State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic StateUniversity of Michigan Press, 2004 - 248 pages In premodern Germany, both the emerging centralized government and the powerful Catholic Church redefined gender roles for their own ends. Ulrike Strasser's interdisciplinary study of Catholic state-building examines this history from the vantage point of the virginal female body. Focusing on Bavaria, Germany's first absolutist state, Strasser recounts how state authorities forced chastity upon lower-class women to demarcate legitimate forms of sexuality and maintain class hierarchies. At the same time, they cloistered groups of upper-class women to harness the spiritual authority associated with holy virgins to the political authority of the state. The state finally recruited upper-class virgins as teachers who could school girls in the gender-specific morals and type of citizenship favored by authorities. Challenging Weberian concepts that link modernization to Protestantism, Strasser's study illustrates the modernizing power of Catholicism through an examination of virginity's central role in politics, culture, and society. Weaving together the stories of marriage and convent, of lay as well as religious women, State of Virginity makes important contributions to the historical study of sexuality and the growing feminist literature on the state. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political and religious history, women's studies, and social history. |
Table des matières
Which Public Matters Most? Rites of Marriage Formation | 27 |
Houses of Women in the Male | 57 |
The Thirty Years | 87 |
The Public Dimensions | 119 |
Schooling Women | 149 |
Conclusion and Epilogue | 173 |
Bibliography | 219 |
| 237 | |
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authorities Bavarian Bavarian capital Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München Bayern became body brothel burghers Catholic Catholicism church city's civic court cloister cloister walls confessional Council of Trent Counter-Reformation cultural discourse doctrine Dorothea dowry early modern ecclesiastical economic enclosure English Ladies families female plaintiffs female religious houses female virginity Franciscan Frauen Frühen Neuzeit Gedaechtnuss gender Georg Schwaiger German guild holy honor houses of women Ibid Jahrhundert Jesuits Klosterliteralien Landrecht lower-class women male Maria marital marriage formation marriage promise married Mary Ward matrimony Maximilian medieval monastic moral morning gift mother Munich nonmarital sexuality norms nuns officials Paradeiserhaus political Poor Clares profligacy profligate prostitution Protestant Protestant Reformation Protestantism public order Pütrich sisters reform Reformati regulation Reichart religious women riage Ridler and Pütrich rule sacramental secular seventeenth century sexual relations sixteenth century social society spiritual Stadt Stadtarchiv München Stadtgericht tion Titul took Tridentine University Press unmarried urban Verlag Wittelsbach Wolfgang Behringer woman