The Reformation in Germany, to most of the people, was a reasonably cut-and-dried affair. Once Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door, this patchwork portion of the Holy Roman Empire threw off the thousand-year-old shackles of the Roman Catholic Church. Churches had been stripped. Papal officers peddling indulgences had been run out of city. Jubilant Katharina von Boras had been swept into the arms of smitten Martin Luthers. Not so, says Amy Leonard. Leonard takes as her instance the intractable Dominican nuns who survived-and sometimes, even thrived-in the decidedly Protestant Strasbourg of the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. These nuns used no matter means got here handy to keep up their spiritual id and their vocation in a metropolis bent first on fully dissolving the convents after which on merely ready the growing older nuns out by trying to starve the convents of recent novices. However, two of town's eight Dominican convents survived till 1792, when the French Revolution disadvantaged them of their usefulness to their neighborhood.
Leonard doesn’t paint Strasbourg as a "typical" German metropolis, astutely noting that "nothing is typical in the fractured world of the Holy Roman Empire" (7). She focuses as a substitute on what made the connection between the nuns and Strasbourg's metropolis council so distinctive: "accommodation, flexibility, and negotiation" (9). The metropolis proved surprisingly lenient-perhaps too lenient, Leonard later notes-when deciding what to do with its feminine spiritual, a lot of whom got here from guild households or the native the Aristocracy. That Strasbourg progressively deserted the notion of fully dissolving the convents spoke to the persevering with want to coach its daughters earlier than marriage. This, Leonard argues, was key to town's usually benign remedy of its feminine spiritual whilst these ladies refused to desert Catholic gown and rituals. Whatever the confession of the lecturers themselves, Strasbourg's main households wanted locations the place their daughters can be stored safe-and chaste-until an acceptable marriage was organized. Utility turned the nuns' catchphrase; they fervently maintained their "usefulness to the community … measured by how much [they] loved, supported, and helped" town's inhabitants (46).
A much less even handed studying of Leonard's sources, most of that are letters and numerous official paperwork from Strasbourg's personal collections, would possibly suggest from the council's frequent concessions that the physique was full of crypto-Catholics solely biding their time till this Reformation enterprise burned itself out. While it’s true that there have been possible quite a few Strasbourgeois who secretly remained Catholic, many within the metropolis embraced the Reformation and would have most well-liked that lay faculties for his or her daughters, had any existed. Nails within the Wall adroitly skirts allegations that the nuns ran roughshod over the council by together with cases through which the nuns didn’t get their means. Some novices had been reclaimed by mother and father. Convents had been merged or closed fully. For each Anna Wurm, who resisted her brothers' efforts to take away her and her dowry from a convent, there have been a number of novices like fourteen-year-old Margarethe Kniebs, whose father efficiently wrested her away from the nuns at St. John's Nicholas-in-Undis (66). No matter how helpful a convent was to a neighborhood and irrespective of how desperately a woman might need needed to stay, no prioress may maintain an unprofessed novice's father from eradicating her.
Leonard interprets almost all main sources herself, whereas making even handed use of different historians' work, prominently incorporating Lyndal Roper's assertion that "the urban reformation, both as a religious and a social movement, must be understood as a theology of gender," with some necessary {qualifications}, into her bigger thesis that mixes the nuns' frequent exploitation of their gender together with their coverage of accommodating and negotiating change with the Strasbourg metropolis council (4). Nails within the Wall is at its strongest when portraying the nuns at their weakest, struggling to outlive and keep relevance in a Protestant metropolis. Leonard's weakest chapters are these detailing first the Augsburg Interim, adopted in June 1548, and the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. With Catholicism formally protected, Strasbourg's nuns are not a struggling and technically unlawful minority conserving afloat by offering a helpful service to their neighborhood . It appears in these chapters that neither the sisters nor Leonard has sufficient to do in Strasbourg.
Leonard affords a refreshing reprieve from the final assumption that the majority early fashionable nuns in Germany fled their convents in a mad rush to marry and secularize themselves. Though sometimes floundering when Catholicism reigns supreme in Strasbourg, she retains her work steadily tied to her thesis: that "accommodation, flexibility, and negotiation" from each the nuns and the uniquely tolerant metropolis council ensured that the convents, although technically unlawful, maintained their mission to supply a crucial service to Strasbourg.
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