Abstract
The Hussite tradition historically has been excluded by the mainstream of Reformation historiography. Czech-language scholarship treating Hussite history have made few significant advances in the study of women and there has been limited attention given to the role women played in the Hussite tradition. The gap in Anglophone historiography is even more apparent. This essay considers Klára, a sixteenth-century Prague housekeeper, Marta, a learned figure contemporary with Klára who withstood civil and ecclesiastical officials, and Anna Marie Trejtlarová, an early seventeen-century educated laywoman. Their names are almost completely unknown outside Czech historiography. An examination of their lives and faith by means of the surviving primary sources and relevant historiography provides a window through which to observe the nature of religious reform in the Prague context in the world of Reformations. What is striking is the role of theology and the nature of female agency in the examination of these women. The essay endeavours to use these case studies to present a preliminary answer to the question: What do women tell us about Reformation? This study reveals the world of religious reform more fully by situating women and female agency in an active capacity.
Highlights
The history of religious practice in the Latin West has often excluded women from the main narratives and they have been overlooked in traditional scholarship
By looking at three specific females within the Hussite movement in the post-medieval world, it is possible to expand our understanding of the ways in which women reflected and informed the impulses of Reformations that swept the religious worlds of early modern
In the annals of the Hussite phenomena, we find women surging to the forefront in communities of violence and in the context of religiously-motivated riots
Summary
The history of religious practice in the Latin West has often excluded women from the main narratives and they have been overlooked in traditional scholarship. Bainton, have been informed partly by the desire to put theology back into Reformation studies, in response to those who have sought to reduce the field to political or social history and to address the thesis that reform (on the part of any of the churches) achieved, at most, confessionalization as a mode of group identity.4 Such identity has been assumed to have been largely imposed from above. By looking at three specific females within the Hussite movement in the post-medieval world, it is possible to expand our understanding of the ways in which women reflected and informed the impulses of Reformations that swept the religious worlds of early modern. There cannot be a single explanation or unified narrative for the simple reason that the female experience was shaped by a myriad of factors.
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