“I Leave My Best Gown as a Vestment:” Women’s Spiritual Interests in the Late Medieval English Parish(1)

In 1518, Elizabeth Tymprly of the parish of St. Michael’s in East Hamsted, Buckinghamshire, died. In her will, proved August 11 of that year, she left “unto the church of Savret my weddyng gown to make a vestment therof.”(2) Elizabeth’s bequest is typical of women’s testamentary bequests to their parishes. Gifts of personal items such as clothing or jewelry, rather than money, are more common in women’s wills than in men’s, reflecting women’s piety and their relationships to their parishes. Looking at the material culture of lay women’s piety, one can see that in the late middle ages it drew upon notions and concepts of domesticity.Although not free of problems, analysis of the goods left to the church does provide the opportunity to see the personal ways that men and women remembered the church. These goods comprise a vocabulary of piety that is gendered and reflects different expectations for the parish and the church. Looking back on a lifelong relationship with a parish or parishes, the personal girls of men and women reflect something of their concerns for their church and how it fit into their personal cosmology. Women often explained that the goods they left should be adapted for use in the liturgy. In the process they left their aesthetic and spiritual imprint on their parish.For most of medieval English society, religious life took place within the context of the parish, the primary forum for public worship. Although scholars have been studying the medieval English parish for over a century, discussion of women’s religious activities within this context has been largely absent.(3) The collective nature of parish life renders women less visible in the surviving documents and, consequently, scholars have typically made one of two assumptions about the spiritual concerns of lay women. They were either perceived as largely the same as men’s or focused solely on childbirth.(4)One position denies the possibility that women outside of childbirth (i.e., single women, women past child bearing, or women in between pregnancies) had spiritual or pious needs. The other implicitly assumes that factors such as gender roles, legal position or geographic region played no role in the construction and practice of piety. Piety is presented as unrelated to the social realities of daily life.Men and women did manifest their piety in different ways. One expression of these differences is the items which parishioners donated to the church. A central concern for lay organization and administration of the parish was the maintenance and beautification of their local church.(5) Furnishing and decorating a parish on either a personal or a collective basis was a venue for expressing spiritual interests. Work on the church was good work that honored God and benefited the soul.(6) To this end, parishioners organized and engaged in fund-raising to build and furnish their parish churches. From the outside, churches could be noted for their tall towers and bells. Inside they were decorated with wall paintings, rood screen, carved seats and side altars. Each altar had candles, altar clothes and accompanying art work. Images, whether painted on the wall or freestanding, were an important medium for religious education and veneration of the saints.Some of a parish’s religious art was the result of group efforts and reflected more generalized religious concerns.(7) Some was the work of individuals, the more affluent members who could afford new projects such as chapels or windows.(8) The differences in what parishioners gave speak to the influence of gender, wealth and legal status in the creation and performance of piety.Some of the most obvious examples of the material culture of women’s piety do revolve around childbirth. Many of the relics confiscated and destroyed in the English Reformation were directed at alleviating the life-threatening dangers of pregnancy. Westminster Abbey claimed to have a girdle that had belonged to the Virgin Mary “which women with chield were wont to girde with.