Workshops: Faiths

Workshop 24: Gender, Piety, and Spiritual Identity

Conveners:

• Amanda Eurich, History, Western Washington University
• Carol Janson, Art History, Western Washington University
• Diane Wolfthal, Art History, Arizona State University

Workshop Summary: This workshop probed the ways in which Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women functioned as crucial agents in the revitalization of spiritual life and ritual, the reconfiguration of charitable activities and practice, and the perpetuation of the boundaries of religious community in early modern Europe. We reexamined the private/public dichotomy of the early modern period and its relevance to gender by reconsidering the representation of women in religious texts and visual culture, and the breadth of women's devotional, ritual, and charitable activities.

Workshop Description: This workshop addressed a number of questions raised in plenary session III, particularly the contours of the spiritualities of early modern women and their representations. We begin with a brief introduction (10 minutes), asking participants to introduce themselves, their interest in the workshop, and their scholarly focus. Then we moved on to a discussion of the readings and distributed images and tables. In the first 40-minute period, we considered the gendering of spiritual identity and ritual in the Jewish and Christian faiths. This section of the workshop considered the multivalence of ritual and practice by focusing on excerpts from Karant-Nunn and Weissler, in tandem with textual and visual representations of women in Jewish and Christian homiletical and devotional literature. Central to our concerns were the ways in which these representations challenge or reinforce the boundaries of female piety. How do we understand the effort of sacred/secular officials to control the spiritual experience of early modern women, to define their relationship to the spiritual in communally-sanctioned forms, and to perpetuate specifically gendered rituals of purification and integration? How profoundly gendered is the sociology of religious knowledge and ritual?

In the second part of the workshop, we moved to an examination of women's charitable actions in the public sphere. Of particular interest were the ways in which women became critical agents of spiritual revival, reinforcing the contours of religious identity and reintegrating the poor into the larger sacred community.

In the final ten minutes of the workshop, we encouraged participants to return to the larger question raised by these secondary and primary sources. How did religious ritual, devotional practice, and charitable action provide women with access to sacred power and authority? We hoped to attract participants eager to explore and share their own research and insights on the workshop topic.