Women, religion, and reform in sixteenth-century Geneva
Elisabeth Mary Wengler, Boston College

Date: 1999

Abstract

My dissertation explores the significance of the Protestant Reformation for women in Geneva through an examination of early printed books and manuscripts and sources from the Genevan State Archives. My study challenges the notion that women simply accepted the changes wrought by the establishment of the Reformation. Before the Reformation's establishment in 1536, Genevan women actively participated in the debates about religious reform. I have discovered that even after 1536, women continued to discuss their religious ideas and even challenge the new pastors. At the center of women's religious activism was an attempt to preserve or increase the power they had traditionally exercised in the home, society, and religious life. They did not always succeed, but what is remarkable are their attempts to maneuver around institutional arrangements which sought to regulate their religious beliefs and behavior. Chapter 1 treats the struggles over power and authority in Genevan politics and religion between 1519 and 1555. Chapter 2 provides an overview of Genevan women's religious activities before and after the Reformation. In chapter 3, 1 analyze Sister Jeanne de Jussie's Petite Chronique which recounts the resistance of Geneva's sisters of Saint Clare to the Protestant reformers' attempts to close the convent and force the nuns to marry. In chapter 4, 1 examine the religious treatises of Marie Dentière, a former nun. I argue that while she engaged in discussions of the major theological controversies of her day, as did male Protestant theologians, her interpretation of Scripture challenged male clerics' notions about gender and women's religious roles. In chapter 5, 1 look at cases where women came before the Genevan Consistory, a quasi-ecclesiastical faith and morals court, and find that women did not quietly return to the pews after 1536. 1 argue that women continued to articulate their ideas about religious change well after the Reformation was established. My study demonstrates that women in Reformation Geneva challenged and worked around the limits male religious and secular elites placed upon their individual consciences, religious activities, and moral behavior.

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