Leonard, Amy 1966- (Amy Elmore Leonard)

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Leonard, Amy 1966- (Amy Elmore Leonard)

PERSONAL:

Born March 14, 1966. Education: Barnard College, B.A., 1988; University of Wisconsin, Madison, M.A., 1991; University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1999.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Washington, DC. Office—Department of History, Georgetown University, 628 ICC, 37th and O St. N.W., Washington, DC 20057-1035. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Georgetown University, Washington, DC, associate professor of history.

WRITINGS:

Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2005.

(Editor, with Karen Nelson) Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men, University of Delaware Press (Newark, DE), 2008.

Contributor to festschrifts and anthologies, including A Companion to the Reformation World, edited by R. Po-Chia Hsia, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 2004; and Politics and Reformation: Studies in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., edited by Christopher Ocker, Brill (Leiden, Netherlands), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Amy E. Leonard is a historian of early modern Europe, concentrating on the Protestant Reformation and gender relations and issues. Her study Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany looks at the lives of women in the regular orders in central Europe during the sixteenth century. Three Dominican convents in the German city of Strasbourg, which was led by a Protestant government during the Lutheran Reformation, were left intact by the city fathers. In other Protestant venues, all convents would have been dissolved and the women there scattered to their families' homes or married off. As a result, the cloisters preserved a Catholic tradition in the midst of a Protestant community where otherwise it might have become extinct. "When the city closed one convent in 1592, Leonard finds that it had proven to be more troublesome than useful as a result of serious financial problems and a sex scandal," stated Elisabeth M. Wengler in the Historian. "The two remaining convents survived to welcome the city's return to Catholicism in 1681."

The question of the survival of these convents, peculiar to Strasbourg, is central to Leonard's thesis. According to Nigel F. Palmer in the Catholic Historical Review, the author argues that the convents "got away with ignoring the city council's rulings and found that their persistence in Catholic religious practices was hardly ever seriously challenged." The convents had for years been a place where members of Strasbourg's elite could send their daughters for an education or simply for safekeeping, secure in the knowledge that their virginity (and therefore their claims to the family's wealth) would be preserved unscathed. Residents of the convent maintained contact with their families, so the elite had a direct interest in the survival of the institutions even if their religion conflicted with that of the city. Finally, the nuns themselves wanted to maintain the convents; they represented one of the few venues during the early modern period in which women had control over their own lives without direct male oversight, independent of their fathers, brothers, or other relatives. "Most of them had decided independently in favor of this life and found it to be a good one; they elected their prioress jointly, by whom they felt themselves to be well represented," declared Bea Lundt in H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. The author's conclusion, wrote Lundt, was that "convent women had more control over their lives than average women in Strasbourg."

The convents responded to the threat of Protestant domination by adapting to conditions, coming to terms with the town and its council. "They changed in function," Palmer continued, "and could justify themselves as ‘useful’ in a secularized society, no longer in terms of their contribution to the spiritual well-being of the city through their prayers, but primarily through their role as schoolteachers who were supposedly preparing young women to be the ‘nails in the wall’ of Strasbourg family life." "Far from confirming the Reformers' image of the corrupt and dissolute cloisters," Lundt explained, the nuns "fulfilled precisely those ideals typical of the evangelical movement of the sixteenth century." In the process, the nuns created new roles for themselves, independent of the Roman Catholic Church. By negotiating directly with the Strasbourg city authorities, they launched a kind of mini Counter-Reformation, collaborating and reaching accommodations with the Protestants in violation of the spirit of the Council of Trent. The historian concludes that, on a local level, it was entirely possible for two separate and independent faith communities to coexist, even in the midst of the darkest days of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. "Amy Leonard confronts us with detailed insights into the variety of possibilities for female existence in history," Lundt concluded, "and … shows us the logical arguments for their preservation in the face of attacks upon their significance."