The Profession of Widowhood: Widows, Pastoral Care and Medieval Models of Holiness by Katherine Clark Walter (review)

The Profession of Widowhood is an intriguing survey of widows in European Christian literature and culture from late antiquity through to the early modern period. Katherine Clark Walter tracks the image of the vere vidua (true widow) from the Pauline epistles onward, exploring continuity and change in how widows were written for and written about. As such, this is not so much a book about medieval widows as about the idea of widow-hood, how it persisted and developed over the course of the Middle Ages. The study of pre-modern widowhood is still in its early stages, and Walter's contribution is invaluable in bringing pockets of scholarship on widows in particular centuries and locations into a wider context.

This context centres around a paradox: the good widow versus the bad; high expectations on one hand and doubt and misogyny on the other. The image of the self-sacrificing matron, spiritually elevated by her chastity, serving the Church and the poor, is juxtaposed with male anxiety and mistrust of unsupervised women. Similarly, the poor widow, needy, vulnerable, and an object of charity, stands in contrast with the widow's role in the Church as financial patron and spiritual mentor. Walter skilfully presents how these tensions run through centuries of written material, beginning with early theologians such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, who shaped an understanding of consecrated widowhood in response to controversies around marriage as inherently good and necessary but at odds with the ideal of sexual asceticism. She follows the development of the concept of widowhood through earlier and later hagiographies of widowed saints, through canon law and liturgical manuscripts, through sermons, through late medieval popular literature, and into early modern didactic writings and visual culture. She demonstrates how, at the Reformation, there is a shift from emphasis upon the widow's chastity and vocation toward conjugal loyalty, grief, and respectability. Pious widows become living monuments to their husbands and guardians of family interests, and misogynistic fears centre around women's forgetful, unreliable nature. Walter's nuanced and thoughtful treatment of such an abundance of source material reveals the bigger picture of continuity and change over more than a thousand years.

Reading this work, one is conscious of the gap between literature and life. As Walter states, it is difficult to assess the circulation and influence of these texts. What is missing, then, is how these ideas around widowhood were manifest in the lives of real widows. Walter's example of Elizabeth de Burgh illustrates beautifully how medieval women could deliberately and consciously inhabit the archetype of the pious widow, enhancing their own social status and protecting their autonomy (2–4). As ideas around widowhood played out differently for different women, more case studies like this would have been illuminating. Similarly, the canonical and episcopal writings about broken chastity vows might have been complemented with examples from the registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary in which widows who had broken vows sought absolution and justified themselves. The chapter on chaste widowhood in canon law and liturgical manuscripts, in particular, raises vital questions about widows in the world beyond the page. Walter describes different manifestations of widowed religious life—beguines, Franciscan tertiaries, vowesses—and the ritual of veiling widows. This would benefit from greater clarity around which vocations or lifestyles flourished where, how they compared with one another, and how the English vowess benediction ceremony fits into the larger European picture. Were equivalent vows available to women on the Continent? It would have been helpful to ascertain which options for religious life were available to widows in which country and which century. The widows whose lives influenced and were influenced by texts on widowhood might be beyond the scope of this book, but, if so, they are the first, most essential avenue for further enquiry.

The study of widowhood as an...