Wednesday, 19 November 2025, at 4pm GMT
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Reflections on Women and the Reformations: A Global History
The Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, have long been told as stories of men. But women were central to the transformations that took place in Europe and beyond. What was life like for them in this turbulent period? How did their actions and ideas shape Christianity and influence societies around the world? In Women and the Reformations: A Global History, Professor Wiesner-Hanks explores the history of women and the Reformations in full for the first time, examining well-known figures like Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth I, and Anne Hutchinson, as well as women whose stories are only now emerging. Along the way, she highlights the stories of converts in Japan, Spanish nuns in the Philippines, and saints in Ethiopia and America, exploring women’s experiences as monarchs, mothers, migrants, martyrs, mystics, and missionaries, and revealing that the story of the Reformations is no longer simply European—and that women played a vital role. Please join us to hear Professor Wiesner-Hanks discuss the book, how she came to write it, and what she is trying to achieve with and through it.
About the Speaker
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the long-time senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, former editor of the Journal of Global History, editor-in-chief of the seven-volume Cambridge World History (2015), and co-editor, with Mathew Kuefler, of the four-volume Cambridge World History of Sexualities (2024). She is the author or editor of many articles and forty books that have appeared in ten European and Asian languages, including most recently Women and the Reformations: A Global History (Yale 2024), Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789 (3e Cambridge 2023), Gender in History: Global Perspectives (3e Blackwell 2022), What Is Early Modern History? (Polity 2021), and Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (4e Cambridge 2020).