Anna Adlischwyler

Life

Anna Adlischwyler lived as a nun in the Oetenbach convent in Zurich, Switzerland. The year of her birth is not known with certainty. At that time the Reformation, led by Huldrych Zwingli, was under way in Zurich. The Reformers held that monastic vows (a pledge to live the religious life in lifelong celibacy) had no basis in Scripture, and during this period many monks and nuns left their religious houses.

When Heinrich Bullinger proposed marriage, she reportedly did not come to a decision easily. In the end she left the Oetenbach convent as one of the last nuns to remain there, and she married Bullinger in 1529. Bullinger later succeeded Zwingli as leader of the Zurich church. The couple had eleven children. She died of the plague in 1564.

Ministry and Contributions

There is no record of Anna Adlischwyler holding any public office or leaving any writings. Her work consisted chiefly of managing her husband's parsonage, the residence of the pastor's family. She kept the parsonage open to guests, and many of those who stayed there were people who had fled their homelands for Zurich because of their faith.

Because of this hospitality and her faith lived out in daily life, later generations of the Reformed church regarded her as the ideal of a pastor's wife. In 2017 the Gesellschaft zu Fraumünster (Fraumünster Society) of Zurich placed a commemorative marker honoring her in Zurich's Old Town.

Assessment

In the Reformed tradition she is regarded favorably as a believer who left the convent, embraced the Reformed faith, and served refugees through hospitality. The Catholic Church, by contrast, regards monastic vows as a holy promise made to God, and it therefore understands differently from Protestants the renunciation of vows and marriage of monks and nuns during the Reformation. Moreover, because most surviving accounts of her were written from the perspective of her role as "the reformer's wife," little is known of her own thoughts or voice.