Bainton, have been informed partly by the desire to put theology back into Reformation studies, not only in response to those who have sought to reduce the field to political or social history but also to address the thesis that reform (on the part of any of the churches) achieved, at most, confessionalization as a mode of group identity. The most recent approaches to the study of Reformation and religious beliefs of ordinary people, two scholarly generations after the pioneering work of Roland H. What is difficult to dislodge from an evidentiary point of view is the overwhelming sense that women were regarded inferior to men in almost every respect. Much that was said about women in the Middle Ages and the general period of the Reformations may rightly be questioned or dismissed as outright nonsense. Naturally, fewer women than men left records behind and chroniclers tended to overlook women save when they became public figures in revolt or martyrdom or otherwise gained compelling notoriety. That said, it is also pertinent that Hussite sources tended to marginalize the witness and role of women.
The stultifying effect of the Counter Reformation almost completely extinguished the Hussite tradition and in the course of re-catholicizing Bohemia many sources were lost. Finding sources, especially in the Hussite context, has been especially onerous. It is also evident that women in the world of Reformation did not simply passively react to the various reform messages that arose. 3 We know that women did respond to the reform impulses that coursed through the Czech lands in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, arose to prominence in the fifteenth century, and continued into the early modern period. This is especially true for the sixteenth-century Reformations but less so for the Hussite movement where scholarship has not progressed. In the past generation they have increasingly become the subject of serious consideration. 2 Within Christianity, women have been equally praised and excoriated. 1 It is a frail argument to maintain that heresy appealed to medieval women more than men. We know a great deal about those in official religious orders and there has been a fair amount of conjecture about women in heretical movements though much of this has been unable to sustain the weight of close interrogation. The history of religious practice in the Latin West has often excluded women from the main narratives and they have been overlooked in traditional scholarship. The essay endeavours to use these case studies to present a preliminary answer to the question: What do women tell us about Reformation? This study reveals the world of religious reform more fully by situating women and female agency in an active capacity. What is striking is the role of theology and the nature of female agency in the examination of these women. An examination of their lives and faith by means of the surviving primary sources and relevant historiography provides a window through which to observe the nature of religious reform in the Prague context in the world of Reformations. Their names are almost completely unknown outside Czech historiography.
This essay considers Klára, a sixteenth-century Prague housekeeper, Marta, a learned figure contemporary with Klára who withstood civil and ecclesiastical officials, and Anna Marie Trejtlarová, an early seventeen-century educated laywoman.
The gap in Anglophone historiography is even more apparent. Czech-language scholarship treating Hussite history have made few significant advances in the study of women and there has been limited attention given to the role women played in the Hussite tradition. The Hussite tradition historically has been excluded by the mainstream of Reformation historiography.
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