The Age of Reformations andWomen’s Lives

Pieter de Hooch

The Bedroom

(1658-1660)

I. Background: The Three Strands of Western Misogyny

1. Greek Philosophy and Women’s Inferiority

Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael)

School of Athens, detail

(1509-10)

a. Aristotelian Dualities

b. Physiological and Psychological Implications

SuperiorInferior

Action Inaction

Completion Incompletion

Possession Deprivation

Hot Cold

Rational Irrational

MaleFemale

2. Roman Law and Women’s Dependence

a. Paterfamilias, patria potestas, and manus

b. Legal personhoodc. T.E.’s Resolution of Women’s Rights

(1632)

“If a man beat an outlaw, a traitor, a pagan, his villein, or his wife, it is dispunishable, because by the law common these persons can have no action.”

3. Christianity

a. Eve, Mary, and the Magdalene: the Inherent Contradiction

b. The Official Role of Women: St. Paul’s EpistlesRembrandt

St. Paul at his Writing Desk

(1629-30)

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Galatians 3:27-8

“I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet women shall be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness with modesty.”

I Timothy 2:11-15

II. Implications: Medieval and Renaissance Roles

A. The Ideal Woman1. Daughter, Wife,

Mother2. Nun

B. Outside the “Norm”1. Widows2. Prostitutes3. “The Nag”

Vermeer

Woman Sewing

(1657-8)

C. Did Women Have a Reformation?

1. The Seminal Question: “Did women have a Renaissance?”

2. Protestant Reforms: the “Protestant Wife”

a. Religious Gender Ideology:“Differentiated Equality”

“Now hereupon St. Paul concludeth ‘that there is neither Greek nor Jew… male nor female, but that Jesus Christ is one in all of us, and all we are one in him…’ Yet notwithstanding, St Paul meant not to say that there be no diversity of degree… for we know that there are masters and servants, magistrates and subjects: in a household there is the good man which is the head and the good wife which ought to be the subject. We know that this order is inviolable, and our Lord Jesus Christ is not come into the world to make such confusion as to abolish that which was established by God his father…”

- John Calvin,

Sermon on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians

b. The Priesthood of All Believers and Women Preachers

1. Luther’s View2. Margaret Fell: Women’s Preaching Justified

(1666)

3. Argula Von Grumbach (1520s)

“But how far they wrong the apostle’s intentions in these scriptures… Let this word of the Lord, which was from the beginning, stop the mouths of those who oppose women’s speaking in the power of the Lord: for he hath put enmity between the woman and the serpent…”

Argula Von Grumbach

(the first female Protestant preacher, 1520s-30s)

c. Clerical Celibacy, Marriage as the Call, and the Closing of Nunneries: pros and cons

d. Post-Trent Catholicism, Saints, and Mysticism

1. Rigid enclosure

2. The New Orders: Education and Charitya. Angela Merici and the Ursulines (1535)b. Vincent de Paul and the Daughters of Charity

Angela Merici, ca. 1535

c. Mystics and Saints1. St. Teresa of Avila (1515-82)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

St. Teresa in Ecstasy

(1647-52)

e. “Equal Opportunity Persecution:” Prostitutes, Witches, and Infanticides

1. The Criminalization of Prostitution

2. The Doctrine of Satanic Witchcrafta. Malleus Maleficarum (1486)b. The Early Modern Difference: conscious

agreementc. The Likely Suspects

3. Infanticidea. Melefica or Pragmatic Choice?b. The Likely Suspects