This essay examines Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life through the framework of caregiving. It also uses de Sales’s correspondence with two elite women, Jeanne de Chantal and Marie Brûlart, to demonstrate how de Sales’s guidance for laity was put into practice. Exploring women that yearned for a richer spiritual yet also had extensive caregiving obligations that did not allow for complete withdrawal from the secular world, reveals the increased labor these women faced. Women could not neglect household and family to spend more time in prayer and devotional practices. Caregiving duties were ongoing for most women of Early Modern Europe and continue today. Exploring how caring was viewed as part of women’s obligations as Christians, highlights the often-hidden labor of women.
This article compares late medieval and early modern patterns of women’s preaching in Strasbourg. Medieval women circumvented gendered restrictions against female preaching through performative acts of embodied devotion. This article compares the embodied sermons of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenburg and the printed sermons of Katharina Schütz Zell to discuss the change and continuity in late medieval and early modern women’s preaching. Using Beverly Kienzle’s definition of the sermon and Roxanne Mountford’s concept of rhetorical space, I identify continuity in both’s women’s conformity to gendered regimes of piety. I also argue that Protestant reform shifted the location of female religious authority from embodied piety to printed sermons, but in a way that reflects a continuity with medieval traditions of female preaching. Overall this article demonstrates how women’s preaching persisted within the theological and cultural changes of the early modern period.
This paper will analyze the publications for children of Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention, from 1953 to 1957. These include Tell, a monthly magazine for girls, and Ambassador Life, a monthly magazine for boys. The paper will argue that these magazines urged girls to develop social graces while challenging boys to physical activity. In addition, both Ambassador Life and Tell generally encouraged their readers to adopt what editors saw as gender-specific roles, positing distinctive tasks for boys (and men) and for girls (and women). Overall, these emphases reflected conservative Southern Baptist understandings of gender and helped shape the views of a generation (or more) of Southern Baptists.