Saving the Souls of Medieval London: Perpetual Chantries at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1200–1548 (review)

The Cathedral of St Paul’s, the heart of London’s religious life, was one of the most important churches in medieval England. A major landowner, home to the bishops of London, and an important setting for significant civic and national events, the cathedral was also central to urban lay piety, commemoration, and intercession. One of the most recognizable elements of this intercessory practice was the medieval chantry, the theme of which forms the subject of this book.

The medieval chantry was the foundation and endowment of a Mass by one or more benefactors, to be celebrated at an altar, for the souls of the founders or other specified persons. Chantries could range from Masses celebrated at pre-existing altars through to side chapels and the elaborate “cage-chantries” of the later medieval period. The study of medieval chantries has been a popular subject over the last few decades. However, much of this work has largely been within the field of architectural history with a particular focus on a small, perhaps unrepresentative, sample of surviving and architecturally impressive examples. Such work has often gloried in the architectural specifics and minutae of such monuments, as well as perhaps a rather unhelpful obsession with their founders. Overall, they have generally informed very little on how these monuments operated in practice or their wider relevance to the religious community as a whole; a lacuna somewhat remedied by more recent revisionist historical, and archaeological, work. Marie-Hélène Rousseau’s work is thankfully, largely in this category and provides a detailed and meticulously researched piece of historical work that focuses not just on the chantries themselves, but on their management and organizational arrangements. This is a worthy task made much the harder by the fact that both chantries and medieval cathedral have long departed. Here, the value of history in resurrecting the afterlife practices of pre-Reformation London is ably and effectively demonstrated.

The interdisciplinary study of chantries can present many problems to the researcher. Just as the archaeologist is sometimes criticized for failing to use documentary sources adequately, the historian—and certainly the architectural historian—can be equally criticized for failing to reconstruct such physical aspects as setting, location, and visual and spatial relationships. Despite the fact that individuals often founded chantries, it is clear that in practice they did not operate independently; they formed but one component of a wider ritual church landscape. Thus, one minor criticism of Rousseau’s book would be that it would be very interesting to understand further where some of these chantries were located in the cathedral and their relationship with other important areas of the church, wherever possible. We are told that there were more than eighty chantries in the cathedral, and thus they would have had a significant impact on church ritual space and liturgical arrangement, as well as serving as foci for important civil and lay interactions. Such an interpretation, perhaps in the form of a plan—based on Schofield’s plan of the cathedral and precinct already included—would have provided a further useful addition to this work.

The book is a bit pricey and therefore may be unfortunately beyond the means of many interested amateurs. Overall, however, it provides a timely, well-written, and well-researched contribution to the study of medieval chantries in one of London’s most important churches.