We Know Not God's Designs in Permitting a Separation: Women Religious,the Consolidation Controversies,and the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Church*

This article bridges the fields of Catholic history, Women's history, and American religious history to propose a new perspective for studying the development of the American Catholic Church, termed by me as the consolidation controversies. Previous historians have focused on the development of the local parishes and the dioceses, focusing on the power conflicts between the lay trustees and the local bishops that accompanied this institutional growth. However, an often-forgotten aspect of Catholic history is the simultaneous rise of religious congregations and orders. As these communities developed, their leaders clashed with the local bishops over questions of property and authority over members of the communities. Often at the centre of these power struggles were the women religious. Rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated, women religioudemonstrated their own autonomy, navigating larger institutional politics. Should these women fail, they faced losing their place in the diocese as well as their position and vocation as women religious.     

Women of the Sisters' Hall: religion and the making of women's alternative space in Taiwan's economic restructuring

Against the background of Taiwan's recent economic restructuring, this article investigates the lives of a group of working-class women who were believers of I-Kuan Tao, a sectarian religion, and who had by and large decided to remain single in order to better practice their religious teaching. They lived together in an I-Kuan Tao temple. This article situates singlehood in the literature of resistance and sees it as a strategy of these women seeking an alternative lifestyle from the culturally prescribed roles of wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Three interlocking factors are particularly important to an understanding of these women's experience: cultural (the Taiwanese patrilineal family), religious (I-Kuan Tao), and economic (Taiwan's post-World War II export-oriented industrialization and its recent economic restructuring). Paradoxically, while trying to establish an alternative social space, these women were also seeking cultural legitimacy for their choice. Marriage resistance, in this case, was an act of both transgression and conformity. Yet the different readings that these women and their families applied to their situations, as well as the ingenuous strategies they deployed to solve their predicaments, also added new elements to the cultural repertoire which, collectively considered, might broaden the range of options for future Taiwanese women who attempt a similar life trajectory. In this article, I therefore caution against a totalizing understanding of the concept of resistance based on its final result, but call for a more nuanced analysis focusing on the process.     

Crossroads of Identities in Women Religious in Spain. Catholicism,Society and Second Vatican Council (1953–69)*

This article examines the evolution and transformation of female religious life in Spain under Franco's regime, which began after the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and ended with the dictator's death in 1975. During the dictatorship, the public stance towards Catholicism made consecrated religious life one of the potential social undertakings for women at that time. The Concordat of 1953 corroborated National Catholicism, and women religious abided by a heritage sanctioned by this ideology. The Second Vatican Council parted ways with this tradition, and some women religious reassessed their role as females and consecrated women in their society. This article analyses how the renewal doctrine of the Council was received in Spain, particularly regarding female religious life, revealing the commonalities and differences of opinions and practices resulting from the break with National Catholic schematism, as well as the first manifestations of renewal among women religious.     

Italian religious historiography in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines Italian religious historiography of the past decade, taking into account the difficulty of this national limitation, given the increasingly frequent arid profitable exchanges among the diverse European traditions. The review first examines some general works and then focuses on certain themes that mark the historiographical trends: ecclesiastical institutions, with particular reference to the period of the Reformation and the Counter‐Reformation; religious complexity, with special reference to heterodox movements, to Jewish culture and to the Islamic presence; and people's religious experiences, with particular emphasis on those of women, in their interaction with both cultural production and social history.     

Monuments,Reputation and Clerical Marriage in Reformation England: Bishop Barlow's Daughters

The impact of the English Reformation upon women and women's agency in effecting religious change has been much debated. This paper examines the key innovation of clerical marriage by studying the family of Bishop William Barlow (d. 1568), whose five daughters married five bishops. It establishes that Barlow himself married well before it was lawful to do so, and reviews the circumstances that led to his daughters’ remarkable marital achievements. Subsequently, the commemorative acts of this family between 1595 and 1630 were crucial to the creation of an honourable role for the clergyman's wife in English society. By manipulating the representation of the dead, Barlow's daughter Frances Matthew improved her and her sisters’ place in the world. Monuments and their influence upon historical memory are therefore shown to be a hitherto unrecognised means available to women for transforming social order.     

On reading the scriptures as literature

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thought has been seen by many scholars to be derivative of German Idealism, especially Kantian critical philosophy. The present article challenges that claim by offering an analysis of Coleridge's interpretation of Francis Bacon's founding of the empirical method. Through the course of this discussion, Coleridge's understanding of the distinction between the intellective faculties of reason and understanding will be established, and will be shown to run counter to Kantian epistemology. Coleridge's dialectical approach to the role of reason in the operations of the understanding will be applied to their uses in scientific discovery, aesthetics, and religious thought. The various uses of symbolic representation in the context of these different endeavors will be given critical expression, revealing the unity of the human mind and nature, of subject and object. Ultimately, it is by appeal to the existence of God that the intelligibility of these various fields of symbolic representation are established. Coleridge's interpretation of Bacon offers a way of reconciling Baconian empiricism with Platonic Forms, in a genealogical recovery of the concealed methodology established in his Novum Organum. The overall argument proceeds critically, through a discussion of the subjective operations of the symbol-making powers of human thought, in the sciences and mathematics, in aesthetic, and in theological speculation and religious representation, revealing the Romantic origins of modernity.     

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

This article uses a 1972 television advertising campaign for Femfresh vaginal deodorants and the backlash against it to explore how women grappled with the permissive society in their bathrooms and living rooms. It uses women's magazines and the business archives of Femfresh to trace the popularity of vaginal deodorants in the early 1970s and show how advertising for the product played on women's fears of undesirability and shame about their bodies during a period of changing sexual mores. It details how feminist campaigners Women in Media (WiM) constructed a campaign against vaginal deodorants and how adverts for the product became linked in press coverage to trial television adverts for Lil-lets tampons, before analysing complaints made about both product categories collected by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The contested terrain of feminine hygiene advertising adds nuance to historical understandings of debates around ‘permissiveness’, suggesting that, for some women, frank discussions of bodily functions were not inherently ‘indecent’, but rather had a correct time and place. WiM's campaign and the complaints collected illustrate how women of varying political leanings utilised conceptions of shame to exert limited control over the extent to which feminine bodies were up for public consumption in 1970s Britain.     

Feeding and Healing Bodies and Souls: German Women in Nursing, 1830s–1850s

Nursing care of the 1830s−40s required significant financial stewardship, material resources, spiritual fortitude and political support alongside the everyday routines of cleaning, cooking and home visiting. The minutiae of Catholic, Protestant and other Prussian institutional donations, budgets and schedules, government records and occasionally women's own writings reveal how German nursing was not a singular and timeless profession. Rather, the feminisation of nursing emerged out of a myriad of gendered ways elite, bourgeois, religious and working women collectively cared for the poor and the sick even before bacteriology and maternalist women's movements transformed nursing in the late nineteenth century.     

Not a Priority: Infertile Women and the Symbolic Politics of IVF in 1980s Britain

This article considers the early debates over state funding for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment following the birth of Louise Brown in 1978 as a lens through which to re-evaluate attitudes towards womanhood, maternity and sexuality in 1980s Britain. The state's reluctance to devote resources to IVF reflected, in no small part, the financial imperatives on an overstretched National Health Service. Beyond financial considerations, the question of IVF funding sparked deeply gendered debates over the politics and social significance of motherhood and mothering, and the state's role in family planning and maternal and child welfare. In short, debates over IVF operated as a form of symbolic politics. Stakeholders – including patients’ advocates, women's associations, feminist activists and religious leaders – drew a clear link between the female body and the body politic and sought to articulate a policy towards both IVF treatment and infertile women more broadly that reflected their understanding of women's place within modern British society. Despite holding widely divergent views about gender, sexuality and motherhood, women's and religious groups found common ground in opposing state funding of IVF. This coalition facilitated the state's decision not to prioritise funding for IVF even as neighbouring countries, including Germany and France, embraced the procedure to help combat demographic decline.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

Irish Female Emigration in the 1930s: Transgressing space and culture

Following the establishment of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, the continuing levels of emigration from Ireland came as a disappointment to many who believed that British colonialism had caused and perpetuated the emigration problem. Within this context, there was a need to explain emigration in ways that deflected blame away from the new state authorities. In this article, the author contributes to a gendered analysis of these shifting constructions of emigration. Drawing upon Irish newspapers of the period, she suggests that the figure of the 'emigrant girl' was central to post-colonial discourses on emigration. During the 1930s, the emigration of thousands of young Irish women to English cities such as London sparked widespread comment and criticism. The Irish press and the Catholic hierarchy in particular propagated an image of these vulnerable young women as lost and alone in the big, bad cities of England. The author analyses the ways in which the 'emigrant girl' embodied specific representations of place, culture and gendered identity; the 'emigrant girl' embodied an Irishness marked by religion, culture and landscape. Through her transgression of physical, cultural and religious spaces, she encountered loneliness, danger and the risk of denationalisation.     

HOW NINETEENTH‐CENTURY GERMAN CLASSICISTS WROTE THE JEWS OUT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.     

What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328)

This article examines how Parisian university clerics responded to the city's communities of beguines (uncloistered religious women), highlighting in particular the ways in which clerics employed the term ‘beguine’ in sermons and preaching material from thirteenth-century Paris. Because the beguines were not hidden behind convent walls but were instead a visible presence in the city, they were often the focus of Parisian clerics' ideas about religious women. Sermons preached, composed, and copied in Paris reveal the process by which Parisian medieval thinkers constructed, although not always consciously, a negative meaning for the term ‘beguine.’ Always poorly defined, ‘beguine’ evoked a wide variety of meanings and associations for clerical observers in medieval Paris. The varied ideas about and images of the beguine allowed the Parisian intellectual elite to include these women in discussions of their own position in society as clerics in charge of the religious instruction of the laity. Clerics used the beguine as an example of the contemplative life, often comparing their own intellectual approaches to religious knowledge with the beguines' mystical knowledge. These positive comparisons, however, were joined by negative accusations when clerics expressed concern that the beguine thought too highly of her spiritual gifts.     

What's in a name? Clerical representations of Parisian beguines (1200-1328)

This article examines how Parisian university clerics responded to the city's communities of beguines (uncloistered religious women), highlighting in particular the ways in which clerics employed the term ‘beguine’ in sermons and preaching material from thirteenth-century Paris. Because the beguines were not hidden behind convent walls but were instead a visible presence in the city, they were often the focus of Parisian clerics' ideas about religious women. Sermons preached, composed, and copied in Paris reveal the process by which Parisian medieval thinkers constructed, although not always consciously, a negative meaning for the term ‘beguine.’ Always poorly defined, ‘beguine’ evoked a wide variety of meanings and associations for clerical observers in medieval Paris. The varied ideas about and images of the beguine allowed the Parisian intellectual elite to include these women in discussions of their own position in society as clerics in charge of the religious instruction of the laity. Clerics used the beguine as an example of the contemplative life, often comparing their own intellectual approaches to religious knowledge with the beguines' mystical knowledge. These positive comparisons, however, were joined by negative accusations when clerics expressed concern that the beguine thought too highly of her spiritual gifts.     

Countryside-versus-City in European Thought: German and British Anti-Urbanism between the Wars

The idea that the city is a place of sin and immorality is as old as urban civilization. But what does anti-urban thought mean in societies which are highly urbanized under the conditions of modern industrialism? Furthermore, is anti-urbanism in the interwar period a German völkisch phenomenon––one further stride on Germany's special path? And what does rural revival and the “back-to-the-land” cult mean in Great Britain, the first industrial nation? This article seeks to provide an answer to these questions by exploring anti-urbanist writing between the End of the First World War and 1933 in Germany, and 1939 in Britain. By examining two key themes it aims to show that the clear-cut distinction between German anti-urban radicalisation and the West's coming to terms with urbanisation cannot be maintained. Firstly, attention will be drawn to the ambiguity of perceptions of the city in the writings of “Conservative Revolutionary” authors in the Weimar Republic. In a second step, the British “back-to-the-land” movement, whose advocates developed comprehensive anti-urban third-way theories in the interwar period and were themselves part of a broader popular anti-industrial movement and a rural cult throughout the 1930s, will be examined.     

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.     

Female Patriots: Women,War and the Nation in the Period of the Prussian‐German Anti‐Napoleonic Wars

The period of the wars against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815 represents a central phase in German history for the formation of a national political culture organised along gender lines. Acting as a sort of catalyst, these wars accelerated and intensified the nationalisation of the gender order and the ‘gendering’ of the nation, and also permanently influenced the fundamental structures of the relationship between women, the state and the nation. The article analyses the contents and forms of patriotic national women's activities during this period, as well as the ways in which they were perceived and judged in public discourse. In so doing, it explores the relationship between women, war and the nation.     

Redescribing the Enlightenment: The German-Jewish adoption of Bildung as a counter-normative ideal

This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews in the late eighteenth century. By examining the creative use of the concept by German Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, later, in a very different political context, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the article challenges a body of scholarship that interprets the German Jewish enthusiasm for Bildung as an assimilationist capitulation by post-emancipation German Jews to the individualism and rationalism of the German Enlightenment. In contrast, I suggest that both Mendelssohn and Cassirer saw Bildung's emphasis on the vita activa as offering a vehicle for multifarious human engagement with the world that inspired not only a movement beyond reified conceptions of tradition, whether religious or secular, but forms of activism that could combine cosmopolitan sympathies with communal affiliation.     

Tolerating Particularity: German Pietism and Jews' Conversion in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Historical discussions about German Pietism's posture toward Jews underlined Pietists' attempts at their conversion as the dominant feature of their relationship. Contesting orthodoxy, Pietists favored a lenient attitude toward Jews, arguing that their change of heart might hasten salvation. However, revisiting Pietists' texts, I argue that from the late seventeenth century on, these awakened Protestants acknowledged the improbability of conversion. By the new meaning they gave to religious adherence, Pietists believed that mere baptism would not turn Jews into Christians. In fact, as they developed closer acquaintance with Jews, they came to realize that their efforts at mission would not succeed. More than any other confessional strand, Pietists conceptualized Jews not merely as those who denied Christ as the messiah. They also came to see the Jews as a people whose belief in God crossed beyond religious devotion into a unique, inalterable culture, and who therefore should be constructively tolerated.