© Henry J. Cohn, University of Warwick, 2000

The Impact of the Reformation on Women in Germany

Before reading this case study it would be advisable to consult the section of the core document devoted to 'Martin Luther and his Message' (00.03) and the case study on Martin Luther (01a)

During the past two decades historians have fiercely debated two related questions concerning the impact of the Reformation on the place of women in German society during the sixteenth century:

(1) did Luther in his writings offer women greater opportunities within the family, or did he merely reinforce existing patriarchal views? and

(2) how far were any changes in the role of women in sixteenth-century Germany brought about by Lutheran teachings?

An important byproduct of the resulting discussion has been a growing realisation that the fate of women was influenced by two important developments apart from the religious divisions. Patriarchal attitudes were not new, but had a developing dynamic within Catholic religious teaching, the legal system, and the political structure of local and regional communities. Moreover, the degree of independence which some women enjoyed depended in part on their function within economic life, the nature of which in town and country was continuously evolving.

A by-and-large favourable view of Luther's sermons and comments on women, marriage and the family may be found in most standard biographies of the reformer and especially in the books by Steven Ozment. Feminist historians like Lyndal Roper, Merry Wiesner (also known as Wiesner-Hanks) and Heide Wunder take a more critical approach. The best introduction to the debate is to read extended passages from one or two of the protagonists on each side of the argument. It should be noted that all these authors are serious historians using scholarly methods and not driven merely by ideological preconceptions. Nevertheless, it is possible for every student coming to this controversy for the first time to recognise that the sympathies of each author clearly lie in one direction, and to notice also that they often emphatically state their own position but rarely seek to rebut the arguments of their opponents. To some extent they are even examining different aspects of the same larger problem. Also, while frequently quoting from Luther and other Lutheran theologians, as is proper, these authors do not always give the context for a particular quotation. In Luther's case one has to distinguish between his published sermons and treatises and the off-the-cuff remarks recorded in his Table Talk by his students, from which some of the more memorable quotations are taken. As many as a dozen students lived in the Luther household and others might join them for dinner, at which Luther conversed with them between copious drafts of German beer. Later, several of the students took notes -- reliable, of course -- which were subsequently published. Luther used these occasions to continue the religious and social education of his protegées, but also to keep them and himself amused by remarks which were not always in good taste, if taste be defined from a modern, politically correct viewpoint. Such statements may only be taken as fully representative of his considered views if they find corroboration in works which he wrote in the sober light of day.

09.11 Steven Ozment, Luther on Family Life

09.12 Lyndal Roper, Luther: Sex, Marriage and Motherhood

Another good feminist introduction to the issues is Wiesner (1989)

One good way of testing the persuasiveness of different interpretations of Luther's views on women is to confront them with what he said on the subject himself. Almost as soon as he made his stand against indulgences in 1517, Luther found himself besieged by ordinary people wanting to hear what he had to say about a wide range of their daily concerns for which Christian faith could give ethical guidance. Problems related to married life and relations between the sexes naturally loomed large. A Sermon on the Estate of Marriage was published in 1519 and the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) also contained relevant comments, but Luther's more considered remarks are to be found in a treatise of 1522, also expanded from a sermon.

09.13 Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage

As a supplement to this work Luther published That Parents Should Neither Compel nor Hinder the Marriage of their Children and That Children Should not Become Engaged Without Their Parents' Consent (1524). Luther's ideas on marriage soon spread widely by means of pamphlets, sermons, plays, and the activities of the judicial courts in those cities which first adopted the Reformation. While it is interesting that Luther wrote knowledgeably and confidently about married life already several years before he married his ex-nun Katharine von Bora in 1525 as an old bachelor aged forty-one, the topic was a natural outcome of his desire to condemn the celibacy which marked off priests in the old Church for a separate life as Christians. In the early years of the Reformation many of the former priests and monks who became Luther's adherents found it to be a pressing matter of conscience that they already lived in stable unions with female companions and were reliant on dispensations from the Church to do so. It was important that they be allowed to marry in the normal way. Marriage for Lutherans was superior to celibacy and no longer second best or a concession to the weaknesses of the laity.

Beyond this, however, Lutheran teachings did give women greater equality of esteem alongside men in the sight of God. Women were no longer considered more inclined to sin than men, nor more likely to lead their menfolk into sinning, and were not reliant on the mediation of male priests to obtain the means of salvation. In his Large Catechism (1529) Luther stressed that God had created body as well as spirit, thereby lessening the tension of the laity that their bodily needs diminished their spirituality. The bodily functions of women were no longer to be considered impure. These issues are not really in dispute between feminist and more traditional historians, but two others are: the place of women within marriage and within the new churches as compared to the old.

Ozment (1983) concentrated on the family as a unit of affection and for bringing up children. He argued that both Luther's teaching and the practice of the Lutheran churches gave women effective equality within marriage. As evidence he drew firstly on Protestant handbooks of marriage which stressed that marriage should be companionable and its responsibilities be shared (Luther's image of a husband washing nappies reminds one of the 'new man' who emerged at the end of the last century), and secondly on the example which the families of pastors, from Luther onwards, set to their flocks of cooperation within marriage. Feminist historians set aside this evidence as not representative of society at large and concentrate instead on the many opportunities which women lost as a result of the Reformation. For Merry Wiesner, women's lives were more affected by institutional changes which followed from the Reformation than by the teachings of the Reformers. The Catholic church had assigned special places for women which no longer existed. The veneration of the Virgin Mary and female (as well as male) saints was replaced by that of Christ alone. One particular loss as role model and intercessionary was St. Anne, mother of Mary and patron saint of pregnant women. The religious calendar lost not only its celebrations honouring female saints but religious processions and other rituals like lavish baptisms and weddings which gave women clear functions of their own, such as they had also enjoyed in the now defunct female religious confraternities. Devaluation of female honour was compounded by anticlerical Protestant propaganda which used female images of depravity to attack the clergy, right up to the Pope as the 'whore of Babylon.'

09.14 The Pope as the Whore of Babylon

Above all, the closure of the convents is seen as depriving a minority of women of a major vocation open to them outside the family. This is the most hotly disputed contention of all. Already at the time there was a series of pamphlets, some of them written by nuns (see Wiesner-Hanks (1996)), others by their relatives or the Reformers, for and against the conventual life. The Reformers believed that by liberating the nuns from convents they had saved them from sexual repression, cultural deprivation, and domination by male clergy in the persons of their father confessors and male heads of female religious orders. While it is true that few male monasteries held out against secularisation in town or countryside, a number of convents did protest vigorously, notably in Augsburg. The feminist arguments, that convents provided a unique opportunity for female education and engendered a sense of female community, are countered by the assertion that most nuns had no vocation but were placed in convents at an early age by their families. The feminist riposte is that marriages were also arranged and many nuns later developed a vocation in the same way as love could grow in an arranged marriage. Whatever the merits of these rival contentions, the opportunities for ex-monks to enter employment as clergymen, teachers or on the general labour market were certainly greater than those for ex-nuns; unless the latter were young and marriagable, they faced a bleak future as a burden on their families.

Other incidental effects of the Reformation might also work to the disadvantage of women. Small medieval general hospitals, really a form of almshouse, some of which were managed by women, were replaced by large centralised urban charitable institutions controlled by men. Although midwives retained many important functions, they were more strictly supervised because of concerns both about Anabaptists who denied the need for baptism and about illegitimacy in the new moral climate. From the time of the Peasants' War, moreover, the Reformation brought exile, war and destruction which grievously affected women who lost their menfolk or had to leave home with their families.

There is also some substance, as will be further shown below, in the contention that the supposed benefits to women from the Reformation were not as great as the promise seemed. Luther called for the education of girls, albeit not to as advanced a level as for boys, but in practice few Protestant girls' schools were established, and especially in the countryside parents rarely encouraged girls to attend. The divorce which Protestantism allowed for the first time did not afford that degree of relief for abandoned or maltreated women which it ought to have. The new churches did not grant women the subsidiary clerical role which nuns had performed. In the early years a small number of Lutheran women like the Bavarian noblewoman Argula von Grumbach or the minister's wife Katharine Zell in Strasbourg published polemical and theological works. Luther himself came to a grudging recognition of their intelligence, piety and uprightness (Classen & Settle (1991)), but they had few emulators in their own day and none in the following generations. In the early years of struggle and martyrdom there was a small niche for exceptional Protestant women, including a few princesses like Elizabeth of Brunswick who steered the introduction of the new faith into their territories, but once state churches were established conventional hierarchies prevailed. There was a parallel development in Anabaptism, where women did play a more significant role until mid-century, but older patriarchal views about their status then revived (see The Role of Anabaptist Women in the Churches (08.08)).

Parallel to the religious changes of late medieval Germany (and Europe as a whole) which affected women were others in the political and especially the economic organisation of society. Examination of German sermons from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century has shown that the patriarchal view of the family and of the nature of society at large grew steadily over the period and were no mere product of the Reformation, although given a boost by it. As state power in the German territories developed from the late fifteenth century, much as in the larger European monachies, the parallels with the similarly autocratic structure of the family were increasingly drawn by preachers. (Bast (1997)). Over the same timespan the legal system gradually privileged husbands, sons and widowers over wives, daughters and widows in the control of property. The lawyers who drew up the legislation and administered it in the courts came more under the influence of Roman law and drew on classical, biblical and medieval misogynist views about the nature of women. In turn they influenced the norms of the wider society, which increasingly became more reliant on the courts to settle disputes. This bias in favour of men in civil cases probably outweighed the concessions which continued to be granted to women as the weaker sex in criminal cases. By further legitimating the state and the law as products of the divine will, the Reformation strengthened this preexisting trend towards a more patriarchal outlook.

The process of economic transformation which affected opportunities open to women also began well before the Reformation. Women's work outside the home was quite extensive in late medieval times, but tended to be unskilled, low-paid, casual and seasonal, with little security and vulnerable to economic fluctuations. Nine-tenths of the population lived in the countryside. Less is known about women's work there than in the towns, but its nature does seem to have changed less. For the majority of peasants engaged in traditional arable and pastoral farming, the female role remained principally one of looking after the smaller animals and vegetable gardens attached to the farm, and helping out at harvest and other busy times. However, in many regions new crops were developed from the late fourteenth century which required a greater input from women. Alternative crops like flax and woad provided work for women, as did the spread of viticulture in southern Germany. The major new industrial development of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the mining of copper, lead, and precious metals in Saxony and the Austrian lands, in which women played a subordinate but important role. The putting out of some stages of cloth manufacture to the countryside, an early form of protoindustrialisation, began in Swabia already in the fourteenth century and probably gave more employment to women and children than to their menfolk.

09.15 A Woman Managing a Craft Workshop

The towns however continued to attract surplus population from the country and formed the wealthier and more dynamic sector of the economy, in which however the chances for women were less favourable than earlier. In late medieval towns women became more restricted in the extent to which they might engage in the crafts and skilled work. Women were active in family or household production units in the crafts, and lost ground as those units became less important in manufacturing. As the example of Augsburg shows (Roper(1989)), women actively helped men in the work of some trades, like those of butchers and millers. More generally, in all trades women ran the household in which the work was executed, providing board and lodging for the journeymen and apprentices for whom this was their major remuneration. Other women were employed as maids, leaving the wives of gildsmen free to help their husbands or even act on their behalf if they were also traders absent on business. Economic cooperation of husband and wife were the foundation of success in both business and marriage. Both household production and the crafts associated with it came under threat during the sixteenth century, although they were vigorously defended by most city councils which had the interests of the gilds at heart.

The gilds themselves were however also becoming more hostile to women's work, because they were under pressure from economic competition and the demands of the ruling princes and city authorities. Membership of a gild was increasingly associated with political status in the city, as the gilds obtained some form of representation in their government. Since it was held to be axiomatic that women might not hold political office (except as hereditary ruling sovereigns or abbesses), the crafts tended over time to eliminate women from the gilds as an economic association as well. There were however two important exceptions to these trends:

(1) Women continued employment in crafts involving skills traditionally associated with them: needle-making, baking, belt-making, linen-weaving, embroidery, yarn-making, or gold spinning. Cologne, the largest German city, had women prominent in these and similar trades like silk-making in the late fifteenth century, and even had four gilds reserved to women only, although by now they were excluded from the vast majority of the city's forty-two gilds.

(2) Widows who carried on the business of their late husbands were allowed to act as temporary incumbents of the workshops, but with skill could get the period extended from the usual one to two years to fifteen or more. Women were indeed the heads of up to one quarter of early modern urban households, most of them widows, though even the gilds with most favourable ratios had fewer women in charge, 10-15% as heads of iron-working shops in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, 15% of master weavers in Augsburg in 1600. Yet their workshops were usually smaller than those of men and viewed with mistrust, since it was feared, sometimes justifiably, that they were merely a front for unqualified journeymen to enjoy the privileges reserved for full masters.

Of the wide range of occupations pursued by women, some underwent little change in the sixteenth century. Domestic service, which employed about 20% of both men and women in towns, posed no threat to the prevailing patriarchal view of society. Jobs bringing low status and low pay in caring for others remained the preserve of women in hospitals, infirmaries, pesthouses, and orphanages, and as teachers of young children, midwives, healers and wetnurses. In other occupations women merely shared the changes in working conditions which worsened also for men as they came under increasing urban control. Small-scale marketing in single commodities saw women as probably the majority of stall-holders. In innkeeping they often worked alongside their husbands, who might practice a second craft as well. The retail distribution of food, alcoholic drinks, used clothing and household articles was largely a female monopoly. Women had to gravitate to peddling of this kind when excluded elsewhere.

Craft restrictions began to be applied to women from the mid-fifteenth century. As conflicts grew within society -- between city councils and clergy, councils and gilds, gilds among themselves, and masters in gilds and journeymen -- it was easy to pick on women as scapegoats in the jockeying for power among these rival male groups. Female exclusion from certain crafts was associated with growing economic competition and the changing role of journeymen, who no longer could expect automatically to become masters. Urban authorities also devalued women's work to secure public order and control the economy. In Strasbourg women were given male guardians from the later fifteenth century on the grounds that they would otherwise give their property to the convents, which paid no taxes. From this time widows were restricted in the number of years during which they could operate shops. By the mid-sixteenth century they could no longer take on apprentices or keep more than one or two journeymen. By the seventeenth century some gilds were forbidding women to employ any journeymen at all. In effect widows were put under pressure to remarry.

During the sixteenth century gild membership became increasingly limited to the sons or sons-in-law of masters; the prospects of journeymen became less good and they hardened in their attitudes towards working either under or alongside women. (Wiesner (1996)) They put pressure on the councils to restrict widows and prevent maids working in craft households from taking part in productive processes. Journeymen formed their own associations and engaged in male bonding which heightened their sense that their honour was threatened by the presence of women in the crafts, even those who contributed to economic success through their role in household production. The gilds affected included metal-working, weaving and goldsmiths. Tailors tried to prevent unqualifed seamstresses from impinging on their work and limited them to repairs and working with old cloth or on inferior garments. At all times women could rarely become apprentices themselves and therefore flourished most in the free arts not subject to gild regulation, but during the sixteenth century many formerly free arts, like hat-making, knitting and stocking-making, were subjected to gild control.

09.16 Women Spinning

One occupation still widely open to women was spinning, which had to meet considerable demand from weavers engaged in capitalist cloth-production. Yet spinning was closely controlled and only permitted as small-scale work in the domestic households of both town and country. City authorites saw spinning by women as preferable to having to support them with poor relief. Women's labour was to an extent becoming proletarianised. A greater degree of equality with men could now only be afforded by women in the families of the wealthier burghers, the wives of merchants, or for that matter of urban Lutheran pastors. The dowries they brought from their fathers assured them of status within their husbands' family, while their better education enabled them to play a role alongside their husbands. Steven Ozment has used the fascinating correspondence of a small number of these women with their menfolk to illustrate the degree of their responsibility and the nature of the Lutheran family unit. (Ozment (1986, 1990 and 1999)) How far this picture is representative of the majority of the struggling urban population is open to question.

Luther's ideas on marriage were taken up by his followers, but as on other issues not always in complete agreement with him. Some Protestant authors from the start stressed the subordination of the wife to the husband even more than Luther had done. In his Oeconomica Christiana (1529) Justus Menius ascribed this dependent relationship not just to the secular order but as divinely ordained. A woman derived her honour from her husband's reputation, as the moon received its light from the sun. This classical view of Aristotle, which eventually became dominant, was countered by other authors who relied more on Xenophon's concession to women of a more independent role in the household, as in Johann Steinbach, The Household of Women (1561). Johann Freder's Dialogue in Honour of Marriage (1543) advocated greater parity between the sexes, insisting that women had the same noble and rational souls as men. (Hendrix (1992)) He did however restrict their public role and believed that the domestic care of children which Luther encouraged was against the very nature of men.

Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, influenced by Zwingli as well as Luther, came closest to Erasmus and to modern susceptibilities in a relatively egalitarian view of marriage. (Selderhuis (1999)) He saw marriage as a fellowship which advanced the cause of love and as a covenant voluntarily entered into by two parties with reciprocal obligations. Marriage was the school and workplace for faith. Although the wife was to be submissive to her husband, the latter's love for his wife also had to involve self-sacrifice, and he might not be tyrannical. Therefore as a last resort Bucer allowed divorce for everything which threatened the marital relationship beyond repair, not just the three grounds of adultery, abandonment and impotence which Luther permitted. Bucer saw that when love leaves a marriage it becomes a prison, from which he wrote that the government is obliged to release the partners. These opinions were far ahead of his times and not adopted by other reformers, let alone the governments of the day.

Altogether there was a vast literature devoted to the subject of women and marriage, before the Reformation as well as after, and until recently most commentators have not distinguished sufficiently between the different types of work and have compared like with unlike. There will naturally be a difference between a treatise written to advise married couples and one about the nature of witchcraft. Therefore it is misleading, for instance, to compare the hostile view of women as the fount of all lust and devilish work given in The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum,1486) with a book of household advice for a Lutheran pastor. Examination of fifteenth and sixteenth century works written with similar purposes in mind tends to show similar diversity in both periods on the subject of marriage. One may find already in the fifteenth century examples of sermons delivered at weddings in which husbands were told to treat their wives lovingly and the wives were described as educators of their husbands who should be encouraged to criticize them. Women could be portrayed not only as sexual temptresses but as the victims of sexual aggression. Specific gender roles were emphasised but also the view that the couple were partners with obligations to one another. These precursors of Reformation attitudes need to be set alongside other treatises by clerics which lambasted women, just as Luther's and Bucer's early views contrast with the more patriarchal views which developed later during the sixteenth century.

09.17 Martin Luther, The Shorter Catechism

09.18 Husband and Wife Supervise the Family

The later emphasis on male domination did owe something to Luther's 'home table' which used passages from the letters of Paul and Peter to set out his new hierarchical view of society in the Shorter Catechism (1530). The old division of society into three separate orders of clergy, nobles and third estate was replaced by one of three orders to which everyone belonged in different capacities. All were of the clerical estate, either as pastors or as the faithful. All belonged to the order of government, as ruler or subject; and all were members of a household, in which the husband ruled much as did the prince in his state. Especially after the middle of the century this simplified view of the social order and of the household, while not completely replacing the old one, was widely disseminated through other versions of the home table, learned treatises, sermons, poems, songs and plays. Luther's earlier exhortations that husbands should be considerate to their wives were not entirely forgotten, but a shift was evident towards male authority. Numerous wedding sermons (Karant-Nunn (1999)) held out dire warnings to women to avoid the dangerous example of evil women who were rebellious, spendthrift, quarrelsome, lacking in faith, disloyal and adulterous. This emphasis in later Lutheran orthodoxy derived not just from the inner momentum of Lutheran teaching but from the growing sense of hierarchy in society at large and the increasing social and confessional discipline in an age when three entrenched religious parties confronted one another across a growing political divide in the Empire. Only later in the seventeenth century did pastors adopt more moderate tones and stress the need for husbands to make their wives happy, while a few began to encourage romantic love within marriage. By contrast (Hendrix (1995)) a few sixteenth-century teatises on the male predicament complained of the additional psychological burden imposed on men by the Lutheran injunctions to be both loving to their wives and ensure sustenance for their families. The different approach of different types of literature is further illustrated by funeral sermons which stressed the warmth and cohesion of family life and the grief felt at the loss of any of its members. However, even humorous popular cuture reinforced the patriarchal view by portraying the wife who was the dominant partner as unnatural.

09.19 A Husband who does not Rule

By declaring marriage no longer a sacrament, Luther strengthened considerably the trend for marriage to become a matter for secular regulation. He repeatedly said that marriage was a civil matter and urged that the cases which were brought to him should be resolved by the courts or the government, unless it was a matter of conscience, an important qualification. At the same time he insisted that weddings be public and receive the blessing of the church. New wedding rituals emphasised the marital virtues which learned treatises had proclaimed. (Karant-Nunn (1997)) Yet some of the elaborate wedding practices lasting several days which the new services were designed to replace, such as the bedding of the bride, continued in many Lutheran districts. So too did the practice of churching after childbirth which accepted popular notions of the impurity of women. Continuation of such pre-Reformation practices raises the issue of how far the legislation of Protestant territories and cities faithfully reflected Lutheran teachings or was able to ensure that they were observed.

Because Luther believed that sex was natural and should not be curbed, but that it belonged within marriage, he advised early marriage while both partners were in their teens. The economic circumstances in town and country meant that farm tenancies and craft qualifications could not be obtained by men until they were older than this, so that his injunction was rarely heeded. Urban authorities discouraged early marriage as they did not wish to pay alms to poor married couples. Ordinary people too were more aware than Luther that marriage was not merely a question of morals and inclination but linked with property owning. The response to Lutheran marriage teachings by villagers in the Franconian county of Hohenlohe varied according to their generation. (Robisheaux (1981)) Some younger people wished to marry out of natural inclination even if their parents opposed it because they had other plans for the inheritance of their farms. The Lutheran insistence on parental consent for early marriage aided the older generation in imposing control on the younger. Luther wished to remove the many prohibited degrees of marriage, especially the spiritual relationship of godparenthood, but many people and city councils were mistrustful of breaking the old taboos and damaging the opportunity for marriage to loyal Catholics, so that legislation on this matter was very cautious in introducing any change.

The study of court records, still at an early stage, has shown how halting were the changes made in dealing with moral issues, especially divorce (see Harrington (1995), Karant-Nunn (1982), Roper (1989), Safley (1983)). Often relatively few divorce cases were brought, or if they were initiated, no more were actually granted than the proportion of annulments formerly given by the Catholic church, roughly one in four. Marriage was seen as an economic institution which should not be dissolved if at all possible, and every effort at reconciliation enforced on the parties. Even when divorces were granted, the property settlements often favoured the husbands. Divorce seemed to favour individualism, and this did not conform to the urban ethic. Except for the issue of divorce, marriage legislation and that for the reform of morals was very similar during the sixteenth century in Lutheran, Calvinst and Catholic principalities and cities. Already present before the sixteenth century, the concern about secret marriages which inspired Luther also influenced the decrees of the Council of Trent which proscribed them. The shift to secular control of marriage and morals was not initiated by the Reformation but part of a longer process extending from the later Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Already in the fifteenth century gilds and city authorities had begun to discriminate against those who lived in irregular marriages or unions which were no marriage at all, and this lay sense of what was proper was then adopted by the churches.

Marriages authenticated by family and church may have been considered the norm before the Reformation and increasingly after it, but a large number of people in town and country, especially among the poor, either lived together without the blessing of the Church or abandoned their spouses afterwards to live in irregular unions. Nor were marriages necessarily harmonious, as the many disputes between spouses involving brutality, drunkenness and adultery brought to the new morals courts in the sixteenth century attest. A particular problem in medieval times for urban authorites, who were concerned above all to ensure good order, was the prevalence of prostitution to cater for the large number of unmarried young men and clergy.

As in France and Italy, prostitution was accepted as a necessary evil, so much so that some brothels were owned by municipal authorities and leased out to brothel-keepers. They were seen as a means to satisfy the needs of journeymen and apprentices foced to remain unmarried for many years and to protect the wives and daughters of respectable burghers. In some cities they were allowed to take part in public processions, while in Lübeck they even had their own gild. Restrictions began to be placed on them already from the mid-fifteenth century, as the moral climate began to change. In Strasbourg and Constance, for instance, they had to wear special clothing to identify them, were not permitted to solicit in public places, and were limited to certain streets. A process of ghettoisation of prostitutes had started. This coincided with other measures against adultery, bigamy and other forms of immorality, stricter control of begging, and the regular expulsion of Jews from urban communities. Before the Reformation moralising authors like Sebastian Brant and Thomas Murner helped in the change from viewing prostitution as an issue of public order to one of morality. Popular attacks on brothels occurred in Munich (1498), Constance (1507), Würzburg (1519) and other towns.

Subsequent Reformation preaching, by rejecting the teaching of medieval theologians that prostitution was a lesser evil tolerated so as to counter a greater one, provided the coping stone to this moral crusade and led to the closure of brothels in a large number of German cities, about 24 until 1539, 33 thereafter. These closures cannot be explained as arising from a concern about syphilis. The main syphilis outbreaks took place between the 1490s and 1520s, before most of the closures happened. In any case the view that syphilis was sexually transmitted only held the field from the later sixteenth century, and it was more common for such plagues to be regarded as a divine punishment for sin rather than having a physical cause. Of course public brothels had only ever been a small part of the trade, which continued after their closure as an illicit operation in the back streets of most cities. The climate of opinion had nevertheless swung against prostitutes, for which the Reformation, followed by the Counter-Reformation, must be held largely responsible even if the origins of this change lay earlier.

Another group of women in course of being marginalised by the rest of society were those accused of being witches. The Reformation occurred during a period in which attitudes towards 'cunning women' were changing, and yet the chronology of witch-hunting on a major scale reveals a curious lull during the first half of the sixteenth century. During the last two thirds of the fifteenth century there were about three hundred witch trials in Europe, of which some twenty-five took place in Germany. Betweeen 1580 and 1680 Germany was the main centre for the so-called witch-craze, with tens of thousands of executions, perhaps half the European total, of whom 80% were women. But from 1500 until 1550 only isolated cases were brought. Energies seem to have been diverted to establishing or countering the Reformation. It is significant that executions ordered by the secular courts of Europe for heresy ceased about the year 1565, just before the witchhunts began; it may even be that the trial methods developed to cope with heresy could now be applied to witchcraft.

The reasons for the 'witch-craze' are numerous and hotly disputed among the experts, deserving a case study to themselves. Alongside changes in popular and learned culture, legal and political systems, and economic trends, the conflicts between rival religious faiths and their suspicion of any possible deviation played their part, but no special responsibility lies with Lutheran teachings. Protestants had differing views about witches, as did Catholics. Luther believed in witches, but not in the more fanciful aspects of folklore, like flying on broomsticks. He did contrast the witches' union with the Devil to the Protestant ideal of womanly obedience in marriage. At the other extreme the Lutheran Johannes Weyer was one of the first to argue, in 1560, that witches were really harmless but deranged. Such views eventually won through, but not until a long time after they were published.

In this respect, as in others, the impact of the Reformation on women has to be related to other contemporary long-term changes rather than be considered in isolation. The same is true for the effect that the Reformation had on the Jews of Germany (for which Luther often receives unjustified blame), or more widely on political changes in the Empire. Given that society was already patriarchally structured and other trends were pushing in the same direction, it is not surprising that the reforms to marriage and family relations proposed by Luther were ambiguous in their effect, and therefore provided evidence which still allows some historians to argue that the Reformation was beneficial for women, others that it worsened their lot.