‘Partner in his Calamities’: Pastors' Wives,Married Nuns and the Experience of Clerical Marriage in the Early German Reformation

This essay examines what factors led the first clerical wives to marry former Catholic clergy and nuns to marry in the first decade of the Reformation in Germany and seeks to explain the difference that social class, geography and gender made in those decisions. In contrast to the later Reformation, when pastors married same or higher social status women, the majority of women who married former priests and monks during the 1520s were often lower or, in the case of nuns, significantly higher social status than their husbands. Women married clergy for a variety of reasons that were counterintuitive to typical marital strategies for economic security and social networking, since clergy had neither in the 1520s. While sharing a common experience, clerical wives' reasons for marriage to a pastor varied greatly depending on class, local decision about the Reformation and numerous personal factors. Using a variety of sources including letters, civic records, court testimony and published pamphlets, this article demonstrates that these women did exhibit a limited agency that ultimately helped shape larger social and political acceptance of clerical marriage.     

Book reviews

STRENGTHENING THE FRAMEWORK OF PEACE. A Study of Current Proposals for amending, developing, or replacing present International Institutions for the Maintenance of Peace. By Alan de Rusett. (London and New York, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1950. xiii +225 pp.)

VOTING AND THE HANDLING OF DISPUTES IN THE SECURITY COUNCIL. By Eduardo Jiménez de Aréchaga. Carnegie Endowment, N.Y., 1950. This is a lawyer's study of the operations of the Security Council. The author, a Uruguayan, was an officer in the U.N. Secretariat for some time and is now Under Secretary of Foreign Relations in Uruguay.

IMMIGRATION. By W. D. Borrie, 1949. Sydney and London, Angus and Robertson, pp. 105 + viii.

THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH SINCE 1815. By C. H. Currey. 2 vols. Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1950–51. Vol. I, pp. viii +471; Vol. II, pp. viii +287.

DEFENCE IN THE COLD WAR. By a Chatham House Study Group. London: R.I.I.A. 1950, pp. viii +123.

ASPECTS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT. A Symposium edited by Sidney Bailey. London: The Hansard Society. 1950.     

Size differences between limb bones of recent and subfossil mute swans Cygnus olor

Limb bones of Mute Swan Cygnus olor from neolithic to bronze age Cambridgeshire peat were larger than those of a recent sample when compared biometrically. The decrease in overall size that this may indicate could be part of an evolutionary trend.     

Museums,markets, and modern anthropology

Stocking, George W., Jr., ed. Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. History of Anthropology Volume III. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. viii + 258 pp. including chapter references and index. $25.00 cloth.

Hatcher, Evelyn Payne. Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. With an Introduction by E. Adamson Hoebel. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1985. xviii + 286 pp., including ethnographic notes and index, glossary, bibliography, and indices. $28.00 cloth; $13.75 paper.

Jules‐Rosette, Benneta. The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective. Topics in Contemporary Semiotics. New York: Plenum Press, 1984. xviii + 266 pp. including figures, references, index, and appendices. $32.50 cloth.