ABSTRACT
The developments that have allowed Stjerna to open her book with this sentence are remarkable, however. Thirty years ago considerations of women and the Reformation were largely limited to biographical sketches of queens, martyrs and reformers’ wives, or brief studies of the ideas of prominent reformers about the family. Analyses of developments within Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similarly told a story that focused on men, with women mentioned only as their audiences or occasionally as their ‘helpers’. The women’s movement changed this, as it changed so much else. Research in women’s history exploded in volume and scope, and grew increasingly sophisticated, recovering women’s words and experiences. As they expanded their analyses, historians grew less comfortable talking about the ‘status of women’ in general without specifying exactly what type of women, precisely what location, and in expressly what type of sources. Building on studies of women, some historians during the 1980s shifted their focus somewhat to ask questions about gender, which they defined as the culturally constructed and historically changing systems of sexual difference. This has resulted in new types of questions about the lives of men and relations between
the sexes, and also about the ways in which explicit and symbolic ideas of gender shaped the historical experiences of both women and men in all areas of life.
