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The Catholic Historical Review 88.3 (2002) 585-587



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Book Review

Inward Purity and Outward Splendour:
Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370-1547


Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370-1547. By Judith Middleton-Stewart. [Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, Volume 17.] (Woodbridge: Boydell Press in association with the Centre of East Anglian Studies. 2001. Pp. xiv, 328. $110.00.)

The deanery of Dunwich lies on the coast of the eastern English county of Suffolk. In 1524 some 9,460 people lived in its fifty-two parishes, nearly a fifth of them in the two coastal towns of Southwold and Dunwich (still the bigger, but gradually being claimed by the encroaching sea). This book gives a uniquely [End Page 585] vivid, thorough, and detailed account of the material expression of the deanery population's religious aspirations during the years between the great epidemic mortality of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the Edwardian Reformation. Nearly 3,000 wills of deanery inhabitants drawn up during that period are Dr. Middleton-Stewart's principal source. Their testimony is complemented by evidence from surviving churchwardens' accounts, inventories of church goods, and what remains of church fabrics and ornaments sadly ravaged by iconoclasm, confiscation, neglect, and "restoration." The book is copiously illustrated with both black and white and color photographs.

Dr. Middleton-Stewart explains and illustrates (among many other things) the development of intercessory Masses; the development of the some of the most important later medieval feasts, cults, and devotions; and the uses, forms, and materials of liturgical ornaments and vestments. She is well aware of the shortcomings of her sources. Wills are exceptional in the breadth of their chronological, geographical, and social coverage. There are, nevertheless, what look like oddly anomalous bunchings and gaps in runs of existing wills which are most likely due, in Dr. Middleton-Stewart's opinion, to uneven registration or survival. Where wills can be compared with contemporary churchwardens' accounts, it is evident that some testators made bequests that were mentioned in one of these documents but not the other. Given the clear unevenness of source coverage, Dr. Middleton-Stewart's non-provision of detailed tables is understandable. Her percentage figures for various types of bequest are scattered through the text; most of them cover the whole period, and several are cautiously approximate. All testators made bequests to their parish churches, but only about a third of them for a specific project, purchase, or repair. The percentage of testators favoring any given type of bequest was relatively low. Between 1420 and 1520, for example, the proportion making contributions toward images and lights was roughly 8 per cent; 10 per cent did so between 1510 and 1520, but thereafter there was a sharp fall. We are told that "bequests towards the upkeep of roads and bridges were more generous in the fifteenth than in the early sixteenth century" (p. 85), yet that the years 1520-1530 saw an "increase in the bequests directed towards the secular needs of the community, such as repairs to roads and bridges" (p. 223), two statements which create a somewhat confusing impression. This is a book whose strength lies in its exploration of the local and the particular and the exuberant richness of its detail rather than in its quantitative foundation. Dr. Middleton-Stewart accounts for the geographical distribution of seven-sacrament fonts; shows how parishioners' bequests for images and furniture declined during a church's major building campaign, and explains why the proportion of testators requesting burial within the church was so much higher in urban parishes than in rural ones dominated by a resident gentry family. Informing the whole book, and reflected in its subtitle, is a lively understanding of the desire to be remembered and prayed for. Seldom was this desire more directly and poignantly expressed than in Robert Duckett's 1534 provision for a window in Sibton church to commemorate himself, his wife, and...

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