What are the main challenges for those grappling with distant pasts, such as the history of the Renaissance? I see three crucial principles as essential if we want to make historical lessons relevant to our present: using the tools inherited from feminist movements, considering history from a perspective that goes beyond national boundaries, and considering not only facts but also concepts, particularly in the study of religions.
Scholars have sought to highlight commonalities between confessions and move beyond national approaches to the study of religious imagination. This approach underpins theories of the ‘global reformations,’ as U of T historian Nicholas Terpstra outlined in his anthology also entitled Global Reformations. This category refers to the connections — extending beyond Europe — between early modern movements and figures of religious reform who sought to change ideas about the relationship between God and believers.
These theories arise from a broad debate on the definition and understanding of the transformative and critical period marking the end of the universal Church in Europe — specifically the time of the Protestant Reformation.
The Reformation, sparked by a religious schism in 1517, protested against the Roman Catholic Church’s dogmas and corruption. In response, the Council of Trent symbolically initiated the Catholic Counter-Reformation. While Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation emphasized the need for a direct relationship between God and each individual, the Counter-Reformation represented the ecclesiastical and papal Church’s response to the perceived need for reforms within the broader Roman Catholic Church.
This period is often interpreted as marking the fracture of Christendom, coinciding with the rise of capitalism, liberal individualism, and the modern state — concepts explored in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Religious transformation, therefore, is deeply embedded in the theoretical foundations of the most enduring and widely used political concepts. Adding a feminist perspective to the study of this period — which was rich in religious and political innovation — is essential for making the analysis more inclusive, accurate and meaningful.
Since the 1970s, feminist movements and historians have emphasized the necessity of adopting gender as a category of historical analysis, as Joan Wallach Scott summarized in her essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” As a result, women began to enter this broadly defined field of enquiry. However, for a long time, feminist historiography — the study of historical writing through a feminist lens — developed along lines that generally correspond to national, regional, or local phenomena.
In the last 20 years, research has flourished, demonstrating an ongoing effort to overcome spatial constraints. In 2005, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt’s book The Permeable Cloister argued that transnational research on women’s monasticism or monkhood would be valuable. That same year, Nancy Bradley Warren, in her book Women of God and Arms, concluded that women’s spirituality travels across national boundaries and spans centuries. While a broader perspective on women’s religious agency in the early modern era is being developed — sometimes with an explicit feminist intent — and efforts made to uncover the connections between religious and political experiences, women remain excluded from the dominant narratives that shape political reality and the historical archives as we know it.
Women’s exclusion from decision-making positions underpins the tendency to narrate alternative histories in which women struggle to exercise their subjectivity. In these histories, women can only negotiate with power structures whose inherently patriarchal nature ultimately prevents them from occupying any significant role in shaping the course of History with a capital H.
As a postdoctoral fellow at U of T working on a three-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie project titled “Female Prophecy in Early Modern European Religion,” my research focuses on how women have influenced the development of concepts such as politics, religion, self, authority, power, and discipline since their modern forms emerged. Women are not just supporting actors, but key players in the dialogues that shape these concepts through their interaction with political events.
Investigating women’s prophecy offers a fresh perspective that uncovers the complexity and nuance of what has traditionally been regarded as a male-dominated phenomenon.
Through the marginalized yet centrally important cases of women like the Discalced Carmelite Teresa of Ávila, the allegedly heretic Jesuitess Mary Ward, and the stigmatic Lucia da Narni, we encounter women who conveyed the voice of God, embodied prophetic authority, and became liaisons between community, civil, and ecclesiastical institutions. Through their lives and actions, we find a basis to challenge well-established periodizations and definitions.
These women’s experiences challenge the traditional divide between the pre-Tridentine era, characterized by reform and women’s religious activism beyond the cloister, and the post-Tridentine age, darkened by stricter encloisterment, a decline of prophecy and the suppression of women’s voices. Even Pope Pius V’s 1566 papal bull — or the Catholic Church’s official decree — Circa pastoralis, could not fully close all spaces for women or immediately confine all religious women to cloisters. Although aimed to enforce the regulation of religious life, it was difficult to interpret and apply, as U of T historian Alison More underlined in her studies on non-cloistered women.
Although with varying intensities and responses, women did not stop prophesying. Further research needed to be done to unveil the potential linkages between Protestant and Catholic women, as well as between Europe and its overseas colonies. Cross-fertilizing North American scholarship with European trends is crucial, as is opening up to comparative analyses with other periods and religions.
So, in the end, how should we address the challenges of being both a historian and a feminist today? I have more questions than answers, but one thing is certain: keeping an eye on what happens outside of the academic circles, listening to social movements, and nurturing the need for dissent without falling prey to cancel culture — as U of T historian of political thought Andrea Lanza recently argued in his article “Between Cancel Culture and Uniformity” — can only enrich the everyday work of writing history.
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