Culture during the Two Reformations 121poor. The Church tried to impose strict sexual mores on ordinary people,
while encouraging gestures of deference toward social superiors.
The Role of Women
Although convents and nunneries were almost always abolished in a
Protestant state, reformers nonetheless encouraged women to take an
active role in the religious process of being saved. Protestant women, like
men, were encouraged to read the Bible themselves, or, as most could not
read, to have it read to them. In the case of Anabaptists, women appear to
have made decisions about not baptizing their children; most Anabaptist
martyrs were female. More women than men seem to have converted to
Calvinism in France, perhaps attracted by special catechism classes, or by
the fact that in Calvinist services, men and women sang psalms together.
Yet Protestant reformers still believed women were subordinate to men.
Although a few women published religious pamphlets in the early 1520s
and others undertook devotional writing and publishing later, women could
not be ministers nor could they hold offices within the new churches.
Calvin believed that the subjugation of women to their husbands was cru
cial for the maintenance of moral order. Protestant denominations pro
vided a domestic vision of women, emphasizing their role in the Christian
household.
The fact that a Protestant minister could now marry, however, reflected
a more positive view not only of women but of the family as a foundation
of organized religion. One pamphleteer admonished husbands that their
wives were “no dish-clouts... nor no drudges, but fellow-heirs with them
of everlasting life, and so dear to God as the men.”
Because they no longer considered marriage a sacrament, Protestants
also reluctantly accepted divorce in limited cases. Luther viewed adultery,
impotence, and abandonment as reasons for divorce, but he condemned
Henry VIII’s effort to divorce Catherine of Aragon. Divorce remained quite
rare and occurred only after a long, expensive legal process only the rich
could afford.
In Catholic areas, women could still rise to positions of importance in
convents, or in the new charitable religious orders. But the Council of Trent
reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s ideal of female chastity, reinforced by the
widespread cult of the Virgin Mary. The chapbooks of the Catholic Reforma
tion still taught that the female body was a source of sin, and therefore had
to be controlled.
Witches came to reflect superstitious aspects of popular religion.
Catholic and Protestant churchmen identified and persecuted witches as
part of the campaign to acculturate the masses with “acceptable” beliefs.
Witch hunts peaked during the first half of the seventeenth century. In the
southwestern states of the Holy Roman Empire alone, more than 300
witch trials resulted in the execution of 2,500 people between 1570 and