by individual men. Most areas began to tighten their system of guardianship, demanding that all widows and unmarried women choose a male guardian, who was to oversee their financial affairs and appear for them in court.⁶ Women not only took these guardians to court when they felt their rights had been violated and demanded new guardians; they also objected to being required to have a guardian at all.⁷ Women had appeared before city courts in the past in regard to financial matters and had been handling their own property and inheritance, they argued, so why did they now need male guardians to do the same things?

Some cities were very frank as to why they were requiring guardians; the Strasbourg city council demanded this expressly to prevent women from going into convents and deeding all their property to the convent, ‘by which their relatives are disinherited and the city loses people who provide it with horses’ (that is, taxpayers).⁸ Because such personal decisions by women ultimately had repercussions in the public realm, the council felt they were really public affairs and thus should be placed under male control.

The prominent Catholic preacher and moralist Geiler of Kaysersberg opposed this move, seeing it as an infringement on individual women’s opportunities to perform works of charity. In a sermon from 1501 he comments:

Arranging a guardian for widows who are responsible and sensible persons is a novelty that has arisen in this city supposedly for the common good. In truth, as I will report, it is a self-seeking move by those who were in power… Everyone who is bothered by something always says it harms the common good, but it really involves his own affairs … The Gospel tells us directly – if you want to be saved, go out and sell everything you have and give it to the poor. It doesn’t say to give it to your heirs and relatives. This law is totally against the word of Christ. It is a mockery of God, a haughty service of the devil to forbid a pious person to give everything she owns for the will of God.⁹

The thrust of Geiler’s argument here is that such decisions were personal matters and should be left up to the individual woman without city interference. He thus at least tacitly agrees with the city council that women should not have a public role, but sets the boundary between private and public differently. This line of argument will emerge in male defences of women’s activities in other realms as well. Men, whether humanists, reformers, or political thinkers, often argued that the activity concerned – such as writing, education, or inheriting an estate – was essentially private and thus should be open to women.

Women’s objections to guardians follow a very different line of reasoning. This was a period when the division between public and private was not as sharp and distinct as it would become later, and when the household, as a legal and economic unit and as the location of most production, was clearly within the public sphere.¹⁰ City councils recognized this fact, for they taxed households, not persons, as did Protestant reformers who spoke of the family as a little commonwealth, from which basic unit the larger society was made. Women also recognized this and were aware that they were making ‘political’ decisions, or certainly decisions which had effects beyond the immediate household, when they were planning something as simple as whether to cook fish or meat on fast days, whether a political or religious refugee was to be fed, or what quality and amount of food journeymen were to receive.¹¹ They, along with their husbands, were held responsible by municipal and regional authorities for maintaining order within the household and keeping children and servants under control.¹² Thus they saw their legal and financial activities in the larger sphere as no different from, or simply an extension of, those activities in which they were already involved within the household.

Though Geiler and the women were arguing for the same thing – women’s ability to make financial decisions without the aid of a guardian – and though the underlying issue was an economic one which had little to do with women’s rights per se – the tax base of the city – and though none of the arguments was successful in this case, the differences between their justifications are very important. As the split between public and private hardened, and as the public realm expanded to include education, administration of public welfare, and a growing number of occupations, Geiler’s line of reasoning resulted in an ever-shrinking female sphere. The assertion by the Strasbourg women that the household was part of the public realm allowed for an augmented, or at least for a stable, female sphere. Had the women’s line of reasoning ultimately triumphed, the gender divisions which evolved in early modern Europe might have looked somewhat different. The advent of national governments and the end of the household form of production may have made the public/private, work/home, male/female divisions which did develop inevitable, but the speculation is still an interesting one.

Along with increasing restriction of women’s ability to make financial decisions and to handle their own property, the Renaissance and early modern periods saw a restriction of women’s work. This issue is very complex and may be partially attributed to nearly every major economic change that was going on: the decline of the craft guilds and the rise of journeymen’s guilds, the shift in trade patterns, the general inflation, the decline of old manufacturing centres and the growth of new ones, formalization of training requirements, the rise of capitalism. In addition to strictly economic factors, political and ideological ones also affected women’s work: the rise of territorial states, dislocation caused by the religious wars, increasing suspicion of unmarried women, secularization of public welfare, campaigns against prostitution and begging, new ideas about women’s ‘proper’ role and ability to be trained. Whatever the reasons behind it, in every occupation in which women’s work was restricted, the women themselves objected. In this arena we can hear most clearly the voices of lower- and middle-class women defending their public role.

Some of the most vocal individuals were widows of master craftsmen. The earliest guild ordinances rarely mention widows, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Women’s defence of their public role
• PART ONE: Religion
• PART TWO: Law
• PART THREE: Work
• PART FOUR: In Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index