The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (review)

French’s innovative and richly documented study of laywomen’s pious activities in late medieval England juxtaposes prescriptive literary and artistic sources with documents that show how individual women participated in, and contributed to, their parishes. This comparison allows French to highlight the tensions between the feminine docility and humility advocated by sermons and saints’ lives, and the new opportunities for collective parish activities that women acquired in the aftermath of the Black Death. Didactic literature and art, as well as church liturgies, encouraged women to be modest, patient, and silent. Yet analyses of the churchwardens’ accounts, wills, and court and tax records from several parishes (in East Anglia and the West of England) show how women’s enterprises established them as parish leaders and fundraisers, moving them far beyond the constraints of women’s prescribed religious behavior.

The first two chapters argue that women’s family roles shaped their public expressions of piety. Transferring their household duties to the parish church, the “house of God,” women performed church-keeping tasks like laundering, sewing and embroidering sacred textiles, candle making, and brewing ale for parish feasts. Such pious labor, French emphasizes, “integrated women into the parish community” and made the material church a “homey space” that women provisioned and organized (49). Similarly, at baptisms, churchings, marriages, and funerals, women augmented official rituals with liturgical adjuncts like adornments, furnishings, and processions. Through such para-rituals as supplying funeral candles, bells, wedding rings, and tapestries for the churching ceremony, laywomen expressed social and economic concerns and actively contributed to the rites marking the key events of life and death, despite the submissive position church liturgies assigned them.

Three chapters explore women’s collective actions in the parish. Close analyses of seating arrangements in a few parishes show that women’s places in the church could display marital status (in some parishes maidens sat separately), family wealth, husbands’ office holding in the parish, and even friendship. Seating proximity created a particularly female space and perhaps led some women to form all-female groups that raised money for the parish. Although such groups have only scanty documentation, French identifies almost fifty of them with economic activities that varied from dances, collections, and brewing to holding rental property. Besides adding to the parish coffers, these groups provided a rare forum for female collaboration, companionship, and public leadership. The rise in women’s groups in late fifteenth-century parishes paralleled the growing popularity of Hocktide, a holiday when men and women caught and released each other on payment of a forfeit that went to the parish. Organizing this revel gave women “official roles within parish administrations,” contributing as much as 20 percent of a parish’s annual income, but it clearly placed women at odds with the subservience that clerical writers praised (175).

French concludes that the late medieval parish accepted a broader range of female pious practices than prescriptive sources like sermons and confessors’ manuals would endorse. Episcopal visitation records, for instance, show little concern about women’s parish enterprises. Yet this post-plague era of women’s “collective, visible, and active” religious behavior was relatively brief (230), ending with the Reformation, which refocused women’s piety on their roles as wives and mothers.