The Good Women of the Parish

Gender and Religion After the Black Death

Katherine L. French

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201963
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

There was immense social and economic upheaval between the Black Death and the English Reformation, and contemporary writers often blamed this upheaval on immorality, singling out women's behavior for particular censure. Late medieval moral treatises and sermons increasingly connected good behavior for women with Christianity, and their failure to conform to sin. Katherine L. French argues, however, that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities.Scholarship on medieval women's religious experiences has focused primarily on elite women, nuns, and mystics who either were literate enough to leave written records of their religious ideas and behavior or had access to literate men who did this for them. Most women, however, were not literate, were not members of religious orders, and did not have private confessors. As The Good Women of the Parish shows, the great majority of women practiced their religion in a parish church. By looking at women's contributions to parish maintenance, the ways they shaped the liturgy and church seating arrangements, and their increasing opportunities for collective action in all-women's groups, the book argues that gendered behavior was central to parish life and that women's parish activities gave them increasing visibility and even, on occasion, authority. In the face of demands for silence, modesty, and passivity, women of every social status used religious practices as an important source of self-expression, creativity, and agency.

Chapter 1

“My Wedding Gown to Make a Vestment”: Housekeeping and Churchkeeping

In the rural parish of Tintinhull, Somerset, as in many other places in medieval Europe, it was the custom of the women to dress the images of the saints in robes and kerchiefs. On saints’ days and other holy days, the cloth decorated and beautified the images as a sign of love, respect, and supplication. Bequests from women’s wills supplied some of the napery. When Alice Stacy died, she left a linen sheet to the statue of St. Mary, perhaps to be used as a veil.¹ With use and exposure to soot, wax, oil, and even droppings from the bats living in the church’s eves, linens grew dirty; it was the laity’s responsibility to clean them. In 1438 the churchwardens paid a group of women 6d. for washing the “alter cloths and for kerchiefs for the images.”² Yet in 1449 and again in 1452, the laundresses refused their payment choosing instead to donate their labor to the church.³ The actions of Alice Stacy and the laundresses reflect the ways women supported their parishes, the ways they connected their physical contributions to their piety, and the ways that their household obligations influenced their pious actions.

Canon law required that the clergy maintain the chancel of the parish church while the laity maintained the nave and furnished the liturgy with its candles, vestments, liturgical books, altar cloths, and vessels.⁴ Books wore out, vestments tore, candles burned down, and altar cloths became soiled. Theft and repeated use forced parishioners to replace or repair lost, worn out, or broken items. Moreover, roofs leaked, windows broke, and masonry wore away, necessitating professional artisans to repair the building and its fittings. Meeting these obligations required lay organization and labor and by the fifteenth century, parishes had such organizations and administrations in place to oversee these tasks.⁵ However, such work also had benefits; providing for the parish’s upkeep and maintenance was a good work that benefited one’s soul and the souls of the departed.⁶ Work for the church honored God, and by maintaining the church and adorning it with objects, the laity provided a fitting home for the host.⁷ Maintaining the parish, therefore, translated men’s and women’s financial and material obligations to their parishes into pious acts.

Medieval gender roles informed how individual parishioners supported their parish. The house was women’s domain. The keys on a housewife’s belt symbolized her position within the house. In their own households, rural women performed a multitude of different chores directed at keeping order.⁸ They cleaned house, purchased and cooked food, tended to kitchen gardens and poultry, fetched water from the well, spun flax and wool, and mended clothes. If there were children, they cared for them as well.⁹ Urban women did many of the same tasks, although the markets might have been closer, the wells further, and kitchen gardens smaller.¹⁰ Most families had a servant or two and women would have also supervised their work as part of their housekeeping obligations. Felicity Riddy argues that the physical intimacy fostered by medieval urban houses and the housewife’s tasks of feeding and cleaning the house and its inhabitants not only turned the housewife into a powerful image of a caregiver, but that the “embodiedness [of housekeeping] work[ed] against the hierarchical structures that were assumed by urban and natural law makers.”¹¹ Women’s care of their parishes mirrored that of their own households, and we find women cleaning, supplying, and interacting with God’s house much as they would have their own. The familiarity and ease that developed out of such care fostered among women a proprietary attitude toward the parish church and its contents.

Housekeeping and domestic obligations not only translated easily to the parish, they allowed women to view their daily drudgery as meaningful pious activities. Although the parish was not the only venue of women’s piety, non-elite women by and large practiced their piety in this context. This chapter will argue that women’s domestic practices and household responsibilities informed much of their parish participation. Housekeeping chores provided women with a constellation of activities that when practiced in the parish gave a wide range of women the ability to perform meaningful, important, and visible good works within their community. Moreover, women’s labor and material contributions to their parishes, although determined in large measure by the legal and economic constraints placed on them, allowed them to shape their pious practices in ways that reflected their concerns for family, community, self-promotion, and salvation. These activities were not new to the fourteenth century. In the sixth St. Radegund cleaned Frankish churches, “polish[ing] the Abbeys of the pavement with her dress and, collecting the drifting dust around the altar in a napkin, reverently placed it outside the door rather than sweep it away.”¹² In Anglo-Saxon England, women left Bath and St. Alban’s linens, curtains, bedclothes, and a woman’s woolen gown.¹³ What would have been new in the fourteenth century was the material culture that women left and cleaned.

In descriptions of women’s parish work, which differed from the work of men, we can see that gendered religious behavior emerged among ordinary women. Scholars have long identified a tradition of affective piety among elite women.¹⁴ Private confessors, private chapels, and religious texts promoted this form of piety. Non-elite women, peasants and urban laboring women, however, had little or no access to literacy or private confessors who could school them in the details of this style of worship. Nonetheless, non-elite women seem to have had an equally gendered set of pious practices centered on the parish and its identity as God’s house. By interacting with their parish church as a house, non-elite women could share with elite women an interest in Eucharistic devotion and the saints.

Housekeeping and Churchkeeping

The Bible taught that the church was God’s house. The gospels have many descriptions of a church as such. Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a house, with doors and gates to be opened to those who seek God (Matt 7:7–13). Later, when Jesus drives the merchants and money changers out of the Temple, he says “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer;’ but you make it a den of robbers” (Matt 21: 13; see also Mark 11: 15–16; Luke 19: 45–46; John 2:13–16). This verse was central to the liturgies for both the dedication of a church and the anniversary of the dedication of the church in the Sarum Missal, the most common liturgy in late medieval England.¹⁵ In a sermon for the occasion of the dedication of a church, the compiler of a fifteenth-century sermon collection, the Speculum Sacerdotale, explained that because the church is God’s house, it is special. “In it [the church] is the habitation of God, concourse of angels, reconciliation of man, and the lowness of the earth is in fellowship with the height of heaven. And this place is the holy house of God and the gate of heaven.”¹⁶ John Mirk, a late fourteenth-century Augustinian canon, who wrote extensively for parish priests, found the comparison of a house and a church useful for instructing the clergy on how the laity were to behave in the church. In his Instructions for Parish Priests he explains that

Also within the church and chancel

Do right as I give you council

Songs and shouts and other bad behavior

You shall not tolerate in front of the savior;

Throwing of axes and throwing of stones

Are activities best left alone

Balls and bears and other such play

Out of the churchyard and put them away;

Court proceedings and other such fuss

Out of the sanctuary put them you must!

For Christ himself did teach us

That holy church is his house

That is made for nothing else

But to pray in, as the book tells.

There the people shall gather within,

To pray and weep for their sin.¹⁷

In maintaining the nave and its contents, therefore, the laity provided a worthy home for the host. The centrality of the association of the church with a house meant that medieval men and women would have been familiar with the concept.

In late medieval homes, people had their bodily needs cared for, found shelter from the cold, slept, and interacted with family members in close physical proximity. Homes were crowed, and one room held many functions. Homes and hominess denoted, then, familiarity, domestic living, and love.¹⁸ Late medieval descriptions of homes and hominess typically assumed that women stayed in the house, while men returned to it. Once home, men received comfort and care. These assumptions would have influenced audiences hearing descriptions of the church as God’s house.

The roles and obligations of household members provided models for involvement in the parish church. Men and women, mothers and fathers, boys and girls, and male and female servants all played different roles in a household, and either implicitly or explicitly these roles were incorporated into these groups’ interactions with the parish. In this way, the association of the church with a house also created specific gendered expectations for women’s parish involvement, which, in turn, influenced expectations for their religious behavior. It needed to fit into the context of domesticity and household obligations. Just as housewives dominated the household, women, especially married women in charge of their own households, moved about their parishes with equal comfort.

At the same time, the congruence between house and church was not total. Parish work opportunities offered women greater initiative and agency than they had in other institutions, and as a result women’s parish participation periodically breached expected gender norms. The housekeeping women did for the church brought them into contact with other women and gave them opportunities for shared experiences, something lacking in much of their ordinary work. Such corporate and public work gave women a broader scope for their activities, and meant that “churchkeeping” offered women opportunities for visibility and action that housekeeping did not.

There was a danger that women might start to presume upon their relationship with the parish and grow comfortable with the intimacy that such work afforded them. John Mirk, whose sermon collection, the Festial, was the most popular collection in late medieval England, addressed the problem of how to distinguish the value of work done for the church from work done for one’s family or oneself in his sermon for Corpus Christi.¹⁹ Many of Mirk’s sermons came from the twelfth-century Golden Legend, but Mirk reworked them to address the concerns and activities of fourteenth-century English parishioners.²⁰ His collection continued to be popular up into the sixteenth century and the eve of the Reformation. In his Corpus Christi sermon, Mirk retells the story of the woman who made the bread used at a mass being said by Pope Gregory the Great.²¹ She smiled when Gregory gave her a piece of the bread. When asked about her mirth she replied, “you call that God’s body that which I made with my own hands?”²² Gregory, saddened by her disbelief, prayed to God to convince her otherwise. Immediately the bread then turned to a piece of bleeding flesh, which Gregory showed to the woman. She cried out “Lord, now I believe that you are Christ, God’s son of Heaven in the form of bread.”²³ Gregory prayed again, and the flesh transformed back into bread. This story was a popular one for sermons writers in late medieval England, the same story also appears in the Speculum Sacerdotale sermon collection.²⁴

Most obviously the story of the woman and the host explained the doctrine of transubstantiation and the importance of the priest’s role in the daily miracle of the mass. This lesson was important for challenging the heretical Lollards, whose influence was growing in the late fourteenth-century. The story, however, also demonstrates that women’s work prepared the church for mass. The doubting woman made an instrument of worship, but she made no distinction between her work for home or profit and her work for the church. The story explained that labor for the church was not everyday labor and should not be viewed as such. Work in a holy context was sacred work. Baking bread for the Eucharist might look like housework, but it did not mean the same thing. With the priest’s blessings, the bread became God’s body. In confusing housekeeping with churchkeeping,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 “My Wedding Gown to Make a Vestment”: Housekeeping and Churchkeeping
• 2 Hatched, Matched, and Dispatched: Life Cycles and the Liturgy
• 3 “My Pew in the Middle Aisle”: Women at Mass
• 4 Maidens’ Lights and Wives’ Stores: Women’s Parish Groups
• 5 “To Save Them from Binding on Hock Tuesday”: The Rise of a Women’s Holiday
• 6 A Cross Out of Bread Crumbs: Women’s Piety and Impiety
• Epilogue: Women and the Reformation
• Appendix A: All-Women’s Groups
• Appendix B: Hocktide Celebrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments