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Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: the Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy*
Affiliation:
Magdalene College, Cambridge
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Extract

The cult of the saints, according to Emile Male, ‘sheds over all the centuries of the middle ages its poetic enchantment’, but ‘it may well be that the saints were never better loved than during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ Certainly their images and shrines were everywhere in late medieval England. They filled the churches, gazing down in polychrome glory from altar-piece and bracket, from windows and tilt-tabernacles. In 1488 the little Norfolk church of Stratton Strawless had lamps burning not only before the Rood with Mary and John, and an image of the Trinity, but before a separate statue of the Virgin, and images of Saints Margaret, Anne, Nicholas, John the Baptist, Thomas à Becket, Christopher, Erasmus, James the Great, Katherine, Petronilla, Sitha, and Michael the Archangel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 27: Women in the Church , 1990 , pp. 175 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1990

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References

1 Male, E., Religious An in France: the Late Middle Ages (Princeton, 1986), p. 147 Google Scholar.

2 Norfolk Archaeology, 1 (1847), p. 117.

3 S. Cotton, ‘Medieval roodscreens in Norfolk—their construction and painting dates’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40 (1987). PP. 44-54; Hutton, R., ‘The local impact of the Tudor Reformation’, in Haigh, C., ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 115’16 Google Scholar.

4 Lists for Norfolk, W. W. Williamson, ‘Saints on Norfolk roodscreens and pulpits’, Norfolk Archaeology, 31 (1955-7), pp. 299-346. I have not always accepted Williamson’s identification of the saints, and the lists given in James, M. R., Suffolk and Norfolk (London, 1930)Google Scholar, are still worth consulting: for Suffolk, W. W. Lillie, ‘Screenwork in the County of Suffolk, III, Panels painted with Saints’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology (1933), pp. 179-202: for Devon, Bond, F. B. and Camm, Dom Bede, Roodscreens and Roodlofts (London, 1909), 2, pp. 209’54 Google Scholar.

5 Cotton, p. 45.

6 Westlake, H. H., The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (London, 1919), pp. 29’30 Google Scholar: Binney, J. Erskine, ed., The Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon, 1520-1573 (Exeter, 1904)Google Scholar, passim.

7 Colledge, E. and Walsh, J., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto, 1978), 2, p. 447 Google Scholar.

8 F. W. Weaver, ed., Somerset Wills = Publications of the Somerset Record Society, 16 (1901), pp. 172, 186,199.

9 ODS, pp. 270-1 and for further refs.

10 Summaries based on the Caxton translation of the Legenda Aurea, ed. Ellis, F. S., The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints (London, 1900), 3, pp. 32’9 Google Scholar (Agatha); 2, pp. 245-52 (Agnes); 6, pp. 198-205 (Barbara). For bibliographies and notes on cultus, ODS pp. 4-5, 5-6, 28.

11 Golden Legend, 7, pp. 1-30 (Katherine); 4, pp. 66-72 (Margaret); 3, pp. 45-50 (Juliana); 3, pp. 186-8 (Petronilla); ODS, pp. 69-70, 227, 327.

12 M.J. Serjeantson, ed., Legendys of Hooly Wummen, EETS (1938), pp. xiii-xxi (hereafter Hooly Wummen). The popularity of these saints is readily established–36 wall-paintings of Katherine’s Legend still survive, and many more are known to have existed. They were increasing up to the very moment of Reformation: when the parishioners of Earl Stonham, in Suffolk, were ordered to remove their wall-painting of the story of Becket, in the 1530s, they had it repainted as the legend of St Katherine—N. Pevsner, Suffolk (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 195. In the West Country at about the same time, Katherine was supplanting more august saints. At Tavistock in the 1470s the churchwardens record the presence in the parish church of a box-reliquary containing the hair of the Blessed Virgin and St Mary Magdalene. By 1538 they note that Katherine’s hair had found its way into this box also—R. N. Worth, Calendar of the Tavistock Parish Records (Plymouth, 1887), pp. 14,18.

13 F. McSparren, and P. R. Robinson, Introducrion to the facsimile edn of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Ff 2 38 (Aldershot, 1979), pp. vii, ix.

14 I have translated these prayers from the text in Horae Eboracenses, SS, 132 (1920) pp. 34,67-8. The text varies only insignificantly from that commonly found in Sarum Horae.

15 General discussion of these issues is C. W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca and London, 1983), pp. 157–94.

16 A. F. Colburn, ed., Hali Meithhad (Copenhagen, 1940), p. 20; ‘… thet eadi trume of schimminde meidnes’, p. 40.

17 S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen, eds, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS (1940), pp. 48-9, 86-7.

18 Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, pp. 188-90.

19 Brown, P., The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London, 1989), esp. pp. 156’9 Google Scholar.

20 Hooly Wummen, p. 134; C. Horstmann.ed., Sammlung Altenglische Legenden (Heilbronn, 1878), pp. 193-7; other examples: Hooly Wummen, p. 199; Horstmann, ed., Altenglische Legenden Newe Folge (Heilbronn, 1881), pp. 240-1, 258, 452; H. N. MacCracken, ed., Minor Poems of John Lydgate l, EETS (1911), pp. 189-90; F. Procter and Wordsworth, C., eds, Breviarum ad Usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum (Cambridge, 1886), 3, col. 1116 Google Scholar; Erbe, T., ed., The Festial of John Myrc, EETS (1905), p. 202 Google Scholar.

21 Book of Margery Kempe, p. 202.

22 Horstmann, Sammlung Altenglische Legenden, pp. 198-200: Golden Legend 7, p. 273: L. Gougaud, ‘La priere dite de Charlemagne et les pieces apocryphes apparantees’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique, 20 (1924) pp. 211-38: Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, MS 55 fol. 139b. The East Anglian provenance is established by the illustration of the Rood of Bromholm on fol. 57b.

23 Minor Poems of Lydgate, pp. 120-4; on the Fourteen Holy Helpers, ODS, p. 156. The suffrages or prayers to and commemorations of saints in the MSS and printed Horae which circulated in such very large numbers among the prosperous and even the humbler laity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries probably played a significant part in spreading the cult of individuals and groups of saints, and the miniatures and woodcuts of the saints which accompanied the suffrages certainly influenced the iconography of the humbler screens. For a typical list of such suffrages in an influential early printed Horae, closely resembling the choice of saints on the screens we have been considering, see Hoskins, E., ed., Horae Bealae Mariae Virginis or Sarum and York Primers (London, 1901), pp. 112’13, 117 Google Scholar.

24 At Somerleyton, in Suffolk, and at Elsing, Harpley (repainted in the nineteenth century), Houghton St Giles, and Horsham St Faith(?), in Norfolk. Probably also at Loddon, where a half panel sometimes described as a Visitation scene is in my opinion a representation of Anne.

25 Breviarum Sarum, 3, cols 539-56; ODS, pp. 17-18; R. E. Parker, ed., The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of St Anne, EETS (1928); Male, Religious Art, pp. 206-9.

26 Bossy, J., Christianity in the West (Oxford, 1985), pp. 9’10 Google Scholar.

27 Festial, p. 216.

28 Hooly Wummen, p. 57; Festial, p. 215; Male, Religious Art, pp. 207-8.

29 Meredith, P. ed., The Mary Play from the N town Manuscript (London, 1987), pp. 9’12 Google Scholar; Louis, C., ed., The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle (New York and London, 1980), pp. 191’234, 406’32 Google Scholar.

30 In Cranmer’s diocese of Canterbury in the 1530s and 40s it became a ferociously debated point whether the altars and images before which this charming and ancient custom had been carried out were, ipso facto, ‘abused’, and therefore to be removed—LP, 18 (ii), p. 302.