Aut murus aut maritus? Women's lives in Counter-Reformation Munich (1579-1651)

This dissertation addresses two major themes in the history of early modern Europe: confessional state-building and the transformation of gender relations on the eve of modernity. I examine the case of Munich, the capital of staunchly Catholic Bavaria, to explore the impact of the Counter-Reformation on women's lives. Following the Council of Trent, religious renewal became a catalyst for political centralization and social change, as Bavaria's authorities regarded the establishment of patriarchal rule a means of creating public order. Concerned that women would become a source of disorder, the authorities embraced Trent's remedy for female fallibility: either cloister walls (murus) or a husband (maritus) should rein in every woman.;The dissertation analyzes the imposition of this murus-aut-maritus norm upon Munich's women in two interlocking sections. Section one--maritus?--begins with a chapter analyzing novel legislation and the conflicting agendas of Church and state. Chapters 2 and 3 draw on court records to explore the impact of these elite agendas on people's experience of sexual relations. Trent, I argue, mattered not in its advocacy of marriage as a Christian right, but because it lent ideological support to state efforts to combat profligacy. The prospects of lower-class women for social advancement suffered.;The second half--murus?--explores printed chronicles and manuscript sources written by religious women to trace the implications of post-Trent cloistering for female convents with a long history of participation in urban life (Chapters 4 and 5). I argue that the enclosure of nuns was inseparable from changing attitudes towards women's place in Bavaria's nascent "public sphere." Chapter 6 focuses on the so-called English Ladies, a community of women who were able to pave a third way between cloister and marriage through meeting the state's educational needs. Teaching and learning nonetheless became arenas for female agency.;In the large sense, the dissertation highlights striking parallels between the Catholic and Protestant paths into modernity. The historiography on confessional state-building, I contend, has overlooked the importance of gender, while women's historians have displayed a Weber-inspired overemphasis on the importance of Protestantism in the creation of modern gender relations.