Reformation,gender, and sexuality in Switzerland: two case studies

Abstract

Niklaus Manuel, active in Bern, painter, playwright, and politician, wrote a carnival play in 1525 entitled the Der Ablasskrämer [The Indulgence Seller], which stages seven women as rather aggressive propagators of the Reformation. The first case study examines this play and questions the predominant tendency among scholars to qualify Manuel's staging of women simply as a case of literary inversion. The second case study is concerned with sexual deviance among the Anabaptists of the St. Gall and Appenzell areas of eastern Switzerland in the mid-1520s. It interprets this, in line with other recent research, as an attempt to spiritualize sexuality.