By Edina Paleviq
Katrin Keller’s Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire is a vital contribution to a better understanding of European history. The book constitutes a long-overdue correction to traditional Eurocentric and male-dominated historical narratives, as it tells a story that has been missing for far too long. At its heart, the book makes a simple but powerful point: the history of the Holy Roman Empire cannot be fully told without including the women who shaped it. For centuries, their names were forgotten or overlooked. Keller brings them back. She carefully selects twenty-five women whose lives stretched across three centuries. They came from different backgrounds, classes, and religions. Some were queens and empresses. Others were businesswomen, artists, scientists, or religious reformers. What they shared was not status or fame, but action. Each of them left a mark on politics, religion, science, or culture during a time when women were expected to remain silent. This volume is not a collection of tokenistic stories but a critical project of reclamation and redefinition.
Keller writes with clarity and precision. The book is deeply researched, but never heavy. Each story is crafted to stand on its own and reads smoothly, making the volume engaging. She begins in the sixteenth century, a time of reformation and dynastic politics. Then she moves into the turmoil of the seventeenth century, with its wars and confessional divides. Finally, she reaches the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when new ideas about science, reason, and public life began to take hold. Throughout this timeline, she traces how women’s roles evolved, while also showing how, in many ways, they remained the same. One of the strongest points Keller makes is that women found power even within constraint. Some, like Empress Eleonora Magdalena or Maria of Hungary, were born into dynasties and worked from within court life. But while their influence may have looked domestic from the outside, it was deeply political. Managing imperial households, organizing marriages, and offering patronage were all acts of governance. Others, like the Jewish businesswoman Glikl bas Judah Leib or the scientist Maria Sibylla Merian, operated entirely outside official power. They carved their own paths in business and in science. Hence, Keller shows that power did not only come from titles. It could come from resilience, strategy, and intellectual work.
The book also challenges old assumptions about women’s roles in knowledge and religion. We often imagine that early modern women were excluded from the world of ideas. Keller proves otherwise. Consider Katharina Zell. Far from merely being the wife of a reformer, she established herself as a theological writer and preacher, publicly defending her husband’s reformist positions. Luise Gottsched, a leading thinker of the Enlightenment, shaped the public conversation about reason and literature. This expansion of influence is also clear in the increasingly public voice of female writers such as Sophie von La Roche. Even in deeply religious spaces, women found ways to lead. Erdmuthe Benigna of Reuß-Ebersdorf, for instance, helped spread Pietism and pushed for educational reform. These women were not just followers of ideas. They were creators of ideas.
Science and the arts are also key parts of the story. Keller includes women such as Maria Margaretha Kirch, an astronomer who worked closely with her husband and long struggled for recognition, or Dorothea Erxleben, who earned the first medical doctorate granted to a woman in Germany but had to fight for her right to practice medicine. Their stories defy the modern assumption that women were absent from early scientific life. Likewise, Keller introduces us to artists such as Maria Theresia Paradis, a blind composer and pianist whose music was known across Europe. These women did not just participate in the cultural world, they shaped it.
Perhaps the book’s boldest idea is its reimagining of the Holy Roman Empire itself, which has long been described as a male space, defined by emperors, electors, and military leaders. Keller shows us something else. She paints the empire as a shared world, shaped by both men and women. Women moved ideas through salons and correspondence. They built networks in convents and court households. They funded projects, raised armies, ran estates, and educated children. The empire was not only made in battles and treaties. It was also made in letters, families, and rooms where women led.
What makes the book especially effective is its style. Each chapter is short, clear, and rich in details. The stories are easy to follow, yet never simplistic. The narratives bring these women to life, making their presence felt beyond the written page. Keller clearly wants to reach an audience beyond scholars. She writes for students, teachers, and anyone curious about the past. Her book offers historians valuable microhistorical case studies of women’s lives, which makes it a useful teaching tool, as well as a rewarding read for the general public. There are, however, a few limits. The biographical format, while engaging, can sometimes feel a bit disconnected, as the women do not always speak to each other across chapters. A deeper comparison across class, religion, or region might have added further insights. And while Keller gives helpful introductions to each historical period, the book could have engaged more directly with modern feminist theory or intersectionality. Still, these are small gaps in an otherwise outstanding work.
What Keller has given us is more than a cluster of individual lives. She has given us a new way of seeing the Holy Roman Empire as a place of overlapping worlds: public and private, sacred and secular, elite and ordinary, where women were never merely on the sidelines. They were shaping, leading, and building, often in ways we have only now begun to recognize. Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire goes beyond women’s history. It provides a rethinking of European history as a whole by arguing that the past takes on a different form when viewed in its entirety, through the lives of women rather than through the sole actions of kings and generals. Keller’s book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the early modern world, as it was recorded, but also as it was truly experienced.
Edina Paleviq is a political scientist specializing in democratization processes and the role of civil society in the EU accession process. Her research explores how bottom-up initiatives strengthen democracy, the rule of law, and European integration.
Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire
By Katrin Keller
Publisher: Routledge Press
ISBN 9781032181059
