As historiography has increasingly focused on the religious experiences of ordinary people, a number of scholars, both feminist and non-feminist, have turned their attention to gender differences in religion during the middle ages, and in particular to the role of women within the life of the church. They have asked whether there were any forms of piety that can be particularly identified with women, and how women could successfully participate in religious life in an age when female subservience and inferiority were usually taken for granted. The thirteenth century saw the development of pious organizations of women across Europe, such as the tertiary orders associated with the growing mendicant movement, humiliati (lay penitents) and beguines (see below), but it seems that none of these groups was encouraged by the church in England, thus limiting the range of religious opportunities for women. However, one response to this lack of choice was for women to turn to more traditional forms of religious life, in particular the enclosed life of the solitary, or anchoress, which attracted growing numbers of women from the thirteenth century. While enclosure was a pious choice taken up by both men and women, it is clear that more women than men seem to have been attracted to pursue such a life. In addition, whereas the majority of male recluses seem to have been drawn from the ranks of the clergy, many of the women who took up this vocation were from the laity rather than nuns, the latter of course needing dowries from their families in order to set them up within a particular community. The reasons why many women chose to become recluses were mixed, but some did so in order to escape, say, the misery of an unhappy marriage or difficult family situation. The twelfth-century anchoress Christina of Markyate became a solitary after rejecting her husband’s conjugal rights, and other women who valued their chastity as highly as Christina were perhaps moved to do the same. Two broad historical developments in the history of medieval recluses should also be noted. First, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon period such women were primarily drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy and elite classes, over time recluses seem to have come from a much wider cross-section of society. Second, although many of the earlier anchorholds were established in rural contexts, often added on to the body of parish churches, as urban communities grew in size and number more and more came to be established in towns, sometimes attached to friaries and dependent on support from wealthy lay benefactors from the local merchant elite. But the desire to withdraw from the world did not necessarily imply that recluses were entirely cut off from society. They were, after all, reliant on servants to bring them food, and some chose to live in small communities rather than as solitaries. Anchorholds, whether attached to parish churches in remote and rural localities or to urban friaries close to the heart of civic life, were part of much larger buildings that were frequented by the laity, and the world was therefore never far away. Moreover, many anchorites and anchoresses were in regular and direct contact with the laity, offering them their spiritual consolation, advice and prayers. The visits made by the East Anglian mystic Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) to the anchoress Dame Julian of Norwich and to the anchorite of the Dominican friary at Lynn underline this accessibility of recluses to the medieval laity, as well as their high regard and spiritual role among wider society.
Of course, few women decided to become recluses or nuns, and for most fulfilment in religion was described by the framework of the parish and more informal aspects of voluntary religious practice. It is argued by some historians that female piety was strongly based around attachment to the cult of the saints, and pilgrimage and eucharistic devotion. Such activities were, it is argued, more important or central to female piety since they provided ordinary women with a variety of outlets for voluntary participation in religion where normally their roles were rather more restricted. Historians have also suggested that women’s responses to these aspects of medieval religion could be quite different from those of men, occasionally made manifest in particularly emotional or affective responses to images or other sacred objects.8 Both of these trends can be seen in the life of Margery Kempe. Margery was a most enthusiastic and regular pilgrim, making the long and difficult journeys to famous holy places such as Rome, Santiago, Jerusalem and Wilsnack in Brandenburg. She was particularly devoted to the sacrament of the mass, went regularly to confession, had miraculous visions of Christ and the saints, and would often break down in tears and wild sobs when she looked upon sacred images. It is unlikely that Margery was representative of most bourgeois women of her time, but her life at least demonstrates the point that women may have felt certain religious impulses (or were encouraged to do so) more deeply than men. What Margery’s life most emphatically does tell us, however, is that female religiosity, albeit expressed in an extreme form, was sometimes regarded as problematic within the overall framework of the highly patriarchal society in which medieval women lived. Margery’s direct and personal ‘relationship’ with Christ and mystical revelations, her adoption of a white habit, her many fasts and, above all, her teachings and proselytizing in general led some to question her orthodoxy. Indeed, the charge of Lollardy was on occasion directed against her by a number of prominent laymen and clergy. In fact, Margery’s orthodoxy now seems impeccable, if sometimes (at least to modern eyes) of the eccentric variety. By making the accusation of heresy, some may have been making the point that she was genuinely perceived as being in some way subversive and dangerous, yet the suggestion of heresy could equally have been made simply in order to keep her enthusiasm in check.
Margery Kempe was by no means alone among women in trying to forge a distinctively pious form of life while also attempting to lead an active life within the world. There were a number of informal and non-institutional spiritual options open to such women. For instance, it was possible for women to adopt a quasi-monastic lifestyle as vowesses by taking vows of perpetual chastity. Medieval vowesses were not tied to any of the established rules that bound nuns to the observation of a particular monastic order (although some vowesses lived in communities), nor were they enclosed in the manner of anchoresses. The act of becoming a vowess was formally made by undertaking a vow of chastity at an episcopal ceremony at which the individual was clothed and veiled as a widow, although some married women did also on occasion take the vow, in which case both husband and wife took vows of chastity. There is evidence that vowesses existed well before the later middle ages, but some of their identities are known from the fourteenth century onwards from the vowing ceremonies recorded intermittently in surviving episcopal registers. In addition, many more women seem to have taken up similar vows informally and without ever undergoing an official ceremony. The decision to become a vowess might be the product of both spiritual and secular considerations: a vowess might live a distinctively pious and chaste life, but she also enjoyed greater economic autonomy and freedom by escaping the pressure to remarry. Moreover, the state of widowhood enabled women to dispose of their lands, money or goods (that is, if they were wealthy) as they saw fit, particularly on pious projects that reflected their own religious preoccupations.9
On the continent women who did not wish to enter the enclosed world of the convent but who also wished to devote the main part of their lives to religion could join establishments known as beguinages. These communities flourished from the thirteenth century onwards in many urban centres of Europe, particularly those of France, the Low Countries and Germany. Members of these communities were not tied to any specific religious rule but were simply to live by the precepts of charity, chastity and pious contemplation. Formally established beguinages (or institutions specifically termed ‘beguinages’) are not known to have been established in England, nor indeed anywhere else in the British Isles. However, historians have noted the possible existence of certain informal communities of women who may well have been inspired by the example of the beguines. Thus far, all of the identified communities are from East Anglia, which was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a part of the country with particularly strong trading and cultural links with the Low Countries where the beguine movement flourished during the middle ages. For instance, there appear to have been several small communities of women resembling beguinages in the town of Norwich. Little is now known about these institutions of ‘sisters’, except for a few casual references in wills. It is for the moment unclear how many similar communities were dotted around other parts of the country, but further research may well help to identify more of them.
This section has emphasized the distinctiveness of medieval female piety compared with that of men. We should not, however, overplay the significance of the differences between the two: women, like men, were active (if not always equal) participants in most forms of religion, saving of course the possibility of becoming priests, while few women ever achieved positions of responsibility in parish life as guild officials or as churchwardens. But there were aspects of religion which do seem to have appealed more to women or, put another way, which we can think of as being particularly feminized. Their religious preoccupations noted earlier included a marked emphasis on chastity (i. e., recluses and vowesses) and the control of the body, and sometimes a strongly emotional response to certain religious symbols or practices. Other aspects of female piety in the middle ages require further study. For instance, scholars have detected a degree of gender specificity in relation to the cult of the saints, in particular seeing women as more likely to be devotees of female saints, especially the virgin martyrs. Some scholars argue that the attractiveness of the virgin martyrs lay merely in their role as intercessors and helpers, particularly during the perils of childbirth, and that their (usually apocryphal) lives, which involved the observance of strict chastity and ended up in gruesome martyrdoms, did not provide devotees with realistic role models. Others have argued differently, suggesting that less dramatic aspects of the lives of the virgin martyrs, such as their role in learning and as educators, or as exemplars for good conduct and deportment, were explicitly constructed as models for medieval women. However, the results from such lines of enquiry are still impressionistic and somewhat anecdotal, and we also need to know much more about male patterns of devotion in this regard. More detailed research into such an area might yield some interesting results. A further and more thorny issue is whether or not aspects of female religious expression provided a means for medieval women to articulate resistance to contemporary male stereotypes of women, or whether female religious activities indicated that women were merely the victims of such stereotypes.
World History
