Rewriting Eve: the formation of the female self in Reformation Germany

This thesis aims to reconstruct the formation of the female self during the Protestant Reformation by contextualizing women's writings as, not only a response to discourse produced by men, but also as an independent production of opinion. This study will shed light on the highly historicized evolution of the gender hierarchy, how the religious discourse of the Protestant Reformation changed that hierarchy, and how those changes functioned in creating space for female agency in the birth of the self. The central texts to be examined in this study come from Katharina Schiitz Zell, the wife of an early reformed pastor, Argula von Grumbach, a noblewoman and first female Protestant writer, and the male voices that spoke to these women, such as Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and their respective husbands and family, among many others. The discourse created by such men constructed the female identity within a strict topos of either the Virgin Mary or Eve. This thesis will show how the texts written by women and about women construct the self as being between the angel and harlot paradigms: it is in this collision between the authority and the other that the self emerges.