Religious difference and the experience of widowhood in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany 1

This chapter provides a general overview of the situation of widows in early modern Germany. It examines in detail the fate of the Mennonite widow Barbara Maurerin, who lived in the Palatinate in the late eighteenth century. The chapter focuses on the case of the widow Barbara Maurerin and her fight for the custody of her children. The religious parity throughout the Empire, granted by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was unique in Europe. Barbara Maurerin was not alone in her fate, although she was especially vulnerable as a member of a religious sect. The Palatinate was infamous for violent re-Catholicizing throughout the eighteenth century. In 1705, the Palatinate issued a Religionsdeklaration which ruled that the parents in mixed marriages were free to decide the religious faith of their children. In seventeenth-century Germany laws on mixed marriage favoured which ever religion or religious confession the prince belonged to.