One of the earliest and most important publications on this subject was Sherrin Marshall’s path-breaking 1984 article on women and religious choice in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. In it she offered a brief but provocative survey of the opportunities for Netherlandish women to be religious actors across the confessional spectrum, whether Anabaptist, Reformed, or Catholic. Focusing principally on noblewomen, Marshall argued that, in the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century at least, it was possible for women to exercise some degree of choice and agency when it came to their religious allegiance, even though that choice sometimes came with serious social and legal consequences. But by the century’s end, she concluded, as confessional boundaries hardened and institutions solidified, women’s room to manoeuvre had been drastically reduced.¹²

Marshall’s pioneering article was a welcome breakthrough, particularly its ambitious multiconfessional approach and its mining of sources for (elite) women’s voices. The subsequent literature, however, has tended to divide its focus along the three major confessional boundaries: Anabaptist, Reformed, and Catholic women are generally examined separately. To some extent this is a relic of an old tradition of Reformation historiography being written by its various sectarian partisans. It also has to do with the available sources, which tend to vary in nature and extent depending on the confession, and with the highly variegated nature of each confession’s religious experiences. Since these boundaries really only started to solidify late in the sixteenth century, this confessional approach has sometimes overstated the degree of difference among the reforming movements, especially Protestants. The lines among the women and men calling for religious change were on the whole much more fluid than later sectarian literature has suggested. Certainly, the Habsburg authorities saw only heresy and not doctrinal distinctions.

Nevertheless, the confessional approach has yielded valuable information about women’s experiences of religious reform. Of the three confessional streams, Anabaptist women, including their Mennonite and doopsgezind offshoots, have received the most sustained and extensive attention in the historiography. In terms of numbers Anabaptists took by far the greatest brunt of the inquisitorial prosecution that the Habsburg government employed to suppress heresy. Consequently, the Anabaptists were the first among Netherlandish dissenters to develop a martyrological tradition. That tradition included many stories of women, as well as men, who heroically died for their faith at the hands of the state; in fact, women figure more frequently in Anabaptist martyr tales than any other Protestant martyrological tradition – some 20-30 percent, compared to 5-10 percent for Reformed collections.¹³ The fact that these martyrs’ stories featured women so frequently no doubt added to their shock value; highlighting the judicial cruelty directed towards women, whom sixteenth-century patriarchy deemed weaker than men, was intended to strengthen the resolve of Mennonite readers. Thanks to these martyrologies, Anabaptists are the single largest group of sixteenth-century Netherlandish dissenting women that historians have thus far examined.

In the 1980s and 1990s several articles were published that put Netherlandish Anabaptist women on the map, as it were. Virtually all of them were based on the same sources, The Sacrifice of the Lord and The Martyrs’ Mirror, two influential Mennonite martyrologies published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. These early articles were mostly descriptive in nature, making these women visible to a wider readership, in many cases for the first time. The earliest of these articles, written by Ineke van’ t Spijker in 1985 and John Klassen in 1986, argued that the Mennonite martyrologies reveal Anabaptist women as dynamic and eloquent spiritual actors, albeit entirely within the context of home and family.¹⁴ Even a dissenting movement as radical as Anabaptism still adhered to traditional, patriarchal gender roles; women could be exemplary martyrs, but they did not serve in any way as formal leaders. Lucille Marr noted in 1986 that Anabaptist women may have been peers in the faith, but they remained subordinate in marriage, at least according to the prescriptions of their male prophets.¹⁵ Jennifer Reed’s examination of the martyrologies revealed deep affective bonds between wives and husbands, but still within the parameters of a hierarchical marriage.¹⁶ Auke Jelsma likewise underscored that the martyrologies established a spiritual equality between Anabaptist women and men, but not a legal or social one.¹⁷ This interest in equality, or the lack of it, perhaps reflected the preoccupations of the era of second-wave feminism in which these articles were written. If these scholars were hoping to find feminists avant la lettre, they were bound to be disappointed.

In addition to increasing their visibility, the early historiography on Anabaptist women published in the 1980s and 1990s had a faintly laudatory air; female Mennonite martyrs were ‘heroines’ and ‘pioneers’ who evinced praiseworthy spiritual fortitude.¹⁸ The initial historiographical recovery of sixteenth-century Netherlandish Anabaptist women could thus sometimes also come across as at least slightly hagiographical. This tendency may have been a consequence of the nature of the principal source material; martyrologies, of course, functioned in the service of piety rather than of history. It may also have been a reflection of second-wave feminism, which sought to recover the female heroines of the past. The early literature putting Anabaptist women on the map fit in with the then-current historiography, found in the work of notable historians such as Roland Bainton and Steven Ozment, that argued that the Protestant Reformation represented an advancement for women on the whole and that therefore tended to focus on ‘women worthies’.¹⁹ On the one hand, most of this early literature from the 1980s and 1990s concluded that Anabaptism did not advance the position or status of Netherlandish women in any tangible way, but, on the other hand, by shining a spotlight on these women martyrs it did continue the scholarly focus on exemplary women.

Still, this work of recovery was necessary and important. More recent analyses of Netherlandish Anabaptist women have cast a more nuanced eye over their subject, including a more careful consideration of the martyrologies themselves as sources. A good example of this newer scholarship is Nicole Grochowina’s 2014 essay on images of women in the sixteenth-century Mennonite martyrology The Sacrifice of the Lord (published in eleven editions between 1562 and 1599), which analyses its stories through the lens of gender relations. She found a tension between the book’s overall portrayal of spiritual equality between men and women (i.e., that women were capable of heroically dying for their faith) and its reinforcement of gender stereotypes. Theological questions played a prominent role in the testimonies of male martyrs, Grochowina observed, while female martyrs’ accounts were couched in simpler terms of sentiment, steadfastness, and family love. This contrast was of course intended to reinforce gender hierarchies, reminding women of their station while at the same time encouraging their piety.²⁰ The distinguished Anabaptist scholar Gary Waite has likewise examined images of Anabaptist women, especially their similarities to depictions of witches during the early modern witch hunts. Just like witches, Anabaptist women could be seen as members of a fearful diabolical sect, and male fears of assertive female heretics would feed growing fears of female witches in the next century.²¹ These shifts away from mostly descriptive accounts of Netherlandish Anabaptist women to cultural analyses of the role gender played in their depiction suggest a further sophistication of the historiography. There is less concern for either equality or heroism, and instead an analysis of the ways in which gender shaped sources and the ways in which those sources reinforced patriarchal norms.

The sources for women who joined the Reformed Protestant movement in the Low Countries, which first arose in the 1550s and 1560s, are more diffuse than of their Anabaptist sisters. We know from anecdotal evidence that women were already active members of the Reformed movement in the 1540s: Idelette de Bure, the wife of John Calvin, came from Liège, and the polemicist Marie Dentière started her religious career as an abbess in Tournai. Sources, however, are harder to find; Reformed martyrologies, as noted above, did not highlight female victims nearly as much as their Mennonite equivalents.

As was the case with the literature on Anabaptist women, earlier scholarship on Reformed women was primarily concerned with recovering their experience. Because of their social status, we likely know more about noblewomen than any other individual women in the Netherlandish Reformed movement. In a 1969 article the Belgian scholar Johan Decavele brought to light the efforts by the noblewoman Katharina van Boetzelaer to patronise the Reformed movement in Flanders during the ‘wonder year’ of 1566. Van Boetzelaer exploited her extensive kinship networks among the Netherlandish nobility to provide aid to the Reformed cause, including hosting worship services on her estates and subsidising Reformed preachers. Decavele saw this as an instance of what he termed ‘elite Protestantism’, somewhat akin to patronage of the Huguenots among the French nobility.²² Sherrin Marshall similarly analysed how noblewomen of all ranks were well-placed to offer all kinds of material and social support to Reformed dissenters.²³ Jos Venner mined the archives of various communities in the Meuse river valley in Brabant and Limburg to describe the activities of women in the Reformed movement in the 1560s and 1570s; here, too, local noblewomen appear to have played an important role in supporting Reformed activities.²⁴ These early articles highlight the pivotal role social status played in Netherlandish women’s experience of Reformation, as well as what we know about it. Noblewomen enjoyed legal protections and privileges that allowed them a greater degree of agency and religious choice, and consequently their presence in the sources is much greater. The question this visibility raises is of course how exceptional or typical the religious experiences of elite women were. Social class, as these studies indicate, was an important influence on religious agency.

For more ordinary Reformed women, we can get some information from the legal records of the Habsburg persecution of Protestants, and, starting in 1572, when congregations were first freely established on Netherlandish soil, from the ecclesiastical records from the Reformed Church. In these sources women’s voices are of course mediated through male authorities, but sharp-eyed historians have managed to glean some important insights from them. The church’s conciliar bodies concerned themselves with church governance and discipline, and their minutes are therefore valuable, if uneven, sources for Reformed congregational life in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. One of the pioneers in examining these sources with an eye to gender was Els Kloek. In 1990 she published one of the first essays ever to examine the gendered dynamics of Reformed church discipline; her study of the Leiden consistory in the 1580s revealed that the disciplining of women concentrated primarily on cases of marriage and sexual morality. Consistorial discipline could both enforce patriarchal norms and offer women a recourse for women trapped in difficult marriages.²⁵ Similarly, Herman Roodenburg carefully examined gender differences in the Amsterdam consistory’s cases starting in 1578, noting how central notions of sexual honour were in the disciplining of female church members.²⁶ Liesbeth Geudeke likewise found in the consistorial records of Edam that cases of marital dispute involved a larger number of women than men and that the consistory could provide female members some respite and protection from abusive husbands. This may in turn explain, if only in part, the attraction of joining the Reformed Church for women, as they tended to make up the majority of members in congregations.²⁷ These sources can potentially tell us much more about the impact of religious change on family life.

Netherlandish women who joined the Reformed movement sometimes found themselves forced to move abroad, either to escape Habsburg prosecution or to flee the ravages of the Netherlandish wars. Typically, they wound up in congregations in England or the Holy Roman Empire. Religious migrants have recently become an increasing object of study for scholars of the sixteenth century, and the gendered aspects of this phenomenon have only patchily drawn the attention of a few historians.²⁸ In a 2007 article Jesse Spohnholz examined women in the migrant Reformed community in Wesel, a community which appointed deaconesses, a rarity in the early Reformed tradition. These female officials worked alongside male deacons and were responsible for the care of the sick and the poor, especially women and children. The establishment of this office was a largely pragmatic decision by the Wesel consistory, as its migrant congregation was swamped with refugees from war and persecution.²⁹ After 1572 local Reformed churches in the Dutch Republic generally eschewed the office, though the Edam congregation appeared to have at least one deaconess as late as 1596.³⁰ In a 2014 article Spohnholz widened his focus to Netherlandish women’s experiences in exile communities in England and Germany more broadly; these transient, institutionally underdeveloped congregations made the fates of already vulnerable female refugees even more precarious.³¹ Timothy Fehler examined the diaconal rolls of the Emden Reformed community where thousands of migrants wound up in the period 1550-1580; most of those receiving help were men, with women seldom named but instead listed according to their relationship to a husband or father.³² Examining evidence from the Dutch stranger church in Norwich, Raingard Esser noted that women made up a majority of the congregation.³³ This mirrored a similar gender pattern in the Dutch Reformed churches after 1572: women made up a majority of church members in most communities.³⁴ Migration, it appears, took a more severe toll on women, especially those separated from husbands or family, than on men.

Recently Amanda Pipkin has done a close reading of a rare piece of published writing by a sixteenth-century Netherlandish Reformed woman, Cornelia Teellinck (1554-1576). At age nineteen Teellinck, daughter of an influential Zeeland family, submitted a written confession of faith to the elders of the newly formed Reformed congregation in Zierikzee, a document which, along with some of her religious poetry, her sister Susanna had published in 1607 as A Short Confession of Faith. The religious convictions expressed therein were orthodox and not innovative, relying heavily on the authoritative Belgic Confession, and they were accompanied by heavy doses of anti-Spanish rhetoric. Though women were barred from holding any office in the Reformed Church, devout women like Cornelia could serve the church by these kinds of indirect and didactic means, especially if they came from prominent families with extensive social networks. Religious agency was possible for Reformed women, albeit in very informal and unofficial ways and primarily for those with some social privilege.³⁵ Like the noblewomen studied by Sherrin Marshall, their elite status as members of a prominent Reformed family allowed the Teellinck sisters to exercise a rare degree of confessional visibility.

Interestingly, Catholic women in the Low Countries, who were of course far more numerous than their Protestant counterparts in the sixteenth century, have in recent years received the least amount of historiographical attention. Although much archival spadework was done by Dutch Catholic historians in the first half of the twentieth century to recover sources about Catholic women religious, more recent historiography has not concentrated on them a great deal. An exceptional individual such as the fiercely Catholic Antwerp poet Anna Bijns, who published sharply anti-Lutheran verse in the mid-sixteenth century, has been studied by literary scholars, but collectively Catholic women have been harder to find in the literature.³⁶ What about the 10,000 or so women religious, for example, whose convents dotted the Netherlandish landscape in this period? Convents could be found in every town of the Low Countries, though local archival sources for them are quite uneven. Scholars have done some research on Netherlandish monastic women in the high and later Middle Ages, but the attention paid to the sixteenth century in particular has been sparse. The general scholarly consensus sees an overall decline in the numbers of religious women in the 1500s, a trend that would be exacerbated by the Revolt of the Netherlands in the last third of the century.³⁷ Madelon van Luijck’s fine study of convents in late-medieval Leiden and Zwolle devotes a chapter to the Reformation, specifically their dissolution in the 1570s as Protestant regimes took over those cities.³⁸ Nuns forced to leave their convents sometimes went abroad or retired into private life.

In fact, the fate of women religious in the Low Countries, especially those displaced by the wars of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, awaits further investigation. In this case, too, sources are scarce. In 2019 Raymond Fagel and Joke Spaans translated and published a wonderful seventeenth-century account of a company of Poor Clares in Alkmaar who were forced to flee their convent after Protestant rebels took over that city in 1572. In her essay accompanying this chronicle, Spaans reiterated how little is known about these women as they faced a tidal wave of religious change.³⁹ Their counterparts living in the southern regions that stayed under Habsburg control experienced far less upheaval. Much of the research on these women, however, focuses more on the seventeenth century and primarily on the effects of the monastic reforms of the Council of Trent on conventual life there.⁴⁰

Catholic lay women are even more invisible in the historiography of the sixteenth-century Low Countries. They pop up only very rarely, such as the three hundred Amsterdam women who in 1531 protested new construction near the site of the Holy Stead, the city’s most sacred shrine.⁴¹ Certainly there was a long medieval tradition of devout lay women gathering in pious communities. The Modern Devotion, for example, included more sisters than brothers, and only recently have scholars started to pay attention to its gender dynamics, but mostly for the medieval rather than early modern era.⁴² Similarly Beguine communities could be found in every major town in the region. These semi-religious women took no vows but lived in communities doing good works. In 2001 Walter Simons published a masterful overview of these women in the southern Netherlands, but there is scant literature on the fates of these women in regions taken over by the rebellion in the later sixteenth century.⁴³ One group of lay women who have garnered more attention from scholars recently are the spiritual maidens or kloppen, who under the Protestant regime of the Dutch Republic in the wake of the Revolt dedicated themselves privately from the 1580s to the service of beleaguered Catholic communities. In some respects, they were a continuation of the Modern Devout and the Beguines in that they were a movement to accommodate pious laywomen. As Joke Spaans pointed out in her study of the most famous klopje population, that of Haarlem, the kloppen, unlike Beguines, lived in private households rather than in community.⁴⁴ Spaans’s book concentrates mostly on the seventeenth century, but there are nuggets of information about the late sixteenth century from the collection of biographies that forms the book’s principal source. These women’s lives recorded valuable memories of the trauma and disestablishment inflicted on Catholic women by the twin assaults of revolt and Reformation. They also tell stories of how confessional difference could complicate family dynamics.⁴⁵ Sources like this are exceedingly rare, however; documentation on the experiences of Netherlandish Catholic women in the sixteenth century seems to be even more sparse than that of their Protestant counterparts.

The selected works surveyed above suggest that future study of Netherlandish women in the sixteenth century will continue to lead to much richer insights into the gendered dynamics of religious change. Much of the historiography so far has focused on rediscovering and recovering women’s stories, which has been important and necessary work. It has yielded valuable insights about the different life experiences of women of the various confessions, such as the persecution undergone by Anabaptist women, the religious agency exercised by elite Reformed women, and the underappreciated role of Catholic women, both religious and lay. These works produced in the last fifty years have rightly integrated women to the historiographical conversation and have thereby both enriched and complicated it. They have enhanced our understanding of sixteenth-century Netherlandish women as religious actors who were not simply bystanders or victims of reformation but also active agents of it.

Still, this historiography’s focus on confessional boundaries has its limits; by studying only one confession, it becomes easy to fall into historiographical silos. The result is an emphasis on the singularity or exceptionalism of the differing reform movements rather than on any commonalities. And until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the boundaries between different religious reforming groups could be exceedingly porous. In effect, the historiography on women and Reformation in the Low Countries has thus far privileged confession over gender. But in the twenty-first century the historiography of the Reformation has been almost entirely secularised. It is generally seen nowadays not as a purely Protestant movement but a movement for religious change across Latin Christendom. What is sorely needed at this juncture is a more cross- or multi-confessional perspective, or perhaps even a non-confessional one; that is, perhaps it is time to flip the analytical lens on its head and focus more intentionally on the question of gender. The question that we need to ask now is how gender shaped and influenced women’s experience across confessions, or even despite them. To what extent did sixteenth-century Netherlandish women’s religious lives mirror each other? Were there similarities of experience that transcended confessional divides? Did privilege and status pertain in the lives of Catholic women as much as it did for their Reformed counterparts, for example? There are many possible comparative avenues: Nicole Grochowina’s gender analysis of Mennonite martyrologies might, for example, also be fruitfully applied to how women were depicted in Reformed and Catholic martyrologies produced at the same time. Women of all confessions were persecuted and killed for their beliefs in the sixteenth century; were there similarities among their cases that the confessional focus that currently dominates the historiography has obscured? In short, a comparative approach might prove very fruitful. Sherrin Marshall’s 1984 essay offered some tantalising initial forays into this approach, but it has not been emulated much in the interim.

So, much more research is sorely needed. A possible next step is to apply a more deliberately gendered analysis of the available sources, as Grochowina and Waite have done. Looking at familiar sources through a new analytical lens will undoubtedly provide fresh insights. A very promising recent study is a master’s thesis for the Catholic University of Leuven, ‘Simpele harten verleyt?’ Gender-analyse van de geloofsvervolging in de kerngebieden van de Nederlanden, 1520-1540, written by Lynn Callewaert in 2012. The study is an analysis of the gendered dimensions of the prosecution of Protestant heresy in the western core provinces of the Low Countries (Flanders, Brabant, and Holland), using both inquisitorial records and martyrologies, focusing on the trials of 201 women. Callewaert does not attempt any confessional taxonomy of the defendants. She instead examines these cases from multiple perspectives, including legal, familial, and social, and concludes that women accused of heresy could, at least to a limited extent, influence the course and outcome of their trials depending on how they exploited traditional gender roles within their family and social networks. In this manner women were able to exercise some agency even when faced with the most severe consequences of their religious choices.⁴⁶ This is an interesting, combined quantitative-qualitative approach that might be applied to other legal records. Would a similar method work for such analogous sources as the records of the Duke of Alba’s Council of Troubles, which prosecuted thousands for rebellion and heresy in the period 1567-1574? Similarly, Els Kloek’s and Liesbeth Geudeke’s examination of Reformed consistorial records could be extended to all the consistorial minutes that survive from the late sixteenth century. There are not many, and they are scattered in local archives across the Netherlands, but a wider-scale examination of most of them might yield new information and perspectives about how Reformed women wrestled with and benefitted from church discipline in their familial, social, and spiritual lives.

In sum, the examples and themes presented here suggest that there is still much spadework to be done in the terrain of women and Reformation in the Low Countries. The biggest challenge is, of course, in the sources, which for the sixteenth century are far more piecemeal and scattered than they are for subsequent periods. They mostly comprise prosecutorial records, martyrologies, consistorial acta, and the rare, occasional ego-document. Still, with some diligence and imagination these sources can be fruitfully mined, particularly if historians concentrate less on confessional difference and more on gendered experience. The lives of women in the Netherlandish Reformation in the sixteenth century await still more historians, so that the historiographic lacuna can continue to be filled. As we have seen with our Leiden widow Madaleena, women in the sixteenth-century Low Countries could be both agents and victims of religious change; their stories need much more (re)telling and (re)examining. Gender is precisely the analytical lens that will give us new perspectives.