“If they were to burn me tomorrow or drown me in a sack, that’s all the same to me,” said Weynken Claes, thought to be the first female Protestant martyr, before being burned at the stake in The Hague in 1527. Englishwoman Anne Line showed similar courage in 1601 by stating, in her trial for harboring Catholic priests, that she wished “that where I had entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.” She would lose her life on the gallows. 

The stories of these women and dozens of others appear in Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s Women and the Reformations.