“No Better than a Brothel”

Abstract

Chapter 1 argues that reformers initially used a rhetorical dichotomy between the “false Christians” and “true Christians” that inverted the traditional spiritual hierarchy of nuns and laywomen by using “spiritual women” and “common women” (whores) in an unconventional way. This inversion produced verbal, sporadic physical, and then organized community violence against the nuns from the first rhetorical calls for the “storming” of convents in the early 1520s until the Peasants’ War. The impulse to use of force to implement reforms in convents grew as officials, visitors, rulers, and even the nuns resorted to new forms of verbal and physical violence to defend their confessional position. This chapter shows how the discussion by Luther and his followers about nuns morphed into a unique form of iconoclasm directed against convents, including violence against nuns.