<div>In premodern Germany, both the emerging centralized government and the powerful Catholic Church redefined gender roles for their own ends. Ulrike Strasser's interdisciplinary study of Catholic state-building examines this history from the vantage point of the virginal female body. Focusing on Bavaria, Germany's first absolutist state, Strasser recounts how state authorities forced chastity upon lower-class women to demarcate legitimate forms of sexuality and maintain class hierarchies. At the same time, they cloistered groups of upper-class women to harness the spiritual authority associated with holy virgins to the political authority of the state. The state finally recruited upper-class virgins as teachers who could school girls in the gender-specific morals and type of citizenship favored by authorities.<br><br>Challenging Weberian concepts that link modernization to Protestantism, Strasser's study illustrates the modernizing power of Catholicism through an examination of virginity's central role in politics, culture, and society. Weaving together the stories of marriage and convent, of lay as well as religious women, <i>State of Virginity</i> makes important contributions to the historical study of sexuality and the growing feminist literature on the state. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political and religious history, women's studies, and social history.<br></div>

State of Virginity

Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic StateBy Ulrike Strasser

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2004University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11351-4

Contents

Illustrations.........................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.......................................................................................xiIntroduction..........................................................................................1Part I. Discursive and Institutional Foundations, 1550-16001. Which Public Matters Most? Rites of Marriage Formation.............................................272. Nuns and Whores: Houses of Women in the Male Public Sphere.........................................57Part II. Engendering the Catholic Polity: The Thirty Years' War and Its Aftermath3. Pregnant Bodies, Personal Purity, and Public Goods.................................................894. Behind Closed Doors: The Public Dimensions of Private Acts.........................................1195. Public Services and Private Lives: Schooling Women for Society.....................................149Conclusion and Epilogue...............................................................................173Notes.................................................................................................179Bibliography..........................................................................................219Index.................................................................................................237

Chapter One

Which Public Matters Most? Rites of Marriage Formation

Secret Deals with the Vicario? Reconfiguring Courtship, Custom, and Law

In July 1599 Katharina Rieger, a Munich resident, turned to the civic court for help. She explained to the secular judge how the artisan Hans Vorster had promised her marriage so that she "finally acted according to his will." They had intercourse and she became pregnant, yet Vorster did not keep his word. Rieger now asked the civic judge to make Vorster fulfill his promise and take her as his wife. Called to testify on his behalf, Vorster admitted that he had taken her virginal honor and impregnated her, but he adamantly denied the marriage promise. Even if had made a promise, the defendant pointed out, "such a clandestine union could not hold up according to the Council of Trent and the laws of Bavaria." At most Vorster was willing to make economic compensation for the losses Rieger suffered. His former lover did not consider this sufficient, arguing that "she had not had any intercourse with him until he promised marriage [and therefore] did not want a settlement; he should rather keep what he had promised." With both parties digging in their heels, the judge's attempts to achieve an arbitration were to no avail. He terminated the lawsuit with a referral to the church court in Freising, the center of the diocese to which Munich belonged. Only an ecclesiastical court, according to the judge's rationale, could make a decision about the validity of marriage promises.

By 1600, however, Vorster and Rieger were back in the civic courtroom-except that this time around they had switched the roles of plaintiff and defendant. Vorster took Rieger to court in an effort to impose silence upon the woman. Apparently the ecclesiastical judge had concurred with Vorster's view of the marriage matter and absolved him of any obligation to wed the woman. Still, Rieger did not let go of Vorster. She kept spreading rumors about an alleged marital bond with Vorster. Questioned by the civic judge as to the reasons for her behavior, Rieger explained:

Because he [Vorster] had promised marriage to her, and took her honor this way, and now he did not keep anything [he had promised], she could not find him an honest person. She did not care what was negotiated between them in Freising since she did not get a proper hearing there. Vorster might have struck a secret deal with the Vicario [the ecclesiastical judge] ... for they listened to him but not to her, she intended not to let him get away and if it were going to take the rest of her life, she would get in his way in matrimonial matters wherever she could.

The legal dealings of Katharina Rieger and Hans Vorster bring into view the field of social, political, and cultural forces that constrained sexual relations between men and women in Counter-Reformation Munich. Rieger's arguments evoked a context of customary courtship, in which exchanges of promises and sex created mutual obligations. If the judicial system failed to recognize the binding nature of this reciprocal contract, the world outside the courtroom, familiar with the rules of the game, was likely to listen and to support her cause. It was for good reasons that Vorster wanted her to stop gossiping about their relationship.

Not custom and community sanction, but law and the power of state and church subtended Vorster's case. He cited the most recent regulations for the formation of a proper marriage, Bavarian state law and the marriage doctrine decreed at Trent, in an attempt to pull the rug out from Rieger's claim. Regardless of what happened between them, he reminded the court, the traditional manner of forming a marital union now stood in unequivocal violation of the law. A refusal to honor clandestine marriage promises, this line of reasoning suggested, was tantamount to honoring secular and ecclesiastical authority-without doubt a compelling argument in front of an authority figure.

But Munich's secular judge wavered. He too was caught between the pulls of traditional courtship practices and contemporary legal trends. He knew firsthand, since he had watched it happen often, that Munich's residents understood marriage as a process that went through a series of stages, promises and intercourse included, and could very well originate in a completely personal setting. On the other hand, he was cognizant of the state's police ordinances against clandestine marriages and premarital sex, which overrode city law and urban customs. One easy way to resolve this tension was to refer the litigants to the ecclesiastical judge and let him decide on the basis of canon law. This strategy had the added advantage of honoring a long-standing division of labor, recently confirmed by the Council of Trent, that placed validity disputes in the purview of church courts.

What the civic judge could not anticipate was that he would have to face the parties again because of Katharina Rieger's refusal to accept a negative verdict from the ecclesiastical court. He tried to put an end to the case once and for all by mandating that Vorster deposit money to compensate the woman for her losses and some extra cash "for better peace" in the civic court. Rieger was given three months to claim the deposit and ordered to quiet down unless she wanted to "be punished, with severity, as an example to others."

How had things become this complicated in the first place? And what did it all mean for men and women like Rieger and Vorster who entered into sexual relationships after Trent? This chapter shows that the social articulation of attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in Catholic Bavaria took place at the intersection of two juridical discourses at once overlapping and at odds. First, there was an ecclesiastical discourse of matrimony as sacrament and sole rightful forum for sexual activity. This discourse both reinforced and undercut a second, secular...