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Marc R. Forster, Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster, by Simone Laqua-O’Donnell, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1546–1547, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev290
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This monograph by Simone Laqua-O’Donnell makes an important contribution to our understanding of the experience of women in a Catholic German city in the era of Tridentine Reform (1580s to 1620s). Münster provides an interesting setting, since it was the setting for the radical Anabaptist Kingdom (1534–5), where some women took active leadership roles and which instituted polygamy. That history particularly highlighted and problematised the place of women in Münster in the decades around 1600.
Laqua-O’Donnell’s study examines nuns, female piety, family and marriage, deviant women, and concubinage. The chapters on nuns, piety and concubinage come closest to the central theme of ‘women and the Counter-Reformation’. The chapter on nuns confirms what we know about the impact of Tridentine reform on convents in Germany and beyond. As elsewhere, the nuns in Münster were forced into enclosure and, also as elsewhere, they often resisted this policy, drawing support from their families in the city. The eventual success of enclosure changed the lifestyle of nuns, but it did not completely break their ties with the surrounding community, for whom nuns prayed and provided charity, and with whom they sometimes shared a church.
