The Formation of the Female Self in Reformation Germany
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REWRITING EVE: THE FORMATION OF THE FEMALE SELF IN REFORMATION GERMANY A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree H\5T Master of Arts • £ 4 3 In History by Rachel Elizabeth Davis Small San Francisco State University May 2016 Copyright by Rachel Elizabeth Davis Small 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Rewriting Eve: The Formation of the Female Self in Reformation Germany by Rachel Elizabeth Davis Small, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts: History at San Francisco State University. Laura Lisy-Wagner, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of History Sarah Curtis, Ph.D. Professor, Department of History Jarbel Rodriguez, Ph.D. Professor, Department of History REWRITING EVE: THE FORMATION OF THE FEMALE SELF IN REFORMATION GERMANY Rachel Elizabeth Davis Small San Francisco, California 2016 This thesis aims to reconstruct the formation of the female self during the Protestant Reformation by contextualizing women’s writings as, not only a response to discourse produced by men, but also as an independent production of opinion. This study will shed light on the highly historicized evolution of the gender hierarchy, how the religious discourse of the Protestant Reformation changed that hierarchy, and how those changes functioned in creating space for female agency in the birth of the self. The central texts to be examined in this study come from Katharina Schiitz Zell, the wife of an early reformed pastor, Argula von Grumbach, a noblewoman and first female Protestant writer, and the male voices that spoke to these women, such as Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and their respective husbands and family, among many others. The discourse created by such men constructed the female identity within a strict topos of either the Virgin Mary or Eve. This thesis will show how the texts written by women and about women construct the self as being between the angel and harlot paradigms: it is in this collision between the authority and the other that the self emerges. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Chair, Thesis Committee Date PREFACE I began this project during my first semester of graduate school at San Francisco State University in an attempt to put women back into the study of history. I wanted to give women more than the marginal subjective role that I found assigned to them within the texts I encountered repeatedly in my undergraduate studies. In order to locate women’s agency in the early modem era, I looked to Protestant women’s published writings. In these texts, I found more than agency, and discovered unique identities and strong senses of self. I would like to thank my thesis committee and mentors, Professor Laura Lisy- Wagner, Professor Sarah Curtis, and Professor Jarbel Rodriguez, for assisting me in this arduous, but enlightening, project of tracing the Reformation’s impact on women and the self. I also want to thank my family and friends who supported me as I, too, found my own distinctive, and sometimes chimeric, self during this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ...............................................................................................................................1 Chapter I: Reformation Discourse on Female Identity........................................................ 18 The Virgin and the Wife.............................................................................................23 The Preacher and the Prophet ........................................................................38 Conclusion...................................................................................................................42 Chapter II: Argula von Grumbach......................................................................................... 45 A Wife ........................................................................................................................ 50 A Preacher...................................................................................................................55 A Prophet.....................................................................................................................62 Conclusion...................................................................................................................66 Chapter III: Katharina Schtitz Zell........................................................................................ 69 A Pastor’s W ife.......................................................................................................... 71 A Church Mother........................................................................................................ 77 A Preacher and Teacher..............................................................................................84 Conclusion...................................................................................................................89 Chapter IV: Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 92 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................... 101 1 Introduction In a 1522 edition of Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament, a woodcut by Lucas Cranach depicts the Whore of Babylon wearing the triple-tiered papal tiara and riding a seven-headed beast of Revelation. The crowd gathers around the beast, gazing up in awe at the woman holding a censer, a symbol of the Catholic Church’s gilded rituals that the reformers detested. The whore symbolizes the unfaithful Church and is the embodiment of earthly evil that will bring the Apocalypse. This allegorical portrayal of the Pope as the Antichrist was a common theme in Protestant Germany. Lyndal Roper aptly describes the motivation behind these works: “Theological difference took anthropomorphic form.”1 In other words, the Protestant leaders assigned their enemies a body in order to efficiently target it and embed it within lived experience. As was traditional, that body was female. Propaganda depicted the Pope as a tawdry and dangerous woman who was a threat to social life and righteous, Christian living. The Virgin Mary was no longer regal, but simply a Christian mother who did not warrant individual worship. The Devil took the form of female witches who plagued local communities and were burnt at the stake in a display of religious triumph. The Reformation sought to Christianize daily life, and in turn, imbued ordinary moments with new meaning. 1 Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43. 2 The religious schism of the German Protestant Reformation brought with it great social and cultural change. In order to oppose Catholic rituals and sacraments, which reformers believed contradicted truth derived directly from Scripture, Lutherans targeted social roles and aspects of daily life that were closely tied to Catholic rites such as priests, nuns, and concepts of marriage and family. The Lutheran pastor differed from the Catholic priest and monks, because he spoke in the vernacular and interpreted Scripture in ways that made it more understandable for his flock. The pastor’s wife was a figure in direct opposition to the nun. They were both pious female figures who were lifted up by their respective faiths as paragons of womanhood, but the pastor’s wife lived amongst the community and was a celebration of domestic life unlike the celibate, cloistered nun. There was constant tension between these religious and social characters, even amongst Protestants who divided amongst themselves within decades of Luther’s Reformation, and thus provided space for new discourses on identity to emerge, which is the central concern of this project. Secular authorities, at the behest of reformed leaders, dismantled civic-run brothels, local convents and monasteries, and narrowed women’s chances of independence. Marriage became a civic act when it was stripped of its status as a sacrament and its validity rested on parental and secular authority. The secular government was now able to punish marital transgressions, and therefore, Lutheran theology controlled another aspect of daily life and this was supported by the state legislature. By stripping communities of alternative places such as convents for women’s 3 economic independence, and by highlighting the centrality of marriage in Scripture, women’s public roles and opportunities were severely limited. Marriage was so elevated that “the discourse of wifehood began to displace that of womanhood altogether.”3 Protestants believed that God created women to be wives and mothers, but nothing more. This meant that a woman’s identity was boiled down to a mere few elements. She had no other opportunities to fulfill her personal or social purpose, and she could not escape into a convent. Even clergy were urged to marry. Thus came the new role of pastor’s wife. This new type of marriage fell under the community’s gaze and acted as a role model. The pastor’s wife became the definitive role for women, and her actions in her marriage were meant to be an instruction manual for her fellow Christian women. The pastor’s marriage was set up for public consumption. Women’s bodies once again bore