MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN WIDOWS OCCUPIED a blessed but position. Their chastity and devotion to God defined their state an them with intercessory and prophetic powers. Their spiritual proved as they escaped the carnality of marriage and aspired tow could not reach) the perfect, intact chastity of virgins--much as came to represent a liminal space between salvation and damnatio souls elected to be saved but not yet prepared to enter paradise. F twelfth century onward, ideas about the pious widow or matr intertwined with the evolving concept of purgatory. Scholar Jacques Le Goff have argued for the" birth" of purgatory in the century, locating this nascence in the context of the broader tre theological sophistication in what scholars have long called the Century Renaissance. Beyond the world of the theologians, pu theology had wide-ranging implications for pastoral care. Con the fate of souls of purgatory enhanced the sanctity and inte potential of the new brand of lay saint--particularly female sa flourished in the urban movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and invigorated mendicant and beguine expressions of piety. This article explores some of the implications of this scholarship in the hagiographical context of the pious matron. For the widowed saint, the discourse that defined her eschatological and social roles drew together many of the significant concerns of the age, including marriage and domestic life but also the public role of women.

I will argue that the introduction of purgatory to a religious audience beyond the schools of philosophy added a new element to the medieval conception of the holy matron's spiritual responsibility toward her husband and other loved ones: a sort of" spiritual housekeeping" beyond the grave. Throughout the early Middle Ages, concern for the fate of departed souls