Patterns of Piety Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England

This book offers an interpretation of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in the English Reformation, and explores its implications for an understanding of women and gender.

This 2003 book offers an interpretation of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in the English Reformation, and explores its implications for an understanding of women and gender. Central to this is an appreciation of the significance of medieval Christocentric piety in offering a bridge to the Reformation, and in shaping the nature of Protestantism in the period up to the Civil War. Not only does this explain much of the support for Protestantism, but it also suggests the need to question assumptions that the 'loss' of the Virgin Mary and the saints was detrimental to women. The Reformation undermined the ritual role of the Catholic godly woman but its definition of the representative frail Christian as a woman devoted to Christ meant that it was not an alien environment for the weaker sex. The Christocentric piety of the late medieval parish shaped the Reformation and paved the way for a more subtle understanding of gender.

Introduction; Part I: 1. Religious roles; 2. Religious choices; 3. The Virgin Mary and Christocentric devotion; 4. The saints; 5. Eve and the responsibility for sin; Part II: 6. Responses to Reformation change; 7. Parish religion in the Reformation; 8. The godly woman; 9. The Virgin Mary and the saints; 10. The return to the Old Testament; 11. Martyrs; 12. Adam's fall; 13. Godly marriage; Conclusion; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

This 2003 book offers an interpretation of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in the English Reformation, and explores its implications for an understanding of women and gender. Central to this is an appreciation of the significance of medieval Christocentric piety in offering a bridge to the Reformation.

Graduating from St Hugh's College, Oxford, the author travelled widely in Eastern Europe on a Leverhulme Scholarship and was a Fellow at the Warburg Institute before transferring to Oxford. She has published articles based on the first part of her doctoral thesis in Past and Present and Continuity and Change. This is her first book.