Women and Communal Worship: Shaping the Early Modern Christian Liturgy

Women and Communal Worship advances our understanding of early modern women by uncovering and analyzing Christian women’s engagement with liturgical and communal worship between 1500 and 1750. The Protestant attack on the medieval liturgy was at the heart of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but women’s contributions to those momentous changes have been largely overlooked as scholars have focused on women’s private devotional practices and texts. This collection of essays demonstrates that communal worship was vital to women of all confessional stripes. Although they could not generally lead the liturgy, women shaped public devotion in important ways, whether at the level of the local congregation, the household chapel, the convent, the court, or the national church. Communal worship is thus a key site for examining women’s textual, literary, social, and political agency.