Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (revieW)

Christine Peters explains that her research for this book began with the question of the impact of the Reformation on women. Historians have recently tended to agree that women both lost and gained by it. The disappearance of the cults of female saints, above all the Virgin Mary, and the end of monastic life, were offset by the promotion of an ideal of godly marriage in which sexual love was allowed a more positive role. Dr. Peters' investigation of this "balance sheet" results in a more complex and finely shaded picture, full of seeming paradoxes and necessary qualifications. This is based on a wide variety of different sorts of evidence, including, besides the expected literature of Christian advice, orders of service, visitation injunctions, churchwardens' accounts, wills, lives of saints and martyrs, plays, ballads, woodcuts, mural paintings, and embroidery.

One key thread in the book's intricate pattern is the "significance of medieval Christocentric piety in offering a bridge to the Reformation, and in shaping the nature of protestantism in the period up to the Civil War" (p. i). Peters maintains that the saints had already lost much of their importance as intercessors before the Reformation. They might help individual Christians in dealing with the problems of daily life, but their chief importance was that they offered "exemplars of conduct." In this respect, the repentant Mary Magdalen seemed far closer to most sinful humans than did the virgin saints. The increased "humanization" of the saints contributed to the loss of"the strong accent on virginity as an essential qualification for mystical marriage with Christ" (p. 128). Even after the Reformation, however, the Virgin Mary retained a place of honor among Protestants, and her humility, if not her virginity, could still be held worthy of imitation. The saints who disappeared from the post-Reformation devotional landscape were partly replaced by Old Testament figures. Susanna's exemplary chastity made her name an increasingly common choice, and her story was a popular theme of ballads, plays, and embroidery. The vicissitudes of religious policy during the Reformation itself produced new female martyrs, of whom the best known was Anne Askew.

The absence from this book of any sustained discussion of later medieval marriage means that this element in the "balance" lacks the continuity of treatment accorded to the saints and their successors. Dr. Peters explores some of the implications of the reinforced patriarchy that historians, especially feminist ones, have detected in Protestant advice literature. In the first place, the culpability in the Fall of Adam, as the wiser and stronger partner, was underlined in the official homilies, thus displacing Eve "from the centre of attention" (p. 298). This was a "patriarchal solution." (More widespread was a tendency to blame both partners equally. This too, nevertheless, implied a move away from an emphasis on Eve as temptress and a weakening of a gender-based explanation of the Fall.) The "patriarchal" husband might be entitled to his wife's reverence, but he in turn had delicate, complex, and often testing responsibilities toward her. His authority was limited by the duty that both partners owed to God, and the virtuous wife was bound to disobey a husband's ungodly commands. The writers of Christian counsel, Peters also points out, never accepted the idea of a "double standard" of sexual behavior. It was not as strongly entrenched in society at large as is sometimes supposed: men as well as women sued for defamation of sexual misconduct, even if not in such large numbers.

These necessarily concise summaries can hardly do justice to the subtlety and ingenuity of Dr. Peters' arguments. She explores various other themes, especially that of female religious sociability. Some of her conclusions are likely to prove controversial. The important argument about the place of the saints in later medieval English religion seems open to question in detail. Dr. Peters claims that in...