“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.

Although not the first book written on Reformation-era women, its variety of sources and stories sets it apart. Grouped thematically as monarchs, mothers, migrants, martyrs, mystics, and missionaries, narratives of Protestant, Catholic, Anabaptist, Jewish, and Muslim women are juxtaposed in a complex tapestry that blurs confessional boundaries. Wiesner-Hanks draws attention to how women’s experiences differed from men’s – sometimes exceptions were made for women; more often, they fell under greater scrutiny. But she also shows how these women’s commitment to their convictions about how God ought to be worshiped sustained them in acts of astonishing resistance.

The chapter on monarchs shows that women were often influential in the religious world: the first rulers to grant religious tolerance in their domains were queens. The following chapter, “Mothers,” is a goldmine of cultural history, profiling women of low social status alongside nuns and the wives of reformers. The featured migrants come from varied backgrounds: Anabaptist Katharina Hutter, Jewish and Muslim women expelled from Spain, and the Spanish nuns who helped missionize Japan. Mystics – from Spain to Peru, England to the Congo – seem to have ended up either disgraced or canonized. Throughout, stories from regions outside of Europe stretch the reader’s understanding of the wide impact of the Reformation – or, more accurately, reformations.

Although this era’s histories have generally highlighted canonical male leaders, this book points to a far more complex reality. Writing as a historian, Wiesner-Hanks includes women whose lives and thought do not fit easily into the molds of orthodoxy – some even veering into the heretical. Although straightforward hagiographies have their place, nuanced narratives that show both the flaws of heroines and the tenacity of heretics can inform the reader’s own search.

All the women featured in this book suffered, some horrendously. But Wiesner-Hanks includes humorous moments too. Nuns resisting the Lutheranization of their convents stuffed wax in their ears or sang during sermons and even ignited old felt slippers to drive the preacher out with the resulting putrid smoke. Jansenist sisters in northern France dodged a summons to sign an oath of adherence to Catholic orthodoxy by claiming that women were biblically barred from opining on theological matters. The bones of Catherine Dammartin, a former nun who married the Italian reformer Peter Vermigli, were combined with those of Saint Frideswide to keep both Protestants and Catholics from desecrating the dead.

Though the violence done to these women is appalling, their zeal and steadfastness is admirable. This book reads as a call to ecumenism, encouraging a greater appreciation for the way women view and live out their relationship to God.