The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg
The common view that, during the Reformation, sixteenth-century women found that their status had been raised has remained unchallenged in contemporary historiography. This theory is most commonly reinterpreted using the idea that Protestantism, and in particular Calvinism, gave women a different religious experience, that while these women were denied their traditional means of expressing themselves, they were offered new ones, offsetting the denial. Roper, however, disagrees with this stance. She investigates Protestant social morality in Augsburg to demonstrate that women in early modern Europe had their societal status considerably worsened by the advent of the Reformation.
