Reception begins at 6 p.m.

For millennia, female authors, printers, and songwriters have shared their beliefs and devotional practices within their domestic and religious networks. Even Protestant women have a long history of making significant religious contributions, according to Amanda C. Pipkin, Ph.D. To illustrate the power of these efforts, Pipkin recounts the story of six Dutch women who were vitally important to the development of the Reformed Church, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessor of other reformed faiths based on the teachings of Jean Calvin, such as Presbyterianism. Her book reveals that a substantial number of early modern women did, in fact, drive reform and revival movements thus providing an early foundation for women’s ministry in today’s reformed Churches. Although many collectors, archivists, and librarians in the intervening centuries have not valued women’s creative works—so much so that most of the women’s texts featured in this book now survive in a single copy—Pipkin presents ample evidence that women’s devotional books were best-sellers, printed in many editions, and widely read. This long tradition laid a firm foundation for women leaders in Presbyterian Churches in Charlotte and beyond.

Amanda C. Pipkin, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her book, “Dissenting Daughters: Reformed Women in the Dutch Republic, 1572-1725,” published by Oxford University Press, has received the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender’s national 2022 Best Book Award. This first book-length study of women within the Dutch Reformed Church reveals the vital contributions women made to the spread and practice of the Reformed faith. This includes women’s work as editors and authors as this blog post shows. Dr. Pipkin also wrote ”Rape in the Republic, 1609-1725: Formulating Dutch Identity” (Brill, 2013), highlighting the significance of sex and gender in the construction of Dutch identity in pamphlets, plays, poems, and advice manuals, and co-edited “Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500-1750” (Brill, 2019) (available in open access). While earning a bachelor’s degree from Wake Forest University, she volunteered in Mother Teresa’s homes in Calcutta, and later she earned a master’s degree at the University of Leiden, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.