The Duchess and the Saint, or, Holy Shit!

Kunigunde of Austria (1465-1520) was her parents' only surviving daughter--the princess of the Holy Roman Empire. Young Kunigunde was to have every advantage: her parents made sure she had a top-notch humanist education; religion-wise, she shared a mentor with none other than Martin Luther. She grew up at court in Munich, raised in the maelstrom of imperial politics. In her teens she had her father's ear, acting as a screener and intercessor of visitors seeking favors with him. She knew how to play the game: she helped engineer her own marriage to Duke Albrecht of Bavaria in 1487, which not only kept her in the upper imperial echelons but also close to home. She got Albrecht to co-designate their sons as joint heirs, preventing either one from gaining too much control over her own life.

But of course, we're not here to talk about men, so let's take a catastrophic plummet down the social scale of the 1490s to a younger woman named Anna Laminit, the daughter of labourers who had likely moved to Augsburg seeking a better life for themselves. Laminit got into a little trouble during her early teens. No big deal, though—Mary Magdalene had risen from a life of prostitution to sit at Jesus’s feet and evangelize France (gentlefriends, I give you: the Middle Ages); Margaret of Cortona had lived as a concubine, and prostitute is heavily implied, then joined the Franciscan Order, adopted a life of superhuman fasting and self-flagellation as penance, and by Laminit’s day was well on her way to sainthood (can. 1729).

Margaret was supposedly spurred to choose a life of stringent penance by the horrific murder of the man she was sleeping with. For Laminit, it went the other way. In the closing years of the fifteenth century, she revealed to the deeply devout local lay woman who ran the Seelenhaus where she was living (think a cross between a homeless shelter and a monastery) that Christ had called her to a life of penance like Margaret and like Mary Magdalene. For years and years, she subsisted on nothing but the Eucharist—which medieval theology did not consider to have earthly nutritive qualities at all.

And Augsburg started to pay attention.

Miraculous inedia to Laminit’s extremes was a rare gift in medieval Europe, but success stories like Catherine of Siena (who starved herself to death) and Elisabeth of Hungary (who starved to death at the urging of her confessor) were the popular literature of the day. Medieval Europeans knew that where there was one ecstatic gift, there would be several. Like prophecy. And oh, did southern Germany at the dawn of the 16th century need prophecy.

The region was subject to a series of freak meteorological incidents the sources call the Kreuzfell: Cross-fall. According to the reports from numerous cities and villages, one night black and red crosses fell all over the land in a shower. For a city already on the apocalyptic brink, it was truly terrifying. When Laminit was walking from the Seelenhaus to church one day afterwards, someone shouted and pointed: the red crosses were blossoming all over her skirts.

Like Hildegard of Bingen and Birgitta of Sweden, Laminit told the Augsburgers exactly what Christ had told her: the Kreuzfell was indeed a forewarning of Armageddon. Germans had better get their act together and do penance for their sins, individually and collectively, because Dies Irae was about to solvit saeclum in some favilla. It was the message they wanted and needed to hear. Laminit had the ear of the cathedral canons looking for theological and pastoral advice. The town gave her the entire Seelenhaus for, essentially, her new celebrity entourage, set her up with a steady income so she could distribute it to charity like a proper saint, proudly gave her the seat of honor in the cathedral to bring extra grace on themselves.

It was also the message that Empress Maria Blanca, second wife of Kunigunde’s brother Maximilian (remember Kunigunde?) wanted and needed to hear. She met with Laminit and then announced Christ’s message communicated through the living saint. She organized a formal penitential procession through the streets of Augsburg: the local clergy, the bishop, the pyx bearing the Eucharist, select citizens in sackcloth and bare feet—and Anna Laminit right along with them. The former petty criminal, at Christ’s beckoning, had truly transformed her life through Olympian asceticism and a deep, devouring, scouring repentence for all the sins of the world.

But this was not the message that Kunigunde needed or wanted to here.

Duchess of Bavaria, Kunigunde nevertheless continued to think of herself as the imperial princess, and kept a close watch on events throughout Germany. Even after she lost her husband in 1507 and moved into the Franciscan convent she had patronized for so long, she had her eyes and ears across the empire. And what they brought her in those first years was news of a holy man named Johannes Jetzer, a servant at the Dominican convent in Basel. As the brothers and officers of the monastery attested, Jetzer was also the recipient of divine visions, in his case visits from the Virgin Mary marked physically by the lingering smell of spices in the air and most graphically in the bleeding gouges of the stigmata on Jetzer’s body.

Except the part where people also said the stigmata had been clawed out by nails and hammers, the spicy air had been purchased at the local apothecary, and the Virgin Mary was a Dominican friar with a convincing falsetto.

The Dominicans were actually trying to make a point against the Immaculate Conception of Mary, an interesting case of men talking together about a woman (although Mary doesn’t really count, as women’s historians have been demonstrating for a solid half century now). Kunigunde’s loyalties lay with the Franciscans and in favor of the Immaculate Conception; on the matter of these apparitions’ authenticity, she knew where she stood. And she remembered her brother and sister-in-law’s own encounter with a visionary.

Kunigunde was skeptical, but she was also crafty. A straightforward accusation would do no good—and anyway, what if. So she extended Laminit an invitation: come visit and eventually retire to this wonderful community in Munich.

Chronicles preserve a running letter exchange between the two women, or rather, between the two women writing to each other but obviously with the expectation they’d be made public. Laminit deferred, Kunigunde insisted, Laminit was eventually goaded into it by Kunigunde cutting off her excuses. She came to the convent and—

—actually, everything was fine!

Laminit spent that first day praying with the sisters. She shared messages of exhortation and consolation with them. In full view of someone the entire day, Laminit ate no earthly food. None.

Befitting a holy woman of such renown, the Franciscans naturally set her up with her own cell that night. No, this is not a story of Laminit sneaking in a midnight snack.

It’s a story of her throwing shit out the window. Literal, squishy, brown, very unmiraculous shit.

Medieval Christians, as mentioned above, did not believe the Eucharist wafer was earthly food. The Body of Christ could never become shit. If Laminit was throwing feces out the window, they weren’t coming from the Eucharist. And the shit in the garden was definitely Laminit’s—Kunigunde had had holes bored in the wall of the cell, so she and her co-conspirators could spy on Laminit. They saw. They knew.

Hauled into the convent dining area with a lavish display of food laid out, Laminit offered up a series of cascading excuses. She had only eaten a little. She had only eaten because the trip from Augsburg was so long and hard. No matter, said Kunigunde. She watched Laminit eat gingerbread. Nobody who hadn’t eaten in a decade could stomach gingerbread straight off.

Anna Laminit, spiritual con artist, had pulled off a spectacular scheme more than a decade in the making. She’d fooled an empress, an emperor, the city council of Augsburg, a bishop, theologians from Bavaria’s university at Ingolstadt, Martin Luther (who later insisted he knew all along). She’d secreted away all those gold donations earmarked for her to give to charity. And she’d won the loyalties of enough Augsburgers anyway that one of the patricians scooped her out of confinement and potential execution and whisked her out of the city.

And Kunigunde, princess of the Holy Roman Empire and duchess of Bavaria, had rescued her home from one of the greatest religious frauds of the Middle Ages.

Getting my research to pass the Bechdel test has always been tricky – it was a criticism made at my thesis defence, as a matter of fact. The problem is not that women weren’t involved in the Spanish Civil War, but rather that the specific mobilisations I’m interested were coded as masculine, and my thesis rests in large part on the observation that these mobilisations took place within tightly bounded, specific networks. This made gender a useful category of analysis, but meant women featured relatively rarely. Women were mobilised in different ways, for different purposes, than I was primarily interested in, and expanding the scope of the approach to include these would have undermined the thrust of the main argument.

That said, one woman’s efforts to challenge the implicit assumption that fighting in Spain was for men only resulted in a strong contender for my ‘Favourite Primary Source Ever’ title:

Dear Comrade Murray,

I hear there are recruits going out to Spain with you, and I should be glad to know if there is any [unclear] for women out there as fighters. If so, I should like to be considered to train in that line. I shouldn’t be any good in the nursing line, as I’ve never done any first aid and it would take too long to train me, but it wouldn’t take long to teach me how to handle a machine gun or a rifle, or anything in that line. I’m pretty handy and can go for long stretches without food. If you find that they won’t consider women (though why not, I can’t see!), would you mind not mentioning my application to anyone. Even if they will take me, I’d rather you only let those directly concerned know.

I hope they will find some use for me. I’ve only practiced rifle-shooting at the range a little and am pretty accurate, but I could soon learn anything in that line that would be useful. Will you do your best to support my application?

Yours leftly,

Kay Welton

PS My contention is that we need trained fighters here, both men and women, and if one survives one is of greater value to the movement here, if one doesn’t, well, one has still been some value to the Movement here! Will this convince them?

Sadly, no response survives in any archive I’ve visited, though from what I know of the recipient, I’m sure it was kind but patronising. Tom Murray, Labour town councilor in Edinburgh by day, secret communist by night, and volunteer in Spain from April-September 1938, had a habit of undervaluing the frankly amazing women in his life. This was in no case clearer than the way he viewed the efforts of his own wife, Janet Murray. Tom, before going to Spain, had been the chair of the Edinburgh Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, which raised money for various pro-Republican causes in Edinburgh and the surrounding district. Once it was decided he would take things a step further and go to Spain to fight, Janet volunteered to take over his responsibilities.

Janet’s letters to her husband, describing her work at home, are some more of my favourite primary sources I’ve ever worked with. They chart her growing confidence as an organiser, at a time which women were often excluded from serious responsibility within labour and other leftist political movements. Her early letters downplayed her own success as an organiser and speaker, only allowing that ‘I must have done all right’ or ‘suppose[d] I was effective.’ Yet she soon developed a reputation as a capable public speaker, able to cajole unprecedented sums from large audiences, setting a record of £106 (worth up to £40,000 today!) in one collection, and coming to open relish her ‘reputation for cadging money at these meetings.’ Soon, the Edinburgh Committee was essentially the main coordinating body for Aid Spain across eastern Scotland, with Janet Murray speaking as far afield as Dundee. Under her leadership, activity and income increased massively: after raising £500 in its first year of activity, the committee raised £2,300 in the 15 months after Janet Murray took over.

Despite her success, Janet Murray was constantly doubted and undermined due to her gender. Local trade unionists, who had worked happily with her husband, treated her dismissively. The Edinburgh Trades and Labour Council reacted condescendingly to Janet Murray’s informal request to sell badges at Trades Council meetings, deciding that in response to the ‘lady in charge of Spanish Aid Shop’, they would ‘grant [the] request but that in future all such requests be made in writing.’ A trade union representative on the committee suddenly became ‘terribly critical and pugnacious’ in meetings after she took over, eventually demoralising Janet Murray to the extent that she offered to resign as chairman. The committee secretary turned out to be useless, only signing up to impress his socialist girlfriend (but at least he had his own car, his sole redeeming feature in Janet Murray’s eyes). Even her own husband, speaking in an interview years after her death, casually took credit for her successes:

She raised enormous sums of money for Spanish relief. She always appeared, you see, as the wife of an International Brigader. Naturally, that created a bit of a response.

Janet Murray, on the other hand, linked her effectiveness as a speaker not to her husband but to her feeling ‘so intensely about the urgency of the need in Spain.’ Her passion for the cause was readily apparent in her letters – she wrote once that she was constantly ‘living, thinking and dreaming Spain.’ This quote, in the end, ended up providing the title for my Masters dissertation.

I have truly laboured to think of something from Zoroastrian history. Influential women feature invariably as wives or mothers or both, and their roles are essentially always tied to their male relatives. And truly, honestly, the closest thing I can come up with are the attestations of pašap in twenty-three Elamite tablets from Persepolis in the Achaemenid period. These were women labourers or craftspeople of some kind. There are also mentions of women supervisors of labour forces. One suggestion made by Kawase in 1984 is that pašapa were weavers, but it is tenuous indeed. The tablets are full of obscure words. Here is one detailing recipients of grain rations:

1 maker of tukli bariš, 2 makers of _luplak bariš, total 3, each 4.5 10 women makers of tukli bariš, 6 women makers of luplak bariš, 1 zilpira. 2 sesame oil makers...

And so on. All untranslated italic words are meaning unknown, though Kawase made various speculations based on the syntax (qualifying adjectives and so on). The next tablet is interesting in the context of the topic in that it shows women could hold positions of some authority in the work force:

Tell Irtuppiya, Parnaka [uncle of Darius I] spoke thus: 31 sheep and 7 portions issue as rations to women supervisors of pašapa... Dakma..., Ir[...]na..., Harbakka ... and Shaddukka ... and Matmabba; total 5 women. They receive for a whole year each 4 sheep.

There are Elamite place names given after the five names, suggesting they could have headed substantial work forces; another tablet mentions a group of 150 women workers. Issuing of sheep to individuals was quite rare (on rare occasions 10 workers might get one sheep to share), so these rations suggest these women had not inconsiderable social standing by virtue of their occupation as labour force supervisors.

Yep, that's about as much as I can squeeze out. There is only so much you can get from bureaucratic documents, though they are a pleasant variation compared to royal inscriptions!

Just like /u/lcnielsen I struggled of thinking about stories involving just women as the primary actors. The Ottoman society made women participation in public life quite invisible, and a lot of stories involving women are written from a male POV or involving men as major participants. If there are such stories, probably i don't have it in my library so i'll just follow Icnielsen's route of women workforce because there are no interesting questions of my interest lately (and i have nothing to do these days).

Women in Salonika's Tobacco Industry

In the 19th century, The Ottoman Empire was characterized by a process of integration into the world economy, and agricultural exports were an important part for said integration. Of agricultural exports, the tobacco industry was the largest and has the most prominence. While processed and exported from most major port cities of the Empire, the heart of the sector was in Salonika, where tobacco exports increased 250% between 1892 and 1909. Now the unique thing about this is that women constituted a majority of the workforce in both industrial cigarette factories and tobacco processing workshops. One single cigarette factory in the central Salonika district owned by the Régie des Tabacs employed about 300 workers, of which 83% were women. Since the tobacco workshops were considerably larger and more numerous than the tobacco industry, the number of women workshop laborers may well have exceeded the number of women workers in the cigarette factories. For comparison, in the nearby city of Kavala tobacco workshop laborers were fairly evenly divided by gender, at approximately 7,000-8,000 women and 7,000-8,000 men. However in Salonika workshops women constitutes the overwhelming majority.

Now, who were these women? The majority of them were Jewish women, One reason for this was probably because the monopolization of tobacco exportation by Jewish merchant families like the Allatini family in the region. Another was because Jewish girls had the reputation for being industrious workers, "submissive", and obedient. In addition to those factors, the drahoma (dowry) was probably another motivation drawing single Jewish girls into the tobacco sector. Muslim women constitutes the second majority of tobacco workers, as archival registers noted that Muslim women workers worked in tobacco workshops as early as 1887. When working, Muslim women wore yaşmak (white headscarf) to indicate their religion. The workday lasted between 14 and 16 hours, and take place in dark and dry halls to preserve the quality of the tobacco leaves. Women workers sat on the floor either in circles or in lines, and at their feet lay piles of tobacco leaves to be sorted into baskets. Each pair of experienced workers had an unskilled one sitting cross-legged next to them to stack the chosen leaves into small piles. Tobacco dust particles often caused respiratory problems, lung infections, tuberculosis, eye infections, and chronic headaches, while sitting on the floor caused chronic backaches. Because of the silence of the production halls, women workers often converse about any possible subject, among others their romantic dreams about groom, house, and family, or political-social issues like the difficult working conditions, long hours, low wages, gender pay gap, and their living conditions as compared to those of the young girls in the wealthy households where they worked when there was nothing to do in the tobacco factories.

These depressing work conditions made women Jewish workers to be an active participant of trade unions, and factory owners sometimes tried to break trade unions. For example the Herzog factory decided to continue production on the Sabbath. In response, the Jewish women workers went on strike, declaring that they refused to work in a factory that did not respect the holiness of the Sabbath. The women's struggle for fair wages and working conditions attract them into the socialist movement. Women tobacco workers were the first to establish a vocational sector of their own within the tobacco workers’ union. This sector was established after the young girls proved their determination and their independence. Their struggles took place both in the factories and the street, against both their employers and their fellow workers who did not hesitate to sacrifice their female counterparts when it comes to wages. Each time the young girls felt that their employers or the workers’ committees were treating them underhandedly, they called for a strike and took to the streets to demonstrate. Thus, the young girls who worked in the tobacco industry of Salonika became active members of the working class, on the floors of the tobacco factories they acquired an awareness of their rights as workers and they began to demand rights, to take a stand, and to make decisions not only on the factory floor but also within workers’ organizations. By 1912, the factory owners could only dream of employing a young Jewish girl who was not a member of the trade union