Women confront the Reformation: Katharina Schuetz Zell, Teresa of Avila, and religious reform in the sixteenth century

This thesis seeks to situate two sixteenth-century women, Katharina Schutz Zell and Saint Teresa of Avila, within the framework of confessionalization, currently one of the more prominent theoretical models with which to interpret the Reformation. This will be accomplished through an analysis of their conceptions of reform, their interactions with political authorities, and their interpretations of the nature of prayer, specifically the Our Father or Lord's Prayer.;The lives and religious thought of these two women challenge some of the key tenets of the confessionalization theory. First, they show that the political element of confessionalization, that is, the assumption of control over religious affairs by secular temporal authorities, was not a product or corollary of the Reformation, but rather was a process that had begun centuries earlier. Second, they contradict the model's claim that the religious life of Europe after the Reformation was organized into water-tight confessions---Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism---that dictated what their respective adherents believed and did not believe. On the contrary, Schutz Zell and Teresa evince a level of individualism in their religious thought that did not conform absolutely to confessional norms, yet was not subversive or impious, either.;The sources this thesis will use consist primarily of the works of the two women themselves, who both wrote extensively on matters of religion and spirituality. It will also draw upon the large secondary literature of confessionalization and, more broadly, the Reformation as well as late medieval and early modern Europe as a whole, in order to understand the significance of the women within their proper context.