Description
Book SynopsisThere was immense social and economic upheaval between the Black Death and the English Reformation, and contemporary writers often blamed this upheaval on immorality, singling out women''s behavior for particular censure. Late medieval moral treatises and sermons increasingly connected good behavior for women with Christianity, and their failure to conform to sin. Katherine L. French argues, however, that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities.
Scholarship on medieval women''s religious experiences has focused primarily on elite women, nuns, and mystics who either were literate enough to leave written records of their religious ideas and behavior or had access to literate men who did this for them. Most women, howeve
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"Contains a wealth of interesting detail, much of it culled from those churchwardens' account that had begun to be kept in the fourteenth century. Women themselves might act as churchwardens, but as French makes abundantly clear throughout her book, such a role was only one among many that women in the late English medieval parish might exercise. French may not with to argue that the Reformation was 'bad' for women, but she does make it clear that thereafter women had to learn-the phrase is hers-quite a new 'vocabulary of piety.'" * Journal of British Studies *
