Condition of Women in European Society

This research examines the fluctuating condition of women in European society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The plan of the research will be to set forth salient characteristics of the condition of women in three periods: the Renaissance (ca. 1350-1550), Reformation (ca. 1520-1600), and Enlightenment (ca. 1680-1780), and to discuss era-to-era changes that can be identified in social attitudes toward women.

But one must begin with the big picture. Between 1350, which takes in the Renaissance, and 1780, which takes in the Enlightenment, the single most important feature of women's social history that is worthy of note is the transition of prevailing social consciousness from belief in the power of magic, spirituality, and witchcraft to a belief in the power of reason and science as the prevailing method of explaining he condition of the world. In the earlier period there was by and large a socially uninterrogated idea that women could be witches and could affect their environment by way of magic, and vice versa. By the end of the later period, belief in the power of witches to influence reality was considered a superstition. If it was not the case that women's social status had not necessarily reached anything like equality with men's, at least state power was not enforcing burnings at the stake or trials by fire.

The influence of Malleus Maleficarum, published 1485-1490, appears to have been decisive for popular opinion about women in Europe during the Rena

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e rather messily involved in papal politics, and she died from such involvement combined with what appears to have been a lifetime of pathological mortification of the flesh (fasting except for the Eucharist, wearing wire for underwear). Neurotic she may have been, but Catherine was not convicted as a witch. Reformation women seem to have been seeking a voice in the major issue of the day-- ecclesiastical versus secular authority. They might be burned as heretics but were less likely, on the whole, to be burned as witches. Some women emerged as Protestant figureheads. In a review of a book about five English Protestant women (Anne Boleyn, Katharine Paar, Anne Askew, Jane Grey, and Catherine Willoughby--the first two being the second and sixth wives of Henry VIII), Flanagan (2058) makes the point that each in her way "zealously supported the Reformation to the point of torture, exile, or martyrdom." Anne Boleyn's fate notwithstanding, in a variety of ways, social authorities during the Reformation seem to have sought opportunities to de-demonize women as a group. That would explain sacralization of women's experience implicit in Cressy's (33) description of the English church rite of purification and formal welcoming into the chu

Category: History - C