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

In The Good Women of the Parish Katherine French provides a fascinating reconstruction of late medieval English women's religious worlds. French has consciously moved beyond broad questions of agency and power to more closely examine women's every-day religious practices and experiences, deftly combining archival data from numerous parishes, clerical texts, religious art, and late medieval English literature to reconstruct what she terms "the experiences of real women" (13). Despite her title, French focuses on women more often than on gender, and does not limit herself to the "good" women. Indeed, her most interesting examples come from court records of "bad" women's prosecution by their parishes. This is a complex narrative, comprised of rich archival and textual sources. French convincingly recreates the religious experiences of medieval women within their own parishes

In her first chapter, French introduces the medieval concept of the church as a House of God, arguing that divisions of labor gendered devotion. In the first section of this chapter, French begins with allegorical descriptions of female domestic labor—who knew priests were so familiar with laundering?—then explores how women's physical contact with liturgical objects during washing or mending was understood as redemptive. Domestic labor, transposed to the sphere of the Church, becomes a path to religious agency. The second part of this chapter then compares male and female economic contributions to the parish Church. In French's lively account, acquiring candles for a Parish church or beer for a religious feast is pious female labor, enhancing and shaping community life. French offers even more striking evidence of female contributions to the parish through statistical analysis wills; not only did women donate to churches more often than men, but female testators primarily donated personal items, literally dressing and adorning the church's saints.

In her second chapter, "Hatched, Matched, and Dispatched", French argues that "pararituals" (personal and local additions to the liturgy ranging from the addition of extra candles to the public carrying of an infant to baptism) often override clerical warnings regarding female ritual impurity. According to French's data, many pararituals accompanying baptisms, weddings, churchings, and funerals reveal a fluidity that speaks more of social status than religious pollution derived from medieval notions of gender. Though some of these rituals were more elaborate than others, French traces a coherent pattern where families used rituals to enact (or project) social mobility and women, through an association with family and household, played an important role in discounting and reshaping clerical instructions.

Her third chapter, "My pew in the Middle aisle", again emphasizes female rejection of clerical concerns, this time through church seating arrangements. French argues that men and women had different social and religious concerns when buying church seats by tracking the changing prices and gender distribution of church seats. Though some parishes attempted to control women's behavior through seating arrangements, according to French's findings, women used seating to further their own family ambitions, connecting "their devotions to their family and household roles" (116). French stresses that these seating arrangements are local and highly varied, yet her evidence suggests that, despite clerical concerns about female behavior in church, women were visible and influential members of their local parishes.

Female social networks were formed through seating arrangements and parish guilds, groups formed to provide candles and material care for parish churches. Chapter four, "Maidens' lights and Wives' stores", focuses on female guilds reveals an active female involvement in the care for saints, especially Anne, Margaret, and Katherine. According to French's information, these groups were organized primarily around marital status and scattered as far south as Cornwall and as far north as York, suggesting that this was a widespread avenue for female religious participation in late medieval England. Though French stresses that the records of women's groups are fragmentary and difficult to reconstruct, she makes a strong case that...