Between Reform and Persecution: Religious Women and the Preservation of Christian Religious Minority Communities of the Early German Reformations in Southeast Germany, 1523-1528

William Fiedler

Rich historiographical traditions related to both the analysis of early modern expectations of the social and religious roles of women and how women interacted with those expectations, as well as the emergence of religious coexistence and toleration between rival western Christian confessions that emerged and solidified during the sixteenth century. This thesis aims to connect the two traditions and argue that women of elite social status were able to utilize and subvert the expectations for their gender in a growingly paternalistic society to construct arguments for religious coexistence in the early years of the Reformation era in the 1520s in what is modern-day southeastern Germany.This thesis argues that the early years of the German Reformations and the shifting expectations for women in the early modern era enabled women of elite status within the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire to construct arguments for the continued existence of their minority Christian communities. In these efforts, women of elite status played into patriarchal presumptions about their social and religious standings in which they downplayed their educations and spiritual understandings to argue for the continuation of their faith communities along the lines of shared Christian ideology and beliefs in a time when the lines between religious communities of the early modern era had not fully developed. This thesis also aims to bring forward the conversation of the emergence of religious coexistence and toleration between the different confessions of western Christendom in the early modern era. The discourse on religious coexistence has largely focused on the emergence of such practices in the 1560s, 70s, and 80s after European populations were unable to establish and enforce an ideal religious orthodoxy within their communities, which prompted the widescale emergence of ways for those populations to find ways to coexist with competing Christian religious groups in order to maintain peace in their communities. Rather, this thesis argues that such trends emerged at a very localized level as early as the 1520s, as members of early religious minority groups sought to ensure the continued existence of their local religious minority populations. By examining and comparing the writings of Caritas Pirckheimer (Catholic) in the evangelical Imperial City of Nuremberg and Argula von Grumbach (evangelical) in the Catholic Duchy of Bavaria, this thesis argues that both women utilized and subverted expectations for their gender in the shifting religious and social reforms of the 1520s, in which they constructed arguments for the continued existence of their specific religious minority group in territories which had adopted adversarial Christian belief systems. This thesis will thereby present these writings as early arguments for the emergence of localized calls for religious toleration and coexistence within the early years of the German Reformations in the 1520s. As well as, that the shifting and at times lax enforcement of social and religious expectations for early modern women enabled both women to construct their arguments for their respective minority faiths.

Between Reform and Persecution: Religious Women and the Preservation of Christian Religious Minority Communities of the Early German Reformations in Southeast Germany, 1523-1528

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