Mary, Martha, and Domestic Pieties across “The Great Divide”

According to Judith Bennett in her 1992 critique of “the Great Divide” at 1500, the paradigm of dramatic change at 1500 has unduly shaped historical narratives, particularly as they relate to women’s lives.  Urging refocused attention upon the problem of continuity between 1300 and 1700, Bennett’s analysis centered on women’s labor.  In this paper, I extend her argument to consider the intersections of female work and piety in and beyond the late medieval period, and their consequences for traditional periodization.  Drawing upon a variety of source material written or shaped by women, I propose that female strategies for interpreting work and service within culturally sanctioned spaces represent a rich, flexible, and surprisingly overlooked historical thread between the medieval and early modern.  Not only does female pious domesticity belie the facile chronological division at 1500, it also runs counter to the related – and similarly problematic – theory of disjuncture between Catholic and Protestant.  Of particular interest are the multiple ways in which women (including laywomen, “beguines,” and nuns representing both Catholic and Protestant perspectives) specifically employed the Biblical story of Mary and Martha to sacralize their work and legitimize their worship. Thus female strategies for reinterpreting work and service within culturally sanctioned spaces of home and domestic community illuminate a particular, and particularly appealing, “way of seeing.”  The enduring conjunctions between personal spirituality, private spaces, and feminine work point to women’s consistent desire to design “order within,” even as they responded to shifting social, economic, and religious orders from without.