In the sixteenth century, as shock waves from the Reformation rocked the established church not only in Germany and the Netherlands but also in France, England, and Italy, officials strove to maintain doctrinal purity, whether Catholic or Protestant. Increasingly they targeted women, often repeating Saint Jerome’s dictum that women tended to be the first to spread heresy.
As England underwent its dynastic swings between Catholicism and Protestantism, women of both faiths suffered for their beliefs. During the reign of Henry VIII, Anne Askew’s refusal to acknowledge the doctrine of transub-stantiation led to her arrest. During her imprisonment, she was tortured on the rack. Refusing to recant, she was burned for her beliefs. With the return to Catholicism under Mary I, many Protestant women, holding strongly to their religious faith, refused to worship as Catholics. Of the nearly three hundred people executed for their beliefs in the reign of Mary I, approximately one-fifth were women; however, not all women arrested for their religious beliefs under Mary were martyred. In 1558, officials arrested Elizabeth Young for smuggling Protestant literature into England. After enduring many interrogations, in which she was called a whore and accused of being a priest’s concubine, Elizabeth was temporarily released to care for her children, and, fortunately for her, Mary soon died and was succeeded by her Protestant half sister. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, several Catholic women were arrested and executed. For refusing to plead guilty or not guilty, Margaret Clitherow was pressed to death with stones. Margaret Ward, who sheltered a priest, refused to recant and receive the queen’s pardon; she was executed.
There were conflict and violence in France as well. As John Calvin’s writings and teachings were disseminated, a Protestant minority established itself in the largely Catholic country. Calvin actively formed relationships with many French noblewomen who either converted or displayed Calvinistic leanings. In 1557, a Calvinist communion service was forcibly invaded, and twenty-two women were arrested. Philippe de Luns, one of the arrested women, was imprisoned, tortured, and executed; she was one of the first female French martyrs. Madelein Mailly, comptesse de Roye, converted to Calvinism and tried to influence Queen Catherine de Medicis. Imprisoned by the court’s Catholic party, she was later released and in 1563 helped negotiate a peace treaty to end the first French war of religion. Not all adherents to Calvinism were noblewomen, and Jean Crespin recorded their stories in his History of True Testimonies. Marguerite Le Riche, a wife of a Parisian bookseller, refused to attend mass and was arrested, interrogated, and burned.
In the Catholic strongholds of Italy and Spain, fewer women were arrested for holding explicitly Protestant beliefs than in England and France. Before the Inquisition was officially instituted in Italy by Pope Paul III in 1542, fewer than 5 percent of the women were accused of “Lutheranism.” However, some Italian women were charged with heresy. Franceschina, the wife of a silk weaver, was charged with having visited various Catholic churches in Venice and having ripped the rosary beads out of women’s hands. The tailoress Catherina was also brought before the Inquisition for heretical leanings: she had, it was alleged, discussed the writings of Saint Paul with men, and she had denigrated journeymen who followed Catholic ritual as ignorant or mad. In Spain, few women were arrested for Protestant beliefs since the country was more concerned with its converso Christians, or Christians with Muslim or Jewish heritage.
As society was torn apart and reconfigured during the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, brave women of all faiths clung to their beliefs. Many refused to recant, even when faced with imprisonment, torture, or death. Women chose and witnessed about their faith, even to the point of martyrdom.
Kory Bajus
See also Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Work
Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special and Memorable. . . . London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1648.
Secondary Works
Crawford, Patricia. Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720. London and New York: Rout-ledge, 1996.
Davis, Natalie Zemon.“City Women and Religious Change.” Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.
Giles, Mary E., ed. Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Greaves, Richard L., ed. Triumph over Silence:
Women in Protestant History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
Snyder, C. Arnold, and Linda A. Huebert Hecht.
Profiles of Anabaptist Women: Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Lauier University Press, 1996.
World History
