Faith, hope and gender. Women’s religious experiences in the early modern period

Abstract

This paper charts both the wide variety of Christian women’s experiences of their faith in the early modern period, especially in context of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the way in which the historiography of this phenomenon has developed throughout the twentieth century. Through examples from a wide range of pious women, lay and cloistered, Protestant and Catholic, European, American and Asian, the similarities and differences between their reactions to religious change, everyday piety and other types of religious involvement become clear. Some nuns protested their forced veiling, while others lamented being removed from their convents during the Protestant reformation, maintained enclosure while traveling great distances and fought with their confessors for more personalized attention. Similarly, lay women acted as benefactresses for Jesuit schools and defied laws in order to support their faith, but also changed confessors when they felt their needs were not being met.