Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is the Susan C. Karant-Nunn Professor of Reformation and Early Modern European History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. She is co-editor of the Archive for Reformation History and the author of From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation. She has been a James K. Cameron fellow at St. Andrews University, a Solmsen fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institutes for Research in the Humanities, a William D. Loughlin member at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and guest professor in the Interconfessionality in Early Modern Period research group at the University of Hamburg.

• Introduction


• 1: 1. 'No Better than a Brothel': Verbal Abuse, Removing Nuns, and the Destruction of Convents, 1520-1525


• Part I. Laicization and Secularization: The Enduring Convent after 'Dissolution', 1521-1546


• 2: 1. The Fight for Keys: Extending Secular Control Over Monastic Houses in an Age of Religious Uncertainty


• 3: 1. Leaving the Convent? Nuns, Decision-Making, and the Persistence of Convent Congregations During the Early Reformation


• 4: 1. New Habits: Negotiating Desacralization, Liturgical Space, and Convent Jurisdiction in Women's Religious Houses


• Part II. The Birth of the Mixed-Confessional Convent: Devotional Practice and Religious Diversity, 1546-1590


• 5: 1. 'Old, Stubborn Nuns': Secular Convent Reform between Imperial Politics and Freedom of Conscience After the Schmalkaldic War


• 6: 1. The New Evangelical Nun: Monastic Investiture and Petitions for Convent Positions


• 7: 1. Singing Hymns, Removing Madonnas: Devotional Culture in Mixed-Confessional Convent Congregations


• Conclusion

Stripping the Veil explores the daily existence, ritual practices, and individual actions of nuns in surviving convents over time against the backdrop of changing political and confessional circumstances in Protestant regions of sixteenth-century Germany.