Heide Wunder is one of Germany’s most distinguished early modernists… Wunder is one of the few scholars of her county who take regular cognizance of English-language research. She is also thoroughly interdisciplinary in her approach… [Her book] is filled with riveting anecdotes and authoritative analysis, bespeaking Wunder’s expansive search for evidence and her unquestionable expertise.
-- Susan C. Karant-Nunn American Historical Review
This is a masterful (gender-specific usage intended) study of all aspects of women’s lives in early-modern Germany… Wunder’s attention to issues of class and regional difference is evident throughout the book. She is widely read in a variety of disciplines—cultural anthropology, women’s studies, and literary studies—and her use of texts, along with social-historical analysis, make this an example of ‘new cultural history’ at its best… Wunder’s prose in German is clear and concise, and the English translation captures both these qualities.
-- Merry Wiesner-Hanks Journal of Interdisciplinary History
With this translation, Wunder’s book, published in Germany to critical acclaim, is now available to a much wider, English-speaking audience. Wunder, a social historian, is interested in how European society made the transition from one of estates and privileges to one dominated by bourgeois institutions and values. Unlike earlier historians, she places women and gender relations squarely within this process… Using a variety of sources, including funeral sermons, letters, and memoirs, and drawing on her vast knowledge of previous scholarship, Wunder examines both normative rules and actual behaviors of men and women… This important and accessible work should be in every academic library.
-- J. Harrie Choice
Wunder has written a history of women with a difference. It is the best book in any language on the subject to date and will be the benchmark for future studies for a long time to come. The uniqueness of the work lies in its rejecting both a history of women that is separate from the history of men, and a history of women that is the history of man’s domination over women. In place of both, Wunder offers ‘a history of women as part of a new general history of the achievements of humankind as the joint work of both genders.’ Wunder sets the history of women squarely within the social history of the later Middle Ages by focusing on two major developments that peaked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: marriage became the dominant lifestyle for men and women and work and life were ‘familialized.’ By the latter is meant ‘the process by which the production of goods for society was increasingly organized in family households, while at the same time the social and emotional relationship of the people working there developed into a family.’ Contrary to most modern historians, Wunder does not view the union of home and workplace as having been totally detrimental to women.
-- Steven Ozment, Harvard University
An important work by a major historian, Wunder’s book goes a long way beyond the older ‘compensatory’ women’s history, and has very little in common with more recent feminist pronouncements in which the state of women in earlier times is considered largely in isolation from its historical context. As a social historian, Wunder is chiefly interested in the gradual change of western Europe from a society of estates possessing greater or lesser privilege into one in which bourgeois forms and values predominated. The place, role, and experience of women in this transition—women’s changing opportunities for action in life, as she puts it—are the subject of He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon, which is not a separate history of women, but an explanation of how a process of historical development becomes visible in the lives and activities of both genders.
-- Gerald Strauss