April 18, 2008

Sigrun Haude (University of Cincinnati)

Dealing with the Reality of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648):
The Story of Two Religious Women

The presentation concentrates on two autobiographical documents, the diaries of Klara Staiger, prioress of the Augustinian cloister Mariastein near Eichstätt, and the recordings of Anna Maria Junius, nun of the Dominican cloister Heiligengrab in Bamberg. By looking at personal accounts of the war, we turn the focus on the individual, and, with the two religious women, on a couple of very select persons. However, their diaries and chronicles regularly direct their attention beyond the personal and thus reflect a wider circle of contemporaries. A critical reading of these two testimonies in the broader context of other contemporary voices reveals both the commonalty and the uniqueness of their experience, and sheds light on how people managed to survive the war. Klara Staiger led her convent through flights, the destruction and rebuilding of their cloister, poverty, and other frightful experiences of the war, while Anna Maria Junius was part of a group of nuns that held out in their convent as the war raged on around them. Though their situations were quite different, the two women showed great pragmatism in navigating the war and a willingness to exploit all options – orthodox and unorthodox – to ensure their survival.

Sigrun Haude is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. Her main fields of research are the history of reformation, Early Modern European History, and the history of Christianity, European History, in particular the history of Anabaptism and the Radical Reformation, and the history of the Thirty Years’ War. Her publications include: In the Shadow of “Savage Wolves”: Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation during the 1530s (Boston, 2000).