Sexual Invulnerability in a Dangerous World: Contradictory Images of Catholic Religious Women in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

This paper examines the way Catholic priests justified the inner-worldly activities of and empowered a group of religious women called spiritual virgins living in the officially Protestant Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth century. Priests living primarily in what is now Belgium wrote a great number of advice manuals for this group of women to help them construct and maintain a very active religious identity in a society that after 1581 no longer permitted priests to fulfill their religious tasks. In fact, because priests were occasionally persecuted or deported from the Dutch Republic, they were compelled to advise the spiritual virgins to take on priestly functions such as: teaching, preaching, and maintaining altars in private homes.

Catholic priests reconciled these women’s active roles with the post-Tridentine ideal of strict female enclosure and the need to protect vulnerable female bodies in two main ways. Firstly, priestly advice to the spiritual virgins assured them that in the face of great danger out in the world, they were in fact safe. The advice books these priests wrote for the spiritual virgins employed images that demonstrated these women’s safety through symbolic enclosure; these women are depicted secure within walls, garden fences, tightly ensconced in their clothing, and hemmed in by bellicose angels. Secondly, in case a man did invade the home of these spiritual virgins, priests advised them to use the built environment to their advantage: hide in spaces such as attics to allude the attacker or use household implements to fight off and even kill the invader. The Catholic priests’ emphasis on symbolic enclosure and women’s capacity to preserve their physical purity in other ways allowed them to justify the inner-worldly activity of the spiritual virgins in order to ensure the continuation of Catholic services.