Wedding (and Divorcing) the Brides of Christ

Abstract

The Protestant Reformation wrought comprehensive change across early modern Europe, sparking theological debates that continue today. Although the Reformation can be traced through splintering denominations and theological heterodoxies, recent scholarship has highlighted marriage politics as a potent signpost of change. During the Reformation marriage, once a private contract between two members of a homogenous religious community, was transformed into a highly-regulated and deeply-gendered change of political status in both Catholic and Protestant communities. At the same time, as Protestants and Catholics defined themselves against each other, they revised the details of the marital contract in the service of forging confessional identity. However, not only marriageable men and women bore the consequences of these changes – the transformation of marriage during the Reformation was equally pronounced for the so-called “brides of Christ,” women religious sworn to abstain from marriage altogether. Indeed, women religious became battlegrounds for arguments about sex. Although the implications of the Reformation for women religious have been considered at length by other scholars, this paper will examine the fate of the brides of Christ as sexually embodied brides, with a geographical focus on Reformation Germany. I contend that the marital discourse surrounding women religious during the Reformation was not incidental to their fate – the status of the brides of Christ was inextricably linked to the status of earthly marriage. By examining this connection, I hope to illuminate how women’s bodies, and especially the sexualized embodiment of women religious, became central to theological and political discourse in Reformation Germany, reshaping the symbolic role of women and transforming women’s daily lives.