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Women's hidden role in religious reformation
00:46:38
Merry Wiesner-Hanks considers how early modern women transformed religious lives around the world
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Emily Briffet
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical convers from the makers of BBC History magazine. The histories of religious reformations across the globe have often focused on men, but women were also integral to these major transformations. Speaking with Emily Briffet, historian Mary Wiesner Hanks, author of Women and the Reformations, explains how early modern women strove to shape the world around them as wives, mothers, missionaries, mystics and migrants.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Mary, it's lovely to have you.
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McDonald's Advertiser
Oh, it's wonderful to be here.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
So we are going to be delving into the Reformations and when it comes to the Reformations, we so often talk about those in Europe. But this isn't just a European transformation. Introduce us to its global history, wherein the world saw a Reformation.
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, anywhere Christianity expanded. And I think that we sometimes forget the Reformations have really been a kind of European story. And sometimes Reformation historians go, oh, rats, the Renaissance has gone global. But we can't. Well, the way that it has gone global is first of all through Catholicism, starting in the 16th century, because the Reformations occur concurrently with the spread of Christianity around the world. So when Europeans first travel around the world, across the Atlantic and around Africa and such, there's only one Christian church at the time. But shortly after that, by the time we get 20 years later, there's more than one. So the story needs to be told together of the splintering of Christianity in Western Europe and the taking of Christianity or the spread of Christianity. People took Christianity around the world, first Catholics and then Protestants, and those people included women. And the people that they met responded to Christianity in different kinds of ways, including the women among them. And both the story of the religious splintering within Western Europe and the spread of Christianity around the world have sort of traditionally been told as a story of men. You know, there's Martin Luther, who's a man, and Jesuits, who are definitely all men and are resoundedly all men. And that's been the focus. But the more that we look at it and what has happened in the last, say, 20 or 30 or 40 years of doing research is that we know that women are involved in all of these various kinds of things. And that's the story that I wanted to tell. Both their involvement in the splintering of Christianity in Western Europe and their involvement in the spread of Christianity around the world.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
This story has so often been one of women being on the margins. Why do you think this has been historically?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, you know, like, because we've talked about guys in history for thousands of years, so that they're, you know, on the margins in general. But I think, particularly for the Reformations, I mean, this is about religious change. The main historiography, or the initial historiography, tended to be intellectual and theological history about people who went to universities, which meant men, and about disputes about theological issues among highly educated people, not all of whom were men, but among highly educated people. So it's been a pretty intellectual and theological story and then a kind of institutional story about. Mostly about men as well. So those are the kind of histories that sort of women were not included in. The social history of the Reformation has also been done for the last, say, 100 years or so. As we get longer and longer, I have to always expand the number of decades. When I say we've been doing this number of history for so and so many decades now. But social history of the Reformation tended to also kind of focus on men initially, sort of Marxist interpretations and other social history things, looking at peasants and male groups acting one way or another. But again, women are involved in all of those things. And over the last, well, 50 years, really, since the 70s, of course, historians and art historians and literature, people and people in other kinds of fields have looked at the actions of women in this period and the religious actions of women in this period. And they've got great stuff and great stories. But what happened? And I partly my motivation for writing this was 2017 was the 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 theses. Okay, there was a huge amount of hoopla all around the world, and I was part of that. Everybody got swept up to if you do anything to do with the Reformations. But there wasn't anything as part of all of that. That was a book about women and the Reformations that reflected what's been this, like 50 years now, 40, 50 years of wonderful study by scholars around the world of women around the world. There still was nothing available for the general reader. And that's what I've tried to do in the book, is bring that story, all of this great research together to tell a story with women at the mill in the center, not the edges.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
And a very quick bit of context for our listeners. What time frame are we talking about here?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, I mean, the traditional time frame of the Reformation starts with Luther's Theseus in 1517. But there's a new kind of way of looking at the Reformations that Nicholas Terpstra, historian from Toronto, has really come up with, and I'm very convinced by it, which is that Nick pointed out that the Reformations saw the first mass migration for religious reasons around the world. They caused that. But it wasn't only the Reformations that caused that. It was monarchs in Europe deciding that they needed to have religious uniformity within their nation. And that started with Isabel and Ferdinand on the Iberian Peninsula, or, excuse me, Ferdinand of Aragon, Isabelle of Castile. And in 1492, they issued the Alhambra Decree, which said that Jews that lived in Spain had to either convert or leave. And that started the first really mass religious migration within Europe. And that then became the notion that everyone living within a state, within a country had to be the same. Religion starts before the Reformation in 1492, the Reformation is with Luther. But then it becomes a policy widespread in Europe. And of course, once Christianity splinters, that Meant that if the prince or the ruler of an area became Protestant or became Catholic or became a different kind of Protestant, suddenly that territory switched. So you have a very different situation when monarchs decided that everybody had to be the same kind of Christian now. And that's why I ended up. The first chapter of the book is about monarchs. And the first woman in the book is Isabelle Castile, who is, along with her husband Ferdinand. I have to give him a little bit of credit, but I try to focus on her, who is really one of the monarchs, to begin this policy of religious uniformity. And another thing that's happened with Reformation scholarship now is not only that the beginning of it is not quite as. It absolutely has to be, Luther's 95 theses, but we used to kind of talk about the Reformation, mostly about Protestants, and we kind of talked about the 16th century, and then the 17th and 18th century kind of dithered away. But now what's happening is people are really thinking about the whole process of religious change from the 17th century into the 18th century. There's a kind of long reformation, second reformation, the way that they're thinking about it, into the middle of the 17th century, and then kind of including religious movements of the 18th century, the Methodists and Moravians, the Shakers, as part of the story of the Reformations, not different. And so this book goes from 1490s or so up through the rest of the 18th century. I sort of end the time of the French Revolution about 1800 or so. So that includes Moravians and Methodists. And the last women in the book are two Moravian missionaries, one of them an Afro Caribbean woman, and one of them a German woman who migrates to what was then the British colonies.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
You've given us a lovely glimpse into this. Just how central were women to these transformations that took place in Europe and beyond?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Absolutely, that is my really short version of that story. But in every aspect of the kinds of changes that are going on, women are really central. For example, you know, the first chapter is, as I said, a chapter on monarchs. And it just happened that in the 16th century especially, this was a time of female monarchs. And there's actual ruling queens in Castile, in England, in Scotland, in the smaller states of Germany, there are queen mothers and queen regents in France, there are female rulers in states in Italy. And one of the things I'd never kind of put together is that the first two rulers who issue edicts of toleration, in other words, who allow the toleration of a variety of Christian faiths within their own country are in fact women. Isabel of Hungary, who is ruling as a regent, she's actually a Polish princess who marries the king of Hungary and she issues the first edict of toleration that says, okay, a variety of Christian faiths can be followed in Hungary. And then Jeanne d'albret, who's the ruler of Navarre, the Queen of Navarre, which is a little tiny state, kind of in southern France, what's now southern France, and she's the second one. They don't last very long. Male rulers come back, and then there's plenty of female rulers who are executing heretics right and left. So it's not like all women are more tolerant, but it's just. It's an interesting example to me that the two monarchs that first allow toleration are women. And this is the kind of thing that I wanted to kind of have people understand, because the story of the spread of toleration in Europe is usually told in the story of male theologians and Sebastian Castello and other people like that. It's told as a story of men and kind of a theological story rather than one that says, well, the ruler had to say this, and it's two women. So that pleases me.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
Undoubtedly, these were the women that had the most influence on religious life in the era of reformations more widely, how far did women act within the societal boundaries and structures they encountered, and to what extent did they actually push the boundaries?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, both in both and in some ways, acting within boundaries that society had established for them could also be pushing the boundaries. And here's an example, and here's kind of getting back to women who influence the course of things. This year, 2025, is the 500th anniversary of the wedding of Martin Luther and Catalina Van Bora, who was an ex nun who married Luther. There's a tendency to sort of view what she did as, oh, she became a pastor's wife and la, la, la, you know, and pastor's wives are kind of somewhat denigrated, as we don't see that as anything very great. Well, I mean, she was a nun first, which meant she had been married to Christ, right? So she left her first husband, Jesus, and snuck out. I mean, if you think of it that way, which is the way that people in the 16th century thought of it and the way that her Catholic opponents thought of it is that she and a group of other women who were in this convent in Nimshin snuck out of the convent. They get to Wittenberg, decide to leave convent life to give up the vows of three Permanent vows which they have taken, vows of celibacy and chastity and such. And they then go to Wittenberg, where people are kind of casting around for somebody for her to marry. And one first marriage plans fall apart, and she decides that she's going to marry Martin Luther. And he says, well, people were at that point pressuring Luther to kind of put his money where his mouth. It was about clerical celibacy and to get married. So he did, and he married her. And they had six children and had what we can tell, kind of a quite happy marriage. Okay? So we can say, oh, yeah, whatever. Now she's lived in a convent most of her life. Luther's lived in a monastery as soon as he was an adult. He knows nothing about how to run, like, a household or anything like that. And so what she does is she. He's living in the city of Wittenberg, gives him the monastery where he had been living, which had 50 rooms or 90 rooms or whatever it was. So suddenly there's all these people who come to see the great man and who hang out in the Luther household. Students and followers and hangers on and other faculty from here, there and everywhere. Somebody's got to feed these people and somebody's got to arrange for them to be fed and arrange for them to be housed. And all of that ends up really falling in her lap. So what she does is she creates this sort of new occupation, if I think about new role, which is a pastor's wife. So it's a practical issue, but it's also a theological issue, because one of the critiques of clerical celibacy is that basically the church was hypocritical because most priests had concubines or had housekeepers who also had sex with them. These were very unrespected roles. The women who were priests, concubines or priests, whores, as they were called at the time, were lower social status. They were not well respected. They were dishonorable kinds of folks. And that was what certainly happened was kind of the initial view of Katerina Van Borra from Luther's opponents was that she was this sort of priest whore, while she and other early wives of reformers, some of whom were also ex nuns and some of whom were not, create this new role, respectable role of pastor's wife, within a generation. So they completely changed the societal view of what this was so that by the next generation, the kind of women who are marrying pastors, say by the 1550s, like their daughters, they were daughters of pastors. They were daughters of University professors. They were daughters of physicians. They were the daughters from the educated class of people, highly respected, completely honorable. And we sort of look at them sometimes. The focus has been on the men who sort of transformed people's ideas about clerical celibacy. But partly the women do that by being living examples of their husband's ideas and their own ideas. We believe or we accept this notion that clerical celibacy is not the way to go and that marriage is the best Christian life. So that here's this creation of this completely new social role that had not been there before at all by a group of women and against, quite resentful sometimes on the part of people around them who now had to financially also support with their taxes. They had to support a pastor and his wife and his kids, which they didn't have to do before. So there's another group of women, and that's in my chapter on mothers. But that mother's chapter also looks at kind of spiritual mothers, at abbesses, because another kind of heroic figure coming out of this are abbesses and nuns who either support the Reformation and who either leave their convents like Caterina Fanbora, or transform them kind of into Protestant schools for girls, or who put up a true huge fight when an area's ruler wanted to bring in the Reformation, which meant closing the convents. And so it's women in territory after territory, and papal envoys go, oh, the men have just given up and the women are just standing up for Catholicism, those brave women. But they are the ones who really support convent life. Sometimes nuns were forcibly dragged out of the convent by their parents. There's a scene in Nuremberg where Caritas Pircheimer, who's the abbess, is trying to keep the convent together and parents come in and drag their daughters out, like physically, by force, by their hair. And those are spiritual mothers, pro and anti Catholic.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
I'm ready for my life to change.
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Emily Briffet
This is a man's world.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
You're going to Hollywood.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
That's a link to what I wanted to ask you about, actually. How much authority did a religious background give women in instigating or critiquing reform?
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McDonald's Advertiser
It's important to say that Christianity, whatever version of it, is the patriarchal structure. The Bible has lots of sort of pro patriarchy in it and such, but it also has examples within the Bible. And many of the women who I talk about are very biblically literate. Not all of them. And some of them have just heard it. And they're women whose knowledge of the Bible comes to them orally, but they found in the Bible and then in stories of other women, previous women, they found examples for what they were doing. And so women who did this, they had to sort of say, why is it okay for me to be writing a pamphlet against the church? Or to be not so often preaching but teaching girls or teaching others or teaching children. Why is it okay for me to be doing this? And they often then returned to the Bible and said, well, at certain points in the Bible there are these heroic women. And at certain points also, the situation is so dire that God calls on every single one of us women, too, to stand up for what's right. And that's what they do. And then some of them say it explicitly. Yes, yes, I know that Paul said women should be silent in church, but when the situation is so terrible, even women have to speak. So we find then women kind of going back to looking at these heroic earlier women and saying, well, that's where I find my inspiration. I'm not finding it from outside church tradition or the Bible, but it's there if you look forward as well.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
Another of the chapters that you cover in your book is Mystics, and this is a good point to talk about this. What was the Influence of mystics at this time.
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McDonald's Advertiser
Huge. I mean, my answer keeps going to be huge. But another place that women get sort of the sense that they have the authority to do what they're doing, that God has given the authority, are those women who really feel that they have a direct line to God through mystical experiences, through visions, through voices talking to them. And my Mystics chapter is kind of prophets and visionaries and mystics. The most famous ones of whom are Catholic at the time, Teresa of Avila among them, Rose of Lima, who have this sense about having a direct experience with God. But there's also visionaries and prophets and people who understand themselves to have a direct line of God. Within Protestantism as well, during the course of the English Civil War, there's a lot of prophets. The same thing during the Thirty Years War in Germany, there are prophets. Women kind of crop up. Men too, but women crop up during times of crisis. And it's interesting to me how widely varied the ages were of the women that I'm talking about. Some of the women that I talk about, including mystics, start to have their experiences when they're children, when they're 10, 11, 12, that God appeared to them or that they had some sort of experience that way. And some of them also then continue on their activity and their actions until they're really quite old, like well into their 70s and 80s. So there's a wide range of experiences. Teresa of Avila does have some sort of experiences when she's younger, but she has a kind of dramatic mystical experience when she's middle aged. She was a nun in Spain who had a kind of normal earlier life. And she decides that God is calling her to reform her Carmelite order. She's a member of the Carmelites, which meant to her that God wanted her to make it stricter in its observance of rules, rules of being cut off in the world, rules of poverty in particular. So she forms a separate branch of the Carmelites called the Discalced Carmelites, which means shoeless, mean that they only wore sandals, they didn't wear formal shoes. But then her mystical experiences, God talking to her, convince her that this should be done, that she should do this. And she ends up then traveling all around Spain. The Papal Nuncio called her a restless gad about. I mean, she traveled all over the place reforming the Carmelite order and she gets in trouble. And because people say, well, are her visions really coming from God? And this happened not only with Teresa, but with others as well, that there would then be authorities, religious authorities, who would try to test them to make sure that their voices or the visions they were seeing were divine and not demonic. So Teresa was kind of. The Inquisitions sort of looked into her for a while. They decided that her visions were at least not demonic. On the other hand, getting back to your question about how are mystics, powerful rulers and other powerful people listened to them and consulted with them, and so that they come to have enormous power within their neighborhoods and brought her all the way up to the rulers of Spain, for example, who would consult with these, in some cases, quite ordinary women, so they could have great power. So when you're writing for a modern audience, many of whom are very secular, what I'm trying to look at is what effect does this have in the real world? I mean, in the physical world, not judge whether their visions are real or authoritative or anything like that.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
Were these women's motives solely those of faith? What else compelled them?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Well, in some cases, there's a sense of. For rulers, there's a sense of my dynasty and my legacy, my historical legacy of my family. And I think in other cases, too, it's my family and my community. Very often the ones who I think of as church mothers, which is actually a phrase from Catrina Zell, who is a reformer in Strasbourg, and she calls herself a church mother, which again, to us sounds. But she is a mother of the church, and she is someone who has a broader responsibility, not simply to her own family, but to the church community, to the Christian community in Strasbourg where she lived. Katrina Tsel writes to other women who have been, in one case, women who lived in Little Town. The men had been driven into exile by a ruler who was Catholic. And she writes an open letter of consolation. She publishes it to the suffering women, say, you know, kind of buck up. Put on your manly Abraham, like courage, you know, and God will make sure that you do not despair too long. So they saw their responsibility to the broader community. A woman that I talk about, Kimpavita, who is a West African woman in the 17th century, who's a Catholic Christian and who came to see herself as the embodiment of St Anthony, so that she felt St Anthony was living in her. Part of what she does is she allies herself with one side and faction in a civil war and really stands up to the other side that she feels is being too much supported by the Portuguese and by the Jesuits. She's not out leading troops, but she's inspiring troops, and she's very much part of this kind of revolt that's going on. So there are women who feel that their spiritual responsibility then is toward their community, that God is calling them to aid their community as well as their individual self and their families, and then in some cases, their countries, if they happen to be rulers.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
And of course, one thing you mentioned earlier is how when Reformations unfolded, this instilment of greater religious unity, uniformity, how alternative ideas were set aside. And I think with this, we see the greater migration of populations. Could you tell us about some of the women who experienced this mass movement and their reasons and their journeys?
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McDonald's Advertiser
Yeah, I mean, this is what happens in the Reformation is that people are forced to or decide to move or a combination of being forced in decisions. Some cases it's both at the same time, along with forcing Jews to leave Spain. Slightly later, Muslims are forced to leave Spain as well as the rulers of Spain. Then Isabel and her heirs try to achieve this greater religious uniformity. So there's movement and migration then of Jews and Muslims around Europe. And my chapter on migrants actually starts with a Jewish woman who had converted from Judaism while she was in Spain and Portugal, and then is forced to leave Portugal because Portugal also decides that Jews should be exiled, moves to the Netherlands, Dona Gracia Nasi, she's quite wealthy and she helps other Jews get out of Portugal. Then things in the Netherlands get not so stable either. She and her family move to Italy, and then she ends up then from Italy, then moving to Istanbul to the Ottoman Empire, which was a kind of haven at this point. All along the way, she's helping other Jews get out of the Iberian Peninsula, helping them financially. Sometimes they travel on her family firm spice boats, and she's a very wealthy woman. And then she also then supports Jewish scholars and becomes quite a wealthy person. And she's somebody who's been kind of rediscovered. So that chapter kind of starts with Jews and Muslims also. You know, it looks at different kind of Christian groups that are forced out or moved from one place or another. Huguenots that are forced to leave France, lots of them end up in England or they end up in the Dutch colonies or somewhere else. And some of them write letters. And so we have documents from these journeys that they're on and that they're forced to be on. You know. And then I also looked at women who decide to go further for one reason or another. It's not just people who are forced to leave from one place to another, but people who choose to go from one place to another, including then women who are nuns or who are other kinds of women religious and who decide to move out into the Spanish and Portuguese and French empires. They end up in Canada. There's a wonderful book by Sarah Owens called Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire, about a group of nuns that leave Spain, crosses the Atlantic on their way to the Philippines because they decide that they need to establish a convent in the Philippines. I mean, these are people who've grown up in a convent their whole life and led by a woman who's in her 60s. I mean, the difficulties of traveling in this period are just enormous. And especially if you're a nun, you're trying to kind of maintain some kind of cloisters. So they cross the Atlantic, they end up on the east coast of Mexico. They cross Mexico by donkey, because that's what you had to do at this point, during which time this group of nuns ends up talking to the women, the indigenous women, converts who are at that point taking care of the shrine of the Virgin Guadalupe. And one of the nuns reports about this exchange where the Spanish nuns then talk to these indigenous women about, well, what is this shrine? Oh, you know, this is where the Virgin came down and talked to him and she left his cape. So it's a wonderful sense about. Like, here's an exchange about, you know, it's probably, certainly, if not the most important, one of the most important shrines within Christianity today, with millions of people go to visit every single year. And it's just an example of the women exchanging their opinions about what this is about. Anyway, so this group of nuns then get to the west coast of Mexico, cross over into the Philippines again by ship with a Spanish fleet, establish a convent in there. A small group of them end up saying, oh, the Philippines isn't far enough. We've got to go further. Let's go to Macau. And they end up in Macau, establish the first convent in Macau, get chucked out of Macau because they're Spanish, and the Portuguese run Macau, and they're fighting with Spain at that time, and they end up going back to the Philippines, during the course of which they get shipwrecked and end up in Vietnam and meet with this Vietnamese queen. So it's this great story which I think of, you know, like it's the Tempest, but it's real, you know. So they hear these nuns shipwrecked on the coast of what's now Vietnam. Another group that is in both that chapter and the chapter on martyrs are Anabaptists, radicals who were forced from one place to another in Europe. They sort of ever go eastern and end up in the Ukraine and Russia or they get executed. We think about 20%, probably of the people who are martyred at the time were women. So there's another kind of group of women who stood up for their faith in the face of unbelievably horrific persecution. And as I was doing this, it was. Sometimes I just had to sort of step away and stop for a while because it's really. It's really horrific.
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Mary Wiesner Hanks
What can the extent of these women's actions say in the example of martyrs? It's to die for their faith. What can the extent of their actions tell us about their convictions?
- [29:43]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, that they're willing to die for them. You just said it. There isn't much to say beyond that, that they were so convinced. I mean, the word heroic now sounds kind of maybe cheapened, but they really are. They are so convinced that their view of things is absolutely correct. And to us, again, looking back as 21st century people, in some cases, what they seem to be martyred for seems awfully small to us. You know, we just sort of think, well, am I willing to die for my interpretation of the Last Supper? As opposed to your interpretation of the Last Supper or your interpretation of am I willing to die for the fact that baptism should be something done with adults and not children? Is that something I'm willing to die for? Is adult baptism versus infant baptism for people in the 16th century? These were things that they were willing to die for, and they were that meaningful to them or that important to them that they felt that really this was the correct way. Now, of course, again, the flip side with martyrs is that unfortunately, being religiously oppressed didn't make you necessarily tolerant Puritans when they leave England for religious reasons. And there's a sort of myth of coming to the British colonies in North America. And I mean, they're absolutely intolerant there as well. And so, in fact, by going into the 18th century, I'm able to include women Quakers among them Mary Dyer, for example, who is a Quaker woman from England who came to the British colonies and then goes to Massachusetts and preaches in public, because that's something that Quaker women do. And she's ordered to stop and thrown out of the colony. And she comes back and she's thrown out again. And finally, after four or five times of having exiled her from the colony of Massachusetts, she comes back again, is arrested and is executed by those same Puritans who we kind of say, oh, you know, they left for religious freedom. Well, no, they left for their particular interpretation of things. So she'd Been thrown out. They tried not to martyr her. They wanted her to just go away. And then she. She refuses. So she's a person who I think I kind of see as a kind of hero in that. Or you would see her as being unbelievably kind of stubborn in her unwillingness to just go away and preach somewhere else, which is what the Massachusetts Bay leadership wanted to do.
- [32:00]
Mary Wiesner Hanks
I guess with that we could turn to the final group of women that you mention in your book. That's the missionaries. I think today we have an image in mind when we think of missionaries. What did it look like in this period? How were women involved?
- [32:16]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, the chapter starts with Louisa de Cariel, who is a Spanish upper class woman who came to England as a missionary to convert the English back to being Catholic. This was something that usually women are not allowed to be formal missionaries in this particular way. But England was seen as a kind of emergency case in the time. And Louisa de Caraviel, then officially sort of allowed to go to England, has back and forth with the Jesuits in order to try to convert people back to being Catholic. And she teaches and preaches and writes letters back and forth to her Jesuit advisors about things. So we have words from her own voice as well as people talking about her. She talks to people and she has to learn English to do this because she didn't know English before. And she said, oh, you know, I did this so well that people thought I was a priest in woman's clothing. She goes and talks to people who had been arrested and who were in prison for being Catholic and consoles prisoners in that way. She really, really wants to be a martyr. She doesn't quite accomplish that. She does get sick. She was in prison a couple times. She gets sick. She gets some kind of lung ailment and eventually sort of dies of being ill from being in prison. So it's kind of a martyrdom, but it's not a direct martyrdom, which is what she wants. She really wanted to die for the faith. But most of the rest of the chapter is kind of what people might think of more with missionaries, it's out into the colonial areas, kind of we would think of as informal missionary, both establishing convents around the Spanish Empire in Latin America, for example, but also acting as translators and go betweens between male Christian missionaries, members of religious orders and local people when the men have not yet learned local languages. So there's women who serve as translators and kind of go betweens and emissaries and such. A few cases, we know their names Some of these are indigenous women who are enslaved. They are traveling around with these groups of people. Indigenous women end up teaching children who they are. They're sort of converts in that. So one of the things that's sort of happened in studies of missions lately, meaning the last couple of decades, is we used to sort of talk about the spiritual conquest of the world. And it was really horrible or it was really great, depending on your point of view. Now we look at it as a much more nuanced kind of thing in general. So that there's been lots of great new scholarship on indigenous and African missionaries or people who are spreading the Christian message back to Europe, in fact, so that it's not as much a kind of out from Europe only, but now we're seeing the movement across the Atlantic, back and forth as a back and forth movement with much more movement by indigenous people and by Africans. So this chapter is about that. It's also about women who did not want to convert because in some cases women are very strong converts. They adopt spiritual practices that are extreme and that are very harsh. And they really kind of keep the son. Kateri Takagwitha, who's a Algonquin Mohawk woman, who is a Christian convert in what's now Canada around Montreal, is one of those. But then there are also women who just really refuse to be. They're not interested in the Christian message. They also kind of like the nuns upholding Catholicism in Europe against their local overlord. We have the example of, in many cases in Peru and in other places of women really opposing the Christian message and staying with their original kind of beliefs as well. So there's a whole range of kinds of things, and I think that it's important to see. So the chapter on missionaries is women who act as missionaries and also their response to them.
- [35:31]
Mary Wiesner Hanks
If you had to pick one woman to highlight that you haven't yet mentioned, whose story would you like to share with listeners?
- [35:39]
McDonald's Advertiser
I mean, the Spanish nuns that end up in Macau are just great. Again, thinking about what it meant to go from Spain to macau in the 17th century, you know, that's clearly you can tell from my talking about that. But another person who I ended up coming to admire more than I had before, it was Susanna Wesley, who's the mother of John and Charles Wesley, who she's kind of the mother of Methodism and such. And she'd usually sort of there in just in the background, you know, and she's kind of seen as the person who inspired John and Charles. But when you get right down into sort of nitty gritty of it. She didn't just inspire them. She also was a direct model. Her husband was gone, he was a pastor, and he was gone off on some church deal. And they had left the church in charge of a vicar who was holding these services, and nobody came. And she decided that she would expand what had been her household devotions to invite people from the neighborhood to come and listen to reading the Bible and talking about things, prayer and reading the Bible and discussing various things from the Bible. And a couple hundred people ended up showing up with them. And again, we think, ah, what's she doing? She's reading the Bible, she's praying with people, she's doing these things. But they were so popular that the vicar who was left way many more people were then than his little services. And he wrote to her husband and said, well, you know, your wife is doing this. Da, da, da, da da. And then her husband writes to her and says, well, you should stop. You shouldn't do this. And she writes to him, it's just this wonderful letter she writes to him and she says, well, I'm your wife and if you order me to stop, I'll stop because I'm your wife and I must obey you. But if you just ask me to stop, I won't stop because it's my Christian duty to be doing these things. And I'm bringing so many more people to truer faith and strengthening their faith. I'm doing this great good with this. Well, there's other women who do this very same kind of thing where they work sort of within the rules of what was allowed. And so I think we have a tendency to be very much admiring of the real revolutionaries, of the women who just stand up on the street, street corners, and Argila van Grumbach, who's a great hero of mine, who publishes these pamphlets no matter what, in just his very forthright of things. But then, as you sort of watch about, the way that women realize that they can be effective is that they work kind of within the rules and bend them. She's an example of kind of one of these people where I thought sort of believing all the sort of inspirational, pious biographies of that, and there's lots of that around. But when you kind of get down to it, there's like these women end up being a little more badass than I had anticipated.
- [38:08]
Mary Wiesner Hanks
We've spoken about so many extraordinary women. Are there any similarities that you can see across them?
- [38:18]
McDonald's Advertiser
Well, they made it into history, which is one thing that makes them different from any other woman. I think that that's one of the things that I try to get across, to remind people, to let them know that any source that we have, certainly sources by women, there's much less that's available about them than about men. I mean, Katharina Fanbora, for example, we have many, many, many, many, many letters from Luther to her. And we know she wrote to him because in his letter, he says, thank you for your letter. Okay, well, he was a great man. And so his letters are all saved and then they're published. But we don't have a single. Not a single letter from Katarina Fombora to Luther survives. So that I think that one of the things that unites them is that the fact that we know about them means that they're extraordinary. A lot of the sources on which this is based also come out of records of people, hostile women, in other words, trial records, inquisition records, where women's voices. They're not women who left anything recorded, but women's voices come through filtered through many male authorities. There are women who, for one reason or other, came to the attention of something, a local authority, so that they did something that was out of the realm of what was normal in some ways for women. I was talking about the creation of the role of pastor's wife. Sometimes we've seen these things as being not very extraordinary when at the time, they were something that was really dramatic. And I think that's one of the things I want to try to get across in this. You know, there's some things like martyrdom, that if you're thinking about who's doing the martyring, not just being a martyr, or many of the mystics and other women, too, carry out really extreme pious practices that we would now call self harm. And that's something to try to understand, why would somebody do this as they're trying to sort of emulate Christ in his suffering? That might seem strange to some people, but I think that's the kind of extraordinary nature of what has survived.
- [40:20]
Mary Wiesner Hanks
Considering all of these stories, what do you think is one thing that we could learn from these women?
- [40:28]
McDonald's Advertiser
Several things we could maybe learn from them. One is never bet against misogyny. In some cases, there's a direct legacy. In other words, institutions that women set up in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in Catholicism, but in other religions as well. I mean, they're still with us. See some of these religious orders and some of the groups that Mary Ward, for example, who I briefly mentioned, sets up something called the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It's suppressed in the 16th century. She's thrown in prison. That now is worldwide. There's people who understand themselves to be Mary Ward women, and it's devoted to social service and toleration and work with refugees, because Mary Ward was a refugee at certain points. So I think that that's one of the things that it's not just something that's in the past. There's a direct institutional legacy. The Ursulines, for example, they still exist today. So there's groups that are established that exist today. Kateri Teagufe, for example, now she's a saint, but that's only really recently. When I first started to write about her, she wasn't yet a saint. So there's people who look back at these individuals who read their works today as not just someone from the past, but as an inspiration to them in what they're doing today. And I think some of the reclamation of them that lots of it comes, or most of it comes from academia, from academic historians and literary scholars and such, but some of it comes from the women and the traditions that they. They're really trying to look back at their founders and in a way that's both celebratory and also critical. And also, we're in a moment right now, I said, you know, never bet against misogyny. You know, we're in a moment of resurgent patriarchy around the world, including in all kinds of religious establishments, not just Christian. And, you know, I sort of think that many of the women that I talk about in the book would absolutely not be surprised at this what's going on today, but they would probably be disappointed. It's hard to try to think what people who lived 500 years ago would think about what's going on now, but they would really not be surprised because they were also in some cases, in prison and certainly directly criticized for what they were saying and some cases rioting and doing because they were women.
- [42:23]
Emily Briffet
That was Merry Wiesner Hanks speaking to Emily Briffet. Mary is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee's Department of History. Her book is Women in the A Global History and is available now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.
- [42:49]
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