Adjusting Our Lenses to Make Gender Visible

The oldest surviving complete examples of eyeglasses in the world, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, were discovered in 1953, hidden beneath the floorboards of the nuns' choir at the Cistercian Kloster Wienhausen in the Lüneberg Heath in northern Germany, now in the state of Lower Saxony. Several pairs of wood-framed riveted spectacles with their lenses, and fragments of others, were unearthed there, along with prayer books, small pictures, relic bundles, devotional objects, and the materials used for making these items, such as scissors, beads, cloth, paper, and needles, most likely hidden in this sacred spot when Duke Ernst the Confessor, the area's ruler, attempted to introduce Lutheran practice to the convent in the 1520s.

I first heard about Wienhausen thirty years ago, by accident. I was spending several months at the Duke August Library in Wolfenbüttel, investigating why early modern women published their works, and planning to write a book on what I then termed "women's defense of their public role," a topic that reflected the strong interest in the public/private dichotomy in women's history in the 1980s. I was therefore examining prefaces, forewords, addresses to the reader, afterwords, dedications, and anything else in books published by women before 1800.² Among my findings at Wolfenbüttel were studies and some sources about convents in lower Saxony, such as Wienhausen, that were not closed or disbanded during the Protestant Reformation, but survived as women's religious communities, in part by having accepted enough aspects of Lutheran theology so that the political authorities who oversaw these convents eventually left them alone. Thus, these were Lutheran convents, despite the claims by surveys of the Reformation—both scholarly ones and those designed for students—that such institutions did not and, in fact, could not exist. Although I did not know to label them as such in 1987, Lutheran convents were queer; that is, they called into question and blurred dichotomous categories.

As I moved away from what I had originally intended to research to learn more about these convents and their residents, I read about the collection of objects discovered under the nuns' choir, objects that, in my first article on these convents, I presented as an example of the ways in which nuns and other female religious resisted the Protestant Reformation.³ Duke Ernst of Brunswick-Lüneberg, who had studied with Luther at the University of Wittenberg, and whose territory was the part of lower Saxony where Wienhausen was located, introduced the Reformation there in the 1520s. Almost all male monasteries agreed with very little pressure to disband and surrender their property to the duke, but the female convents refused even to listen to the Protestant preachers. In two of these, Walsrode and Medingen, the nuns locked the convent door and took refuge in the choir of the chapel. Duke Ernst first pleaded with them personally, then ordered the gates to be forcibly opened and his Protestant preachers to speak through a hole bashed in the choir. In a convent in Lüne, the nuns lit old felt slippers to drive out the preacher with smoke. They sang during his sermons, and when ordered to be quiet, said their rosaries. They were forbidden to hold mass publicly, so they held it in their private quarters or the convent granary. The nuns in Heiningen hid food from the Protestant preachers sent to their convent, refusing to abandon the site despite promises of a twenty-gulden dowry if they would leave to marry. In 1531, Duke Ernst tore down about one-fourth of Wienhausen's buildings and took much of its land when the nuns resisted his attempts to introduce Lutheran practice — most likely this was the time when the objects were hidden — but the nuns there continued to elect Catholic abbesses until 1587. They also wore their Cistercian habits until 1616, and kept saying the hours in Latin until 1620; indeed, the first woman who willingly left Wienhausen to marry did so only in 1651. While Wienhausen thus blurred the lines between Protestant and Catholic...