Workshops: Faiths

Workshop 23: Did Women Have a Reformation?

Conveners:

• Catherine Annette Grisé, English, McMaster University
• Colleen Seguin, History, Valparaiso University
• Edith Snook, English, University of Western Ontario
  

This workshop considered if such periodic divisions as "medieval" and "early modern" have obscured or predetermined our perceptions of women's roles, writings, and involvement with religion in sixteenth-century England. While the Reformation has been described as a major transition in ecclesiastical and political structures or an event or events inflected by class, this workshop will seek to inscribe gender in histories of the Reformation in England and to consider issues of continuity and change through the religious expressions of women, in their households and in society. We placed evidence of the religious experiences (from devotional literature and diaries) and material practices (such as patronage, political, and social roles) of several early modern women in relationship to women from the late-medieval period to ask several questions: Do women--queens, gentlewomen, commoners, mothers, daughters and others--destabilize the elite/popular distinction made in many discussions of Reformation history? Were expressions of women's piety materially, socially, and theologically changed by the Reformation? To what extent did the writers under discussion see themselves as reformers or upholders of tradition? How do the continuities in the acceptance of women's engagement with religion, through the domestic sphere, patronage, and devotional writing, configure how we understand the effect of an English reformation on women's religious expressions?