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Woman and Home: the Domestic Setting of Late Medieval Spirituality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Diana M. Webb
Diana M. Webb*
Affiliation:
King’s College London
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Extract

‘From the earliest days of Christianity, the domestic community has served as a unit of worship’. In the later medieval period, the home certainly played an important part in the religious observances of many laypeople. By the fifteenth century in England, chapels in private houses were increasingly common, even if they were simply small rooms adapted for the purpose. The practice of informal prayer and private devotional reading did not require special accommodation. We know that individuals prayed in their bedrooms, while Italian women were encouraged to have a bedroom image of the Virgin and to conduct themselves properly in her presence. Italian preachers also thought that children should join in holy play-acting at home, and that they should set up and decorate toy altars. The garden, too, could furnish a setting for the spiritual life. Agnes Paston gives us a haunting glimpse of the life and death of a pious layman in 1453:

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 27: Women in the Church , 1990 , pp. 159 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1990

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References

1 Mertes, K., The English Noble Household 1250–1600 (Oxford, 1988), p. 139 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., pp. 140-1; Wood, M., The English Medieval House (London, 1965), pp. 227’40 Google Scholar.

3 R. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), pp. 160,176-80, discusses the unusually detailed record of Giovanni Morelli’s prayers after his son’s death in the early fifteenth century.

4 Ibid., pp. 69, 71. Cf. Duby, G., ed. A History of Private Life, 2 (London, 1988), pp. 307’8 Google Scholar.

5 Trexler, Public Life, p. 377. Cf. Klapisch-Zuber, C., Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), pp. 115, 320—2 Google Scholar.

6 The Paston Letters, ed. J. Gairdner, 6 vols (London, 1904; reprinted in one volume, 1983), 2, p. 286.

7 Alberti, L.B., Ten Booh on Architecture, trans. Leoni, J. (London, 1755; reprinted 1955), V, xvii, p. 105 Google Scholar.

8 Pantin, W. A., ‘Instructions for a devout and literate layman’, in Alexander, J. G. and Gibson, M. T., Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt (Oxford, 1976), pp. 398’422 Google Scholar.

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11 Christine de Pisan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. S.Lawson(Harmondsworth, 1985), I, cap. 14, p. 66.

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13 Le Ménagier, pp. 45-6.

14 The Treasure, III, cap. 8, p. 168.

15 M. Aston, ‘Lollard women priests?’, in Lollards and Reformers, p. 58.

16 Drcsen-Coenders, L., ed., Saints and She-Devils (London, 1987), p. 63 Google Scholar, citing the Malleus Maleficarum, II. xiii.

17 D. M. Webb, ‘Eloquence and education: a humanist approach to hagiography’, JEH, 31 (1980), esp. pp. 27, 29-30, 34-6. For the hostile or bemused mothers of some female saints, see Bell, R., Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar.

18 The Treasure, III, cap. 1, pp. 145-9. For a summary of other counsels to women about their religious routine, see Duby, ed., Private Life, pp. 356-8.

19 Treasure, HI, cap. 4, pp. 156-60; Howell, A. G. F., S. Bernardino of Siena (London, 1913), pp. 242’3 Google Scholar. Cf. Origo, I., The World of San Bernardino (London, 1963), pp. 67’71 Google Scholar.

20 Treasure, III, cap. 5, pp. 160-2.

21 Life in ActaSS, Aprilis 3, pp. 497-527. See also, and in general, M. Goodich, ‘Ancilla Dei: the servant as saint in the late middle ages’, in J. Kirshner and Wemple, S. F., eds, Women of the Medieval World (Oxford, 1985), pp. 119’36 Google Scholar.

22 Acta SS, Aprilis III, p. 503.

23 Farmer, D. H., ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1978), pp. 418’19 Google Scholar. Coe, B., Stained Glass in England 1150-1550 (London, 1981)Google Scholar, lists windows in Derbyshire, Essex, Herts., Norfolk, Notts., Oxfordshire, and Somerset, pp. 94-128. For an illustration, see p. 49. There is an alabaster figure in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow. The master of a barge which sank in the Thames in the 1480s possessed a badge of Zita which is now in the Shipwreck Heritage Centre, Hastings, Sussex. See also £. Duffy, ‘Women saints in fifteenth- and sixteenth- century England’, below, esp. pp. 177-81.

24 Schiller, G., Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Seligman, J., 1 (London, 1971), pp. 33—52 Google Scholar, summarizes Annunciation iconography. See also, for what follows, D. M. Robb, ‘The iconography of the Annunciation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, Art Bulletin, 18 (1936), pp. 480-526; and M. Schapiro, ‘“Muscipula Diaboli”: the symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece’, in C. Gilbert, ed., Renaissance Art (New York, 1970), pp. 21-38, reprinted from Art Bulletin, 27 (1945), pp. 182-7.

25 Schiller, Iconography, p. 42, where it is pointed out that the book and desk were sometimes represented before the eleventh century. Robb, ‘Iconography’, pp. 482-5, also comments on the late thirteenth-century mosaic by Cavallini in S. Maria in Trastevere, Rome.

26 The Italian text, translated by 1. Ragusa, Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton, 1961), does not include the reference to Isaiah, but earlier describes the Virgin as ‘the best read in the verses of David’ (p. 13). The Carolingian poem Krist describes her as reading the Psalter at the Annunciation (Schiller, p. 42).

27 Meditations, pp. 24,72-6,101.

28 The literature is vast. For a general view, see Smart, A., The Dawn of Italian Painting 1350-1400 (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; for a classic treatment of the emotional shifts reflected in fourteenth-century Italian painting, M. Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (New York, Harper Torchbook edn, 1964).

29 The Hours of Étienne Chevalier, with preface by Sterling, C. (London, 1972)Google Scholar, plates 29, 30. Fouquet reflects both Italian and Flemish influences: his Annunciation takes place in the Virgin’s bedchamber (pi. 9), his Visitation in an Italianate courtyard (pi. 7).

30 ActaSS, Martii 3, p. 183.

31 T. Brandenbarg, ‘St Anne and her Family’, in Dresen-Coenders, Saints and She-Devils, pp. 101-27. See also, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, pp. 17-18. Fouquet includes a miniature of St Anne and the Three Marys in the Hours of Etienne Chevalier (pi. 44).

32 E.g., St Anne and the Virgin in All Saints, North Street, and in St-Martin-le-Grand; the Holy Kindred in the SE aisle of the Minster and in Holy Trinity, Goodramgate. For other windows in Yorkshire, and elsewhere in England, see Coe, Stained Glass.

33 Examples illustrated in Brewer, D., Chaucer and his World (London, 1978), p. 130 Google Scholar; The Burrell Collection, with introd. by J. J. Norwich (London, 1983), p. 98.

34 ActaSS, Aprilis 3, p. 503: ‘… sic continuaba: orare, ut eriam manibus operans, corde et ore obsecrationis verba ruminando depromeret…. Propter quod eveniebat aliquando, ut opera manuum eius resultarent inepta, dum cor non opponeret operationi, sed magis orationi’.

35 Bell, Holy Anorexia, pp. 136-40, 208.

36 Raymond of Capua, The Life of Si Catherine of Siena, trans. G. Lamb (London, 1960), esp. pp. 42-51.

37 ActaSS, Maii 4, p. 389: ‘Quid minus Sanctis Eremitis habuit, quae in meditullio civitatis sibi solitudinem invenit, & thalamum in carcerem commuravit?’ Elsewhere the Franciscan biographer refers regularly to Umiliana’s ‘cell’, and elaborates (p. 390), ‘Cellula, imo carcere collocato in turri pacris, ipsum carcerem in oratorium, juxta quod possibile est, commutava’. The ‘devout and literate’ English layman was advised to retire to his ‘cell’ after dinner for prayer, and this seems to have been distinct from his bedchamber: Pantin, ‘Instructions’, p. 400.

38 Catherine, p. 71.

39 Origo, San Bernardino, pp. 64–5. Boccaccio’s remarks are in the proemio to the Decameron.

40 Catherine, pp. 112-14.

41 The Dialogue, trans. S. Noffke (London, 1980), pp. 242-3, 344-5, 350. It is noteworthy that Catherine here speaks of ‘the cell of self-knowledge’, and imagines the disobedient brother spurning both the cell and the refectory.

42 Catherine, pp. 108-9.

43 H. M. Smyser, ‘The domestic background of Troilus and Criseyde’, Speculum, 31 (1956), pp. 297-315.

44 See, for example, the late thirteenth-century counsels of the Milanese Bonvesin della Riva, ‘De la Zinquanta Cortesie da Tavola’, in F.J. Furnivall, ed., A Booke ofPrecedence, EETS, extra series, 8 (1869), pp. 16-19.

45 Meditations, p. 24.

46 Schapiro, ‘“Muscipula Diaboli”, pp. 28-33; Pantin, English Church, p. 255.

47 Catherine, p. 97.

48 Treasure, p. 146.