Women and Religion in England

1500-1720

Patricia Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415016964
• eBook ISBN: 9781136097645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Patricia Crawford explores how the study of gender can enhance our understanding of religious history, in this study of women and their apprehensions of God in early modern England. The book has three broad themes: the role of women in the religious upheaval in the period from the Reformation to the Restoration; the significance of religion to contemporary women, focusing on the range of practices and beliefs; and the role of gender in the period. The author argues that religion in the early modern period cannot be understood without a perception of the gendered nature of its beliefs, institutions and language. Contemporary religious ideology reinforced women's inferior position, but, as the author shows, it was possible for some women to transcend these beliefs and profoundly influence history.

Part I

Religious changes 1500–1640

1

The Reformation

Our very reformation of Religion, seems to be begun and carried on by Women.

Bathsua Makin, 1673¹

THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN RELIGIOUS LIFE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Until the 1960s, very few Reformation historians devoted much attention to women. Some of the subsequent studies provided some useful biographical information, but little else.² Even the social history of the Reformation, which ought to have been more concerned with the female half of the ‘ordinary’ people, did not necessarily include women.³ Indeed, although the great discovery of Reformation studies in the 1970s was ‘the common man’, the obvious maleness of this person was ignored until the work of Lyndal Roper showed how gendered a concept this was.⁴ Wiesner, Roper and other feminist scholars are making women more visible in the European Reformation.⁵ Among the social historians of the English Reformation there have been varying degrees of sensitivity to questions of gender.⁶

Historians have found it difficult to judge the importance of religion in the lives of ordinary men and women in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. There is evidence both of piety, and of criticism of the church. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation in England – or rather, since it was no single event, the reformations – led to changes in theology which in turn altered the nature of the institutional church. Inevitably, lay beliefs were fundamentally affected.

Women were prominent in medieval religious life. To be female was no obstacle to the highest vocation, monasticism.⁷ Women as well as men entered religious orders. During the later medieval period, there were some 138 nunneries in England, over half of which belonged to the Benedictine order, and a quarter to the Cistercian.⁸ Some nuns were attracted to orders with a strict ascetic rule, others to those serving through practical charity, such as nursing the sick in hospitals.⁹ Although all women in orders depended upon a priest for spiritual direction and the mass, the authority exercised by individual women as abbesses and prioresses was considerable.

By the early sixteenth century, the number of nuns in England was depleted to around 2,000, and in 1536, at the dissolution of the monasteries, there were an estimated 1,600 nuns living in various orders.¹⁰ Assessments of the reasons for this decline in numbers have usually focused on what were perceived to be the failings of individuals to live up to the monastic ideals. For example, Margaret Bowker, in her study of the diocese of Lincoln during the episcopate of John Longland, argues that many women had fallen away from their vocation. In the 1520s Longland directed one group of nuns to abandon their fancy veils and to wear their head-linen ‘playn without rolle’. At another nunnery he told the sisters to live ‘in a scarcer manner’ and without so many servants. But these incidents could be reinterpreted as conflicts between the bishop and the nuns over the nature of conventual life and the authority of the bishop. Longland’s attempts to impose a new prioress to reform the abuses of the Benedictine community at Elstow prompted a walk-out. The nuns resented the bishop’s imposition of a prioress, contrary to their rule, and complained that the new prioress ‘makes every faute a deadly syne’.¹¹ It is difficult to assess the spiritual strength of monasticism. Much of the evidence about corruption was collected from the hostile observations of Henry VIII’s visitors who were seeking reasons to justify the dissolutions of 1536 and 1539. Evidence from Yorkshire, where there were twenty-four religious houses for women, suggests that there was still considerable spiritual life in the convents. Nunneries had no difficulty in recruiting young women to the cloister.¹²

Lay women expressed their religious beliefs in various ways. Some pious women, like pious laymen, chose to live a religious life outside a formal religious order. A few became anchorites, enclosing themselves in four walls and devoting their lives to contemplation, with intercession as their special work.¹³ Anchorites were expected to give advice to others, and in the early fourteenth century Margery Kempe consulted the famous mystic, Julian of Norwich.¹⁴ In Europe, lay devotion outside religious orders was also expressed in communities known as beguinages. These communities were especially attractive to women in Europe, but in England, Norwich seems to have been the only city where a community of lay women lived together under vows of chastity and devotion to God.¹⁵

Many people chose a life of piety which involved a quest for personal holiness. Certain forms of piety were specific to women. Since women were responsible for household routines, self-denial was relatively easy for them to organise, and was socially acceptable because it reinforced medieval views of appropriate womanly behaviour. Although the most famous ascetics were male, women were prominent as penitents and ascetics.¹⁶ Other women chose to devote themselves to the poor, and some of the parish fraternities which women joined were dedicated to mutual charitable help as well as communal prayers for the dead and living.¹⁷ A study of popular devotion in France has shown how the laity, through individual patterns of prayer to the Virgin and saints, linked their everyday aspirations to the divine. Thus although women could not be priests, they could attend the Mass, and participate through their private prayers and devotion.¹⁸ By the end of the medieval period there was a strong tradition of female lay piety in England. There were individual mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, although it would be difficult to establish whether their names were known to women early in the sixteenth century. Some of Margery’s writings were published by Wynken de Worde in 1502 which may have brought her work before a new audience.¹⁹

Studies of popular belief during the medieval period have shown how women’s Christian beliefs had private and public significance. In the private sphere of the household, parents, especially mothers, had a role in socialising their children as Christians. Religion was present in everyday life, from the blessing of food to requests for divine aid. Acts of charity, even when secretly performed, took women into public life. Pilgrimages had a role in the devotional life of the laity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Finucane’s analysis of 1,933 miracles performed for pilgrims to shrines in England showed that 39 per cent of those who visited were women, of whom 86 per cent were of the lowest social classes. That is, poorer women valued the divine aid accessible through shrines more than did any other section of the female community.²⁰ Later, Protestantism offered this social group no substitute form of devotion.

The institutional church had considerable influence on women’s religious lives, and most women turned to their priests for the administration of the sacraments which were linked with the rites of passage of baptism, marriage and burial. In turn, women supported the church in various ways. Among the wealthier aristocratic levels of society, ladies gave endowments. They expressed their piety through personal regimes of devotion, reading manuals of prayers and attending public worship.²¹ Their devotion to the Virgin and female saints provided a feminine influence upon religion. In some parishes, a few women even served as churchwardens. For example, in the parish of Morebath in Devon, they kept their accounts as ‘maydyn wardyns’ until the guild disappeared at the Reformation. A few women presented churchwardens’ accounts up to 1572.²²

The Catholic church offered a series of rituals to help and comfort women. Mothers attended for the ceremony of churching after the birth of their babies. Women recited prayers, often using the prompt of rosary beads. They prayed in the church at the stations of the cross. They lit candles for the Virgin Mary, for the saints, and for the dead. The church buildings were beautiful, a contrast to the homes of poor countrywomen. Frequently they were illuminated through coloured glass, and walls were decorated. Bequests by wealthier women showed female devotion to the fabric of the church, which undoubtedly enhanced the interior. Examples abound. In 1496 a widow, Margaret a Dene, bequeathed vestments, an altar cloth, and two tunicles of purple velvet to the church at Rickmansworth.²³ A 1517 inventory in Reading listed various embroidered cloths given by women.²⁴ Images carved in stone or wood were sometimes dressed in rich coloured fabrics: an inventory of St Mary’s, Cambridge, of 1511 included ‘a Coote of tawney damask for our lady’.²⁵ The sacred relics which the church treasured afforded help in trouble. For example, a woman could borrow the girdle of a saint when she was in labour.²⁶ As various historians have shown, the role of the Catholic church was important in offering supernatural aid for various problems of daily life in the early modern period. The church also channelled charitable relief. Women had less property to dispose of than men, but they gave poor relief through charitable bequests to the church and its hospitals. The vitality and importance of faith and charity in neighbourly and social obligations gave the church a central place in the community.²⁷

Priests advised married women about their marital conduct, including sexuality. Priests could be mediators, or an alternative source of authority to whom a wife could turn. Through the confession, priests sought to establish certain norms of marital conduct, particularly of sexual behaviour. Tentler has suggested that the general view of the clergy, although that of individual confessors might differ, was that husband and wife each owed the other sexual pleasure, and that each should satisfy the other lest they fall into worse sins.²⁸ From the eleventh century, priests themselves were forbidden to marry, and celibacy came to seem fundamental to the exercise of any sacred functions in the church. However, priests were widely suspected of attempting the chastity of their female parishioners, and popular anticlericalism attacked the sexual morality of the clergy.

The Catholic church viewed men and women differently. Men controlled the institutional church and men dispensed the sacraments. The boundary between the most sacred parts of worship and the female sex was firmly drawn. Virginity was preferable to marriage. Woman’s nature was sexual, and she represented a constant danger to herself as well as to men because her sexuality inclined her to sin. A woman was polluted during menstruation and by childbirth. Furthermore, her nature rendered her particularly vulnerable to the wiles of the devil. Just as Eve had fallen, and with her the whole human race, so women represented a continuing danger after the Fall. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft in England and Europe were sex-related to women.²⁹

Further alarm was caused by the presence of women among the Lollard heretics in early Tudor England. At the end of the fourteenth century, the English medieval church had been threatened by the criticisms of John Wycliffe and his followers, who became known as Lollards. Later, Protestants claimed Wycliffe and his followers among the ancestors of the Protestant Reformation. Among the Lollard teachings which were similar to those of later Protestants were the importance of the Bible and of preaching.³⁰ Wycliffe reduced the distinction between the clergy and the laity, which offered encouragement to women, whose sex debarred them the priesthood. There was a strong female presence among the Lollards, but as Margaret Aston, in her studies of Lollardy, has observed, historians have shown a surprising lack of interest in the role of women in the movement. She found fascinating evidence which showed not only that women were preachers in the formative stage of the movement but also that claims were being made that women were capable of priesthood. There were even rumours that women offered the sacrament to believers.³¹ From the earliest days of Christianity, the church fathers had commented adversely upon the attraction of women to heresy.³² Female support for the Cathar and Waldensian heresies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe was marked, and there were women preachers.³³ During the fifteenth century, the Lollards were persecuted. Dickens has argued that many humbler adherents remained undiscovered, especially in the Chilterns.³⁴ However, Derek Plumb has since discovered that Lollards were present at all levels of rural society.³⁵

Women’s role in religious heresy was revealed in the trials of the early sixteenth century.³⁶ Some women influenced families: in 1522 Thomas Hernsted confessed that his wife had taught him ‘the Paternoster, Ave Maria, and Credo, in Englishe’.³⁷ Other women played a role in their neighbourhoods: in Burford, Alice Colins, the wife of Richard, ‘was a famous woman among them, and had a good memory, and could recite much of the Scriptures, and other good books’. She taught not only her daughter, but also a conventicle of men.³⁸ There is evidence in heresy trials of women reading books: Anne Watts confessed that she had hidden an English translation of a treatise about the sacrament in a ditch.³⁹ Other women criticised current Catholic practices. Mistress Cotismore spoke scornfully to her servant of several devotional practices: ‘that when women go to offer to images or saints, they did it to show their new gay gear: that images were but carpenter’s chips; and that folks go on pilgrimages more for the green way, than for any devotion’.⁴⁰

The spiritual condition of the Catholic church in England prior to the Reformation has, of course, been much debated.⁴¹ Protestants, whose case depended upon a view of a corrupt and unreformed church, stressed its inadequacies. Catholics, who saw the origins of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: apprehending the divine: gender and the history of religion
• Part I Religious Changes 1500–1640
• Part II Women's Religious Beliefs and Spirituality 1500–1720
• Part III Women and Radical Religion in the English Revolution 1640–60
• Part IV Restoration to Toleration 1660–1720
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index