Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France

Markers of Difference: Heroines, Amazons, and the Confessional Boundary

MARKERS OF DIFFERENCE Heroines, Amazons, and the Confessional Boundary s CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS dissolved the confessional boundary or cooperated across it to establish families and religious coexistence. Those in both churches who wanted to stop such boundary crossing sought to construct the strictest form of division between the faiths to keep each religion distinct, concretize the confessional identity of church members, and limit interactions between Catholics and Protestants . The guardians of orthodoxy in both churches had to combat religious indeterminacy and pliable confessional identities, which, as in mixed marriages, made boundary crossing possible. Since early-modern gender attitudes often figured malleability and inconstancy as feminine characteristics, the nature of women and of their religious experience became crucial in debates between the churches. And it was so for reasons that went beyond the issue of intermarriage. As has been frequently the case in other times and other places, this culture’s perceptions of gender differences provided it with a means of thinking about other sorts of differences ; they constituted a “system for remarking difference.”1 The vocabulary of gendered categories offered polemicists terms for drawing distinctions between the churches and for attacking their rivals.  1. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 23. The literature on employing gender categories to create social distinctions is enormous, but Dolan’s study examines their use specifically in the construction of religious difference. The polemical battle between the English Protestant majority and the Catholic minority in many ways mirrored that in France. In their crudest form, gendered characterizations gave each side a ready means for denigrating the other as a religion of women or, at least, as a religion that “inappropriately empower[ed] women.”2 But the debates over women were complex, and therefore so were the means by which these debates were put to use in the arguments between churches. Those who criticized the rival church for being dominated by women were not referring to the supposedly natural tendency of women to be inconstant or changeable. Instead, they were complaining about the tendency of women to be obstinate in their religious wrong-headedness—another trait assumed to be naturally feminine. Women of the rival confession had too much prominence or had gained too much power, in public life and within their families. Characterizing the other religion as womendominated immediately threatened to invest it with an array of negative traits. Women’s presumed position in the rival confession was both a cause and a sign of its tendency to overturn the world’s proper order. It was irrational and deceptive as a result of women’s supposedly essential irrationality and deceptiveness. For both Catholics and Protestants, the disorder evident in the opposite faith paralleled the disorder evident in the female sex; indeed, it was directly due to disorder in the female sex. And the obvious fact that both churches were male-dominated institutions did nothing to undermine this commonplace. Yet the defenders of churches could also look to women for a rhetorical advantage over their foes, and it is for this reason that women took on great “symbolic visibility” in the conflict between the churches.3 For at the same time women were characterized as disorderly in religious life, they were also championed as the “devout sex.” They could surpass men in piety. The notion of women as the devout sex was encountered frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in part because of the interest confessional polemicists had in promoting the female exemplars of their faiths. While criticizing the public prominence and excessive religiosity of women from the other side, defenders of Protestantism or Catholicism were quick to honor their own women if they exceeded gender ex-     2. “Each [side] could claim that what was wrong with the other was that it inverted the hierarchy in sexual and familial relations” (Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 53; see also 8, 85). See also Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” 65. 3. I take the term “symbolic visibility” from Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 30. pectations by protecting their church or by displaying a “virile” spirituality through their extraordinary devotion. Polemicists celebrated the virile piety of their heroines because it suggested that the church being defended provided a proper outlet for female spirituality while keeping women in their socially acceptable place. Those women reputed for their virile piety were not more manlike than other women. Rather...