Baptism

Perhaps it was that all women knew they could in fact, and commonly did, confer a sacrament. That all men and women could baptize infants “in cases of necessity” was one of the most widely circulated and well-known pieces of canon law to percolate through to the laity. It was the duty of every priest to teach their parishioners the correct formula to use, although proper intention was sometimes said to be more important than the actual words.12 The most commonly copied texts in English dioceses explicitly permitted mothers as well as fathers to do this, though only in circumstances of “the highest necessity” or imminent danger of death, and when a priest could not be found. The influential council held at Lambeth in 1281 actually inserted the English words into its Latin instructions so that priests knew exactly what to teach, and a wholly English version was widely known from Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests.13 Besides mothers and fathers, midwives were also sometimes instructed to baptize infants who were “in peril of death,” though this is a phenomenon better evidenced, and possibly more common, in France at this time.14

Necessity was the watchword. Mirk told mothers they could baptize only if they were certain it was necessary, otherwise they were to find a priest. In this sense popular knowledge about maternal baptism was conditional after the manner of Brut’s admission that women were “able” to perform the sacraments: ability did not mean blanket permission. Some canon law commentaries even suggested that although licit, female baptism was on a par with baptism by heretics and pagans—that is to say, it was effective but undesirable. However, in this case, the English synodal statutes actually went much further than even Brut allowed, creating an expectation that there would often be circumstances in which women would confer the sacrament of baptism, something that was otherwise reserved for the men ordained as priests. In the early fifteenth century the canonist William Lyndwood then expanded the meaning of necessity from fear for the infant’s life to simply being in places deemed at risk from enemies, thieves, floods, or similar dangers.15

We can assume that while it was conditional and grudgingly conceded, all, or most, women knew they had the authority to confer this sacrament. This is what scared churchmen. In chapter 3, we encountered two women mocking the inability of a sinful priest to baptize a “babe of clowtes” or doll, which also indicates that female capacity could be pointedly contrasted with male incapacity. Much more so than his resonance with continental apocalypticism or English Wycliffism, therefore, the ordinariness of baptism by women ought to be seen as the deceptively still pond that was disturbed by Walter Brut. When he began preaching reasoned arguments in favor of female ministry, his influence had to be resisted with great force, lest it reverberate through this widespread knowledge of female potential, accumulating to itself examples of women’s action in parishes near and far. Brut was condemned so thoroughly not because his views reminded learned men of books they had read but because they were afraid he would start a movement.

There are also grounds for thinking that the idea of female baptism was so troubling because it was connected with female capacities not shared by men. One of the academic opponents of Walter Brut put into his mouth words that linked childbearing to sacramental authority. Brut was supposed to have argued that because a woman gestated, nourished, and suckled Christ’s body, and because to consecrate the sacrament was nothing more than turning bread into flesh and water into wine, a woman therefore possesses the “nutritive power” to do this just as well. Women “consecrate” the body of Christ by conceiving.16 This was not what Brut himself had written, at least not in any of the documents that survive. It seems to have been invented as part of the smear campaign against him. But the idea must have come from somewhere, and there is tangential evidence that connections between childbearing and baptism were current in some lollard circles in the first half of the fifteenth century.

A Norfolk heresy suspect called Margery Baxter was in 1428 also accused of holding two opinions intimately connected with her body. She was supposed to have said that infants are sufficiently baptized in their mother’s womb, and when threatened with execution by burning, she is said to have retorted that she was unafraid because she had “a charter for salvation in her own womb.”17 These are striking assertions. Baxter was paraphrasing a saying attributed to St. Paul, that although women should not teach or have authority over men, they might be saved through childbearing (1 Timothy 2:15). As a retort to threatened execution, her words embody a claim to spiritual power.18 But of what kind? Rita Copeland, Emily Steiner, and Kristy Edmonds have interpreted these words as a version of the fairly widespread trope of words written on the body, symbolizing Christ’s incarnation (the word made flesh), or a hidden text.19 This is plausible, but it is also possible that Margery understood “charter” more figuratively, as in the Earl Warrene’s famous declamation that an ancient rusty sword was the charter that proved ownership of his estates. In that sense, having a charter for salvation in one’s womb could have evoked a unique relationship between childbearing and divine power; the womb not as container for God’s charter, but being itself the charter.20 Such a reading is made likely if we consider Margery’s views about the “charter” in conjunction with those about baptism. If postnatal baptism was an unnecessary rite because every child was sufficiently baptized in the womb, then perhaps Baxter imagined the “charter” as her body’s ability to channel God’s grace. This would also be congruent with her assertion that her own outstretched arms, and not any wooden and painted erection, were the true cross of Christ.21

Had it not been for the rhetorical imagination of Walter Brut’s opponent, constructing an argument that linked reproductive and “nutritive” capacities to sacramental power, Margery Baxter’s comments on the womb would look unique and inexplicable. However, the near resemblance between these two moments suggests that ideas about the female body and female ministry, in which masculine unease about concealed mysteries and hidden potential played a part, circulated along some thin lines of cultural diffusion, now imperceptible to historians. They were also, notably, inversions of the theological misogyny that was used to justify women’s exclusion from the sacrament of ordination: that the female body did present an “image of God.”22 I am not saying that Margery Baxter represents some otherwise-unattested reservoir of female thinking; she was probably not even normal for Norfolk. But I think we can conclude that where such ideas did surface, nervous churchmen were like a drawn bowstring, taut in fear and ready to release their arrows.

Taking Care Not to Call Women “Priests”

While they knew that women could baptize infants, people in the later Middle Ages also knew that women could not be ordained as priests. These two pieces of knowledge sat side by side without leading to the end of the male monopoly on ordination. Explaining this apparent paradox necessitates some examination of how people spoke or wrote about women acting in unsanctioned sacerdotal roles, paying attention to what was not said as well as what was. The key feature of such language is its guardedness. Writers and record makers took great care not to call such women priests, at least not without a great deal of ambiguity, conditionality, reluctance, and denial. I focus on two previously unnoticed visitation reports and some pathbreaking recent scholarship on women’s liturgical texts as well as the better-known evidence of two chronicle stories and several heresy trials.

Our first piece of new evidence is a pair of reports made to the visitation, or “general chapter,” of the deanery of Wisbech circa 1468:

Katerina Prowd non vult servare sedilia sua in navi ecclesie inter vicinas suas sed procumbit genuflexa in choro quasi prope tergum sacerdotis. Dimittitur ad instanciam rectoris. Margareta Markawntt vidua taliter delinquit. Dimittitur ad instanciam rectoris ibidem.23

[Katherine Prowd refuses to keep to her seat in the nave of the church among her (female) neighbors, but falls to her knees in the choir just behind the priest. She is dismissed at the request of the rector. Margaret Markawntt, widow, sins likewise. She is dismissed at request of the rector.]

These two women lived in the parish of Leverington St. Leonard’s in Cambridgeshire, and they were reported by a panel of their male neighbors to the deanery “general chapter” presided over by a judge. The visitor with ultimate authority over the deanery of Wisbech was the bishop of Ely, at this date William Grey, but he regularly delegated responsibility for conducting the visitations of the deanery to his diocesan “official” or to the dean of Wisbech. The rector of Leverington was John Harnham, who had been instituted in 1463.24

There are several elements to this case that are relevant to our inquiry. First, while there is no reason to suppose that the actions referred to did not take place, we need to remain aware that we are looking at reports of wrongdoing made by a select group of male parishioners. Two women knelt in the choir of the church, which was part of the chancel. But beyond this, the report consists of judgments—judgments to do with space, gesture, and gender. Prowd and Markawntt were not sitting in the nave of the church, rebuilt around this time at considerable expense, but in the chancel. The chancel was reserved for clergy and, in certain cases, the lay patrons of parish churches, but the patron of Leverington was the bishop of Ely.25 Women were rather frequently disciplined for sitting in the wrong place in church, usually meaning they were too far forward in the nave; women’s place was generally thought of as being the western end of the nave, as far away from the chancel and the altar as possible.26 To find women in the chancel was, therefore, shocking.

Prowd and Markawntt were not merely present there. They adopted a gesture and position that was taken to be imitative of the clergy. The written words that imagine Prowd and Markawntt as impersonating priests were the work of the parish jurors, perhaps mediated by the judge’s scribe. But we may also be able to discern something of what the two women thought they were doing as well as the rector’s opinion of the matter. Given the rhetorical impact created by contrasting proper comportment and position—sitting among their female neighbors—with their actual position kneeling in the chancel, we can perhaps assume this to be factual.27 And if they were kneeling, they did so in conscious or unconscious imitation of the priest behind whom they had placed themselves. Their positions and gestures were not those of admissible lay patrons, seated with a lord’s-eye view of the Mass, but that of assistant clergy, ready to serve at the altar.

In a strict sense, these reported actions do not speak of motivation and interpretation. However, in keeping with my method of offering the simplest and most plausible speculative interpretations of marginalized acts—so that they are no longer excluded from historical analysis—I will make a suggestion that I believe follows from the evidence. These women’s conduct suggests more than ardent piety: it may be that they did not perceive so much difference between themselves and their clergy as would make them keep to their proper place or role. Kneeling was in itself a gesture of submission and humility: the clergy knelt before the altar and the laity knelt before priests to receive the Eucharist. This was a decorous gesture. But done in the wrong space (the chancel) by the wrong sex (women), it became indecorous. Kneeling women in the choir were therefore the disciplinary mirror image of the priests we encountered in chapter 4 “making a spectacle of their bodies” by playing football or getting drunk. Women in the chancel made a spectacle of their bodies by doing something impossible: presenting themselves as priests.

Such a decorous gesture by insurgent women may have had other layers of meaning about which we can make informed guesses grounded in the known context. One possibility is that Prowd and Markawntt intended their immodest modesty to make good on a lack of suitable clergy. In the early 1460s, there had been a problem with the parish clerk, one William Goodlomb, refusing to assist the chaplain in his ministration of divine service. He had promised to do so in future, but his continuing absence might have been a pretext for Prowd and Markawntt to enter the chancel as assistants to the rector. Furthermore, around the same time as the women’s transgression, another parishioner had caused a scandal by suggesting that thirty years before, the church had become “polluted” through the actions of the then chaplain and a layman.28 The rumor did not spell out whether this was through the spilling of blood or semen, but the effect would have been the same. It would have raised fears that the church had been deconsecrated all those years, invalidating divine services and making it an unsuitable place for Christian burial. This rumor may have created a more general sense of crisis in the parish, stimulating Prowd and Markawntt to support their clergy in the most direct way possible.

That they felt the call of duty, however much it transgressed status and gender norms, is made plausible by Prowd’s and Markawntt’s positions within the parish. Both were members of families who regularly provided male parishioners (inquisitores or “inquirers”) to represent the community during the visitation hearings. A man called Simon Prowd had served as inquisitor six times in the 1460s, while one John Markawntt had done so twice, besides serving his neighbors as a compurgator, a churchwarden, and an executor. Parish representatives tended to come from the more prosperous peasant families, and they dominated local officeholding. Their wives were the formidable “good women of the parish” whose activities—as shown extensively by Katherine French—underpinned the fundraising and communal sociability of late medieval parishes.29 Given what we know about the indispensability of such women to parish churches and clerical households (discussed in chapter 3), it is hardly surprising that they would step in when the clergy seemed insufficient or in need of support.

That is not, of course, to say that their husbands or male relatives would have found this laudable. Quite the opposite. John Markawntt was one of the men under whose name the complaint against Margaret was made, while Simon Prowd, despite being a very regular inquisitor throughout the 1460s, did not appear on the list on this occasion. Perhaps he was ashamed and absented himself, or perhaps he supported his kinswoman Katherine and could not bear to condemn her. Either way, it speaks of tension within the parish. But the most striking evidence for disagreement over the propriety of Katherine Prowd’s and Margaret Markawntt’s action is the fact that they were both “dismissed [from the hearing] at the request of the rector,” John Harnham. This meant that no further action would be taken by the judge. In effect, Harnham was vouching for them. The reason why he did so is impossible to recover from this laconic phrase, but again, we can speculate on the basis of what we know about the whole picture.

The rector was responsible for the continuance of regular divine service in his church, and it seems that he was resident in the parish. Other entries in the visitation returns also indicate the at least occasional presence of an additional chaplain. But given the difficulty he had faced with his parish clerk, Harnham’s clemency toward Prowd and Markawntt suggests that he had invited them to assist at the altar because he was shorthanded. He appears to have privileged liturgical continuity above gender purity. This does not mean that Harnham was a proponent of women priests or clerks in general, just that he may have thought that these two women could be useful at that particular time. Some parishioners may have supported their rector, and some may have appreciated his efforts even if they were less than happy about female assistants, while others were—as we know from the fact it was reported at visitation—appalled by what had happened. The situation was unresolved in fifteenth-century Leverington, leaving us simply with the image of two women performing a simulacrum of a sacramental role. These conclusions derive directly from the evidence and are mutually affirmative. That two women kneeling behind the priest should have been there at his invitation is, indeed, the simplest explanation possible.

Unlike visitation reports, which rarely provide much context, the authors of chronicles were free to present examples of women acting as priests however they chose. It is notable, however, that they were still somewhat circumspect about identifying a “woman priest.” In two cases previously discussed by Margaret Aston, the simulacrum or falsity of sacerdotal women was to the fore. Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester Abbey, reported that in 1391 a woman in London had taught her daughter to celebrate Mass. The mother

furnished an altar in her own bedroom, and there she caused her daughter on many occasions to dress as a priest [uestire se more sacerdotis] and in her fashion [pro suo modo] to celebrate Mass, though when she came to the sacramental words she prostrated herself before the altar and did not complete the sacrament. But then she would rise for the rest of the Mass and recite it to the end, her mother assisting her and showing her devotion. That error went on for some time, until it was revealed by a neighbor who had been admitted to the secret, when it came to the ears of the bishop of London. He summoned them to his presence and showed them the error of their ways, and compelled them to display the child’s priestly tonsure in public, for her head was found to be quite bald. The bishop greatly deplored and bewailed such misconduct in the church in his time, uttering many lamentations, and put an end to it by enjoining penance upon them.30

The girl (she is called a child as well as daughter) could not be acknowledged to have been a priest, only to have been dressed “as,” or “in the manner of,” a priest and to have conducted Mass “in her fashion.”

What was presented as her impersonation or deception was compounded by an attempt to show a tonsure, but this was “revealed” by the bishop to have been simply baldness.31 As we saw in chapter 4, a correct tonsure was strenuously gendered masculine, since it demanded that the head was uncovered in public, something which was respectable only for men. Where this story goes further than the visitation report from Leverington is in describing the actual conduct of the girl and her mother, one celebrating Mass (though stopping short of attempting to consecrate the Eucharist) and the other assisting her.

Aston’s second example came from the chronicle written by Thomas Walsingham at St. Albans Abbey. Walsingham echoes the corrective role of authority in Knighton’s story, telling how this offender, identified as a lollard called John Claydon, was arrested and burned in 1415: “He had become so deranged [in tantam demenciam ruerat] that he even made his daughter a priest [eciam filiam sacerdotem constitueret] and made her celebrate mass in his house on the day when his wife had just risen from giving birth, and gone to the church for the ceremony of purification.”32 This is in one respect the most unequivocal example we have so far encountered. Walsingham does not say that the daughter was “dressed as” a priest or acting “as if she were” a priest; instead, he writes that she was “made a priest.” However, the straightforwardness of this statement is undermined by three things. First, Walsingham wrote that she was “made” a priest, not “ordained.”33 Second, Claydon was called deranged and a heretic. Third, an implied connection is made between this unorthodox priest making and Claydon’s wife’s recent childbirth: postpartum women were regarded as polluted by menstrual blood until they had undergone the church ceremony of “purification.”34 The reader is left in no doubt as to whether Walsingham thought the girl an authentic priest.

During the course of the fifteenth century, a small number of interrogated heresy suspects did indeed claim that all good men and women were priests. Several of the Norfolk defendants interrogated alongside the aforementioned Margery Baxter by Bishop Alnwick between 1428 and 1431 were accused of claiming that women were priests or as good as priests. John Skylly of Flixton, for example, was made to abjure the opinion that “every trewe man and woman being in charite is a prest, and that no prest hath more poar [power] in mynystryng of the sacraments than a lewed man hath.” The articles of belief alleged against John and Sybil Godsell included the claim that “any faithful man and any faithful woman is a good priest” with full power to confer the body of Christ “just as well as any ordained priest” (sicut aliquis sacerdos ordinatus). Hawise Moone, one of the leading figures among this group, was made to abjure the belief that “every man and every woman being in good lyf oute of synne is as good prest and hath [as] much poar of God in al thynges as ony prest ordred [ordained], be he pope or bisshop.”35 In a much later inquisition of 1499, John Whitehorne, the rector of Letcombe Bassett in Berkshire, was accused of holding a similar belief: that when he ascended into heaven, Christ had left his power with his apostles “and from theim the same power remayneth with every goode trewe Cristin mann and woman lyving virtuously as the appostelles did, so that prestes and bysshoppes have no more auctorite thenne another laymann.”36

Margaret Aston made the insightful observation that such formulations were not necessarily as emancipatory as they might first seem. This is because they tend to erase the lay-clerical distinction as much as—or perhaps more than—they raise women up to the level of priesthood. The articles alleged against John and Sybil Godsell, for example, proceeded from a flat denial of the power of priests to confer the sacraments to the Godsells’ claims that all good men and women could be priests. Whitehorne’s abjuration is especially revealing, since he does not in fact call women “priests,” instead saying that apostolic authority lay with every true Christian. In other words, among true believers, there was no priesthood. Aston’s caution was echoed in some of the work that followed on this subject.37 It is also possible that lollards claiming that any good woman could be a priest were making a misogynistic argument against the clergy’s claim to special status within the church: if even a woman could be a priest, what would that say about priests! Whichever way we interpret this, lollard claims about women priests were conditional and equivocal.

To this by now familiar roll call of heresy trials and hostile chronicle accounts, we may, thanks to some pathbreaking research, add an altogether more verifiable and mainstream example of women nearly being called priests. This is Sibyl de Felton’s early fifteenth-century ordinal for the nuns of Barking Abbey, a book that provided the script and stage directions for dramatic performances designed to explain and enhance certain key moments in the Christian liturgical calendar. Laypeople as well as nuns and male clergy attended the major services at which these were performed, making them significant public occasions. The identification of these female sacerdotes by Anne Bagnall Yardley and Jesse Mann and the thorough excavation and interpretation of the manuscript by Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis provide us with significant evidence about the imaginative connections that could be made between women and the priesthood in the later Middle Ages.38 De Felton’s book made women into priests, with astonishing results, but in being dramaturgical, the transformation was provisional—and deniable.

In the drama accompanying the Easter liturgy, specifically the visitation of Christ’s empty tomb by Mary Magdalene, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Salome, those women and the nuns playing their roles are described as priests. The ordinal refers to predicte sacerdotes, “the aforesaid priests.”39 We should pause to reflect on this innocuous-seeming phrase. Beneath the conscious articulations, and even beneath the repressed desires revealed in the evidence surveyed so far, there lay a deep linguistic stratum of ambiguity where the capacities of women were simultaneously permitted and denied. By a quirk of Latin grammar, and against their intentions, when judicial scribes or monastic chroniclers wrote that women acted as if they were priests, they facilitated the very ghostly presence of women they found so troubling. The Latin sacerdos comprised, in classical antiquity, identical masculine and feminine forms with no differences in grammatical case endings. This meant that saying a woman was a priest did not entail the sort of grammatical wrench that would have made it feel linguistically awkward. To speak of a sacerdos thus held open a gender-neutral window of opportunity.

However, in the Barking Abbey ordinal, as Bugyis has shown, the grammatically gender-neutral plural sacerdotes is preceded by the feminine form of the past participle, predicte.40 At this point the manuscript’s author, Sibyl de Felton, was forced to make an intervention because she was working from existing documents, which had assumed male priests and used the masculine participle accordingly. She could not rely on the gender-neutrality of sacerdos to smuggle in female action under the cover of linguistic ambiguity. She had to be more explicit. Nevertheless, in being so, the participle’s continued grammatical agreement with the noun meant that she could assume the new phrase would not seem odd from that point of view. Later in the passage, de Felton’s intervention is seen again when the “Three Marys” are referred to with a feminine pronoun, eas. The ability of the word sacerdos to be read as female worked silently but strenuously in de Felton’s favor.

Bugyis shows that “through chants sung, postures and positions assumed, vestments worn, and objects handled and mediated” the women playing the Three Marys were presented to the congregation in the guise of priests. They wore surplices and carried liturgical ampules that would have indicated priesthood, and they brought news of Christ’s resurrection “to the people” gathered in the abbey’s parish church. While female involvement in the Easter story is present in the gospels, there was no biblical or monastic precedent for them being visually identified as priests. Bugyis calls it a “daring transformation” of gender, made possible by the abbey’s wealth and its earlier history of nuns exercising ministerial functions (before these were barred to women in the twelfth century).41 How these female priests were regarded by the people watching in church is impossible to recover, but there is no record of any objections or interventions. While in one sense the theatrical setting ought to have made clear that the nuns were merely representing priests, it is possible that the assembled laity regarded this particular performance as merely an extension of the liturgical routine. Furthermore, the nuns’ proclamation of the resurrection to the congregation can only be described as public preaching, something forbidden to women as it required sacerdotal ordination. They crossed the horizon beyond which dramatic representation blurred into reality. Moreover, dressing the Three Marys as sacerdotes seems to make a deep historical claim for the innate potential of all women to be priests, since some women had been priests. In this sense, the Barking liturgical drama goes one step further than Walter Brut. Not only were women able to act as priests, but this performance also showed the world what that would look like.

While the grammatical gender neutrality of sacerdos underlay both equivocation and explicit claims in the aforementioned examples, another word was occasionally used in the later Middle Ages. This was the unequivocally feminine sacerdotissa. A notable usage occurs in the second new piece of information supplied by the English visitation evidence.

An entry in the Hartlebury court book for 1412 records that the parishioners asked that “the mulieres sacerdotisse be removed from the chancel” of their parish church. The judge acquiesced, ordering that they be “put back in the usual place, that is, the bell tower.”42 The words mulieres sacerdotisse pose an interesting problem of interpretation. Robert Swanson, in his 2013 edition of the visitation or court book, follows the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources in translating sacerdotissa as “priest’s concubine.” He reads sacerdotisse as the genitive form of this noun, dependent on the women (mulieres), giving him “the women of the priest’s concubine.” Although grammatically acceptable, this phrase has an unusual feel to it, and it is difficult to imagine what English words, written or spoken by the parishioners, the scribe would have been attempting to translate into Latin.43

It seems more likely that sacerdotisse is an adjective in the nominative plural, modifying mulieres. It is usual for adjectives to follow the noun that they modify. If such a reading is correct, we still need to determine what was meant by the adjective sacerdotisse. Could it really mean “priestly” when applied to women? That would seem to convey an approval and acceptance of women priests at odds with the tenor of the complaint. We need to review the late medieval meaning of the word.

In classical Latin, sacerdotissa was simply a feminine alternative to the gender-neutral sacerdos, though applicable only to female celebrants or “priestesses.” Following the legal restriction of ordination to men, sacerdotissa came to be used solely in a pejorative sense. It continued to mean “priestess,” but only when applied sneeringly to the excesses of pagan worship or as a rhetorical device in relation to impiety. The archetypal use is illustrated by a sermon of William of Auvergne (c. 1190–1249), where the celebration of worldly riches and reputations at funerals was associated with “priests or priestesses of the devil” (sacerdotem uel sacerdotissam dyaboli).44 An alternative medieval meaning was indeed “concubine” or “priest’s wife.” For instance, in a late medieval Latin-to-English word list, presbiterissa and sacerdotissa are bracketed together as synonyms for “a prystes wife.” This was the sense deployed by the influential thirteenth-century sermon author Jacques de Vitry, in a story about the expense incurred by priests who bought fine clothes for their concubines, leaving them with no money to clothe the poor and needy. “In certain regions,” he wrote, parishioners “do not wish to give the kiss of peace to these sacerdotisse nor receive it from them . . . if someone does receive the kiss of peace from the concubine of a priest, it is commonly held that they are excluded from the mass.”45 Echoing William of Auvergne’s association between the display of wealth and transgressive female presence in church, de Vitry connects women close to priests with the alienation of church wealth (meant for the poor) and with the promotion of vanity and luxury. The familiar theme of female pollution is also introduced, with the concubine representing unconfessed sexual sins that would disqualify someone from partaking in the Mass. Contact with these women excludes you from communion in the “body of Christ,” symbolized by the Eucharist and the exchange of the kiss of peace.

De Vitry argues with vigor and venom, and we are entitled to ask what he was afraid of. It seems as though there was more at stake than the morality of the clergy themselves; he claims that the presence of these women was dangerous also for the laity. It is reasonable to assume he was arguing against the opposite opinion: that the wives of priests were participants in, and perhaps even cocelebrants of, communion.46 De Vitry seems to express an anxiety that the women of the clergy could be seen that way. We saw in chapter 3 that female companions of priests were commonplace, even ubiquitous. Whether they were sometimes also cocelebrants therefore deserves serious consideration.

The double meaning of sacerdotissa certainly encouraged an ambiguity between concubines and priestesses, and the overlap may often have been intentional. We can draw this conclusion because using sacerdotissa meant discarding the much more common term concubina. The particular associations of sacerdotissa came from its closeness to sacerdos, “priest.” This is not to say that writers using the term thought that women could be priests, quite the opposite. Sacerdotissa had an exclusively derogatory, even derisory, meaning, making it an especially pointed intensification of the almost-but-not-quite evasion we have seen in other records. It spoke of pretension and misguided identification. I contend that its use would hardly have been necessary, had there not been a widespread awareness that women could do the things that priests did, even though this was prohibited.

It is telling that one of the authors of the tracts in MS Harley 31, opposing lollard ideas about women priests, had used the words presbiterisse and sacerdotisse when ventriloquizing Walter Brut’s opinion that there had been female priests in the early church.47 Brut’s own treatise, submitted during his trial, had referred scrupulously only to ministries given to people “ordained as priests,” refraining from giving female celebrants or preachers any special title.48 In claiming that Brut had used the term sacerdotissa, his opponent was trying to make a mockery of him.

To return, at last, to the Hartlebury court book, the translation of mulieres sacerdotisse that I would propose is not “the women of the priest’s concubine” or “the priestly women” but “the pseudo-priestly women”: “the parishioners ask that the pseudo-priestly women be removed from the chancel.” This would make the Hartlebury reality rather similar to events in Leverington: the presence of women in the chancel, perhaps marked by conscious or half-conscious gestures mimicking the clergy, was a shocking affront to the gendered organization of roles and spaces within the church. In both places the female incursion also involved more than one woman. These were not the actions of individuals spurred by entirely personal urgings, but concerted attempts to do something that was seen as righteous or necessary. And the response, in each case, is evidence of a latent anxiety among late medieval parishioners and churchmen. The knowledge that women were able to act as priests was not limited to fringe figures like Walter Brut but was an observable reality in ordinary parishes. Some churchmen may have been aware that women were, as Dyan Elliott puts it, a “rejected option for the clergy.”49 That made it frightening, which explains the care taken by scribes not to call women priests.

Women and the Conduct of Divine Services

In the parochial examples discussed previously, we have had to work hard to reconstruct appropriate social and cultural contexts. Hostile parodies in chronicles suggested more, but we cannot treat them as evidence of practice. Now we can move on to look at further visitation evidence, building on the strong intimations at Leverington and Hartlebury that women were assisting somehow in the conduct of divine service. In this and the following sections, we do not find women called sacerdotes or sacerdotissae, but we do find descriptions of what they were doing.

The ensuing evidence confirms two features of female ministry that I have already noted. First, that it was easy to find women who were capable and willing to assist the parish clergy in clerical or paraclerical roles; second, the feeling was widespread that it was only acceptable for women to step into those roles under certain conditions. In this respect, much of the available evidence is in line with Walter Brut’s conditional support for women priests: they should act as such only if there was no competent and properly ordained person present. Of course, not everyone would have agreed that such conditions did in fact permit female clerical action, but it is inherently likely that every single late medieval parish, from time to time, presented circumstances that could be interpreted as permitting or necessitating action to shore up the work of the clergy. The evidence of visitation complaints against the parish clergy discussed in chapter 4, among which failures of liturgical or pastoral provision constituted the largest single category of fault, speaks volumes. These two features of the evidence lend it all a peculiarly ambiguous quality. A woman in a clerical role seems always to have been simultaneously surprising and completely ordinary. There is something unsettlingly quotidian about the radical challenge to gender norms that she represented. And if it seems that way to us, on the basis of the evidence, perhaps it also seemed that way at the time.

Eardisley in Herefordshire was a particularly unhappy parish at the end of the fourteenth century. Its church was served by a vicar, the rectory and patronage being held by the Augustinian convent of Llanthony Prima in Wales.50 In 1397, at Bishop Trefnant’s visitation, the parish representatives delivered a long list of complaints against their vicar, who they believed was seriously neglecting his duties. He had failed to provide dying men and women with the sacraments of confession and extreme unction (the last rites), placing their souls in danger; a male infant had been improperly baptized, without the blessed oil or chrism, which troubled his parents; he sometimes refused to administer the sacraments (probably confession and the Eucharist) until people paid their tithes or made other offerings to the church; he had conducted a marriage without first allowing the banns to be read (announcements that provided an opportunity for legal impediments to be raised); he sometimes said Mass twice in one day, which was contrary to canon law; a chalice that was allegedly in his keeping (though belonging to the parishioners) had been stolen from the church; he did not provide a candle that was his responsibility; he had failed to appoint a priest to serve the chapel of Bollingham within the parish, even though he had previously promised the bishop he would; he was a “habitual dealer” in corn and other goods, often making the church “unseemly” with his produce; he was a usurer; and he had scandalized the parish by calling a man an excommunicate as he buried his corpse in the churchyard.51

On top of all this, the parishioners reported that

Agnes Knethur et Issabella servientes dicti vicarii pulsant campanas et juvant ipsum vicarium ad celebrandum quod est contra honestatem ecclesiasticam. Item dicunt scandalum et sinistra suspicio est inter parochianos de cohabitatione <dicti vicarii> cum eisdem mulieribus.52

[Agnes Knethur and Isabel, servants of the said vicar, ring the bells and help the vicar to celebrate, which is against ecclesiastical decency. Next, they (the parish representatives) say that there is scandal and sinister suspicion among the parishioners about the vicar’s living with these women.]

There are two offenses here against the gender order of the medieval church. Ringing the church bells was a task for a parish clerk, a man who did not have to be ordained as a priest but who was regularly (as we see in chapter 4) counted among the clergy and disciplined as such. “Helping the vicar to celebrate” meant assisting around the altar and performing menial tasks in the ritual of church services, specifically those connected with the Mass and its central symbol, the Eucharist. Normally, this role was carried out by a subdeacon—who might not be in “major” clerical orders yet but was on the way to priesthood—or by a man who had already attained the status of deacon or priest. He would have been responsible for carrying liturgical vessels, including the pyx containing Eucharistic bread, the chalice containing the wine that represented Christ’s blood, and the thurible, which dispersed incense. He would light candles, lay out books, and clean the font. For this work, he was paid a salary or stipend.53

All of these activities were construed as clerical, and therefore male, responsibilities. As the parishioners said, having women ring the bells and help at the altar was “against ecclesiastical decency.” There had been problems with the vicar’s supervision of bell ringing in Eardisley for some time. Two separate reports farther down the parish’s list of grievances were that the vicar had sometimes not had a bell rung before Mass and that he had neglected to provide new ropes for the bells. The problem, as the very first complaint against the vicar made clear, was that he did not employ a parish clerk, someone “for the service of God in the church, who knows how to read and sing, to ring the bells, go before him [the vicar] when visiting the sick, and carry out other duties.”54 Nor was he able to find a priest to serve the subparochial chapel, up the hill at Bollingham, which suggests that the vicar was the sole cleric in the whole parish. This would have been an unusual situation in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, but the tumbling profitability of agriculture and rents after the Black Death, particularly from the mid-1370s onward, made it more likely that beneficed clergy could ill-afford to employ additional clergy even if they were obliged by local custom.55 There being a standing complaint about the bells, no clerk to ring them, and no one else to assist in church services, the vicar seems to have called on his two servants, Agnes and Isabel, to step in.

Doing so may have been his attempt to remedy other faults, but having the women assist him backfired. The parishioners (or the parish representatives at least) were not prepared to tolerate women in these clerical and masculine roles.56 In this sense, female enactment of clerical functions was regarded as extraordinary and unacceptable. But it was also ordinary and acceptable at least to the vicar, perhaps to others who appreciated the difficulties that the parish was in. As at Leverington, the participation of women was favored by the incumbent priest and, again, more than one woman was involved. As we saw in chapter 3, female relatives and servants of priests often played major roles in the functioning of rectories and vicarages as public, as well as private, institutions. They knew the business of the parish, its tasks, and its timetables, and they may have regarded assistance with the operations of the church as an extension of their domestic responsibilities. There is therefore something rather homely about Agnes and Isabel, busying themselves about the church. But Eardisley was also one of the places where Bishop Trefnant had searched for the accused heretic and friend of Walter Brut, William Swinderby, in 1391, as well as being the location for significant landholdings of another gentry Wycliffite, John Croft.57 For this reason, it is likely that visitation here amplified the voices of intolerance over those of tolerance.

Shortages of salaried clergy were caused by a combination of smaller numbers of men coming forward for ordination and the unprofitability of church estates. This could have played a part in the events at Hartlebury (1412) and Leverington (1468) as well as at Eardisley in 1397. But a similar incident occurring on the cusp of economic recovery in 1518 indicates the difficulty in identifying the specific cause of absences that were filled by women. When Bishop Atwater’s visitation party, which had made clear its interest in the female companions of priests (see chapter 3), appeared in the deanery of Bicester (Oxfordshire) in that year, the parishioners of Finmere complained that “a certain young woman helps the rector in celebrating at the altar, daily except on feast days.”58 She may have been one of the two women, probably servants, who reportedly lived with the rector. If so, that gives us another example of a woman moving easily between rectory and church, assisting her master in his public office as well as his private domestic arrangements. Unlike at Eardisley, there is no direct evidence of a wider manpower problem in Finmere. The only other faults noted at this visitation were some broken seating and the rector keeping animals in the churchyard. However, these and some other facts point toward Finmere being quite a poor benefice: an earlier rector had been forced to plead poverty in the face of his financial obligations, and at the Reformation, there was very little to confiscate. The early sixteenth-century economic recovery had apparently not much benefited Finmere. What is more, there was long-standing ambivalence toward the parish on the part of its distant patron, the Augustinian abbey at Bristol.59 It is possible that this made clerical recruitment difficult, creating a vacuum that was then filled by a willing woman.

A little more detail is available in our final example, which involves events in the Berkshire (modern Oxfordshire) town of Wantage in 1405, and is seemingly unconnected to the causality of demographic and economic difficulties between 1370 and 1520. The salient themes here were male negligence, female readiness, ambiguity around clerical status, and a lack of clear distinction between domestic and liturgical life. The parish church here was appropriated to Salisbury cathedral, and the dean’s visitation in 1405 heard a long series of complaints against the parish clerk, William Hardyng, and his family. Hardyng was explicitly said to be “negligent in his duties” (negligens fuit in officio suo). He confessed to a number of offenses reported by the parishioners: that he only attended services on feast days when he wanted to, that he often left town without permission from the vicar or parishioners, that he refused to pray for peace and for the king (Henry IV) during processions, and that he was a married man whose ministration about the altar was contrary to church laws. Refusal to support Henry IV marks Hardyng out as a possible believer in the conspiracy theories that held Richard II to be alive still—small wonder, then, that he drew attention to himself.60

Unmarried parish clerks could serve at the altar, but Hardyng’s marriage barred him from doing so. His presence around the altar was, though, just one of a further series of accusations against him, all of which, though he denied them, fit together in a reasonably coherent story. He denied refusing to attend baptisms with the chaplain; denied refusing to take part in burials; denied composing songs to taunt his clerical superiors, especially one former chaplain; and denied causing disputes between the vicar, chaplains, and parishioners. Furthermore, he denied a series of allegations relating to his wife, whose name we are not told. First the parishioners said that he sometimes had his wife ring the curfew or sunset bell; then that he took clerical vestments (ornamenta lanea) home with him, where he and his wife would dress in them “indecently, causing scandal to the church” (inhoneste in scandalum ecclesie); and then that he was in the habit of housing his whole family—wife and children—in the church, using the vestments as bedding.61

There seems to have been a feeling in the parish that both Hardyng and his wife had pretensions to be priests, while they made a mockery of this at every turn. He served at the altar though he should not; she rang the bells though she should not. Together they dressed up as priests, visually playing the role from which both were barred by marriage and she by her sex. The complaints about Hardyng’s wife would have made those against him seem all the more serious.

Dressing as a priest is a charge we almost never find leveled against women in late medieval English courts. Hardyng’s wife is one example, and the only other currently known to historians is that of a sex worker, Elizabeth Chekyn, who was prosecuted in 1516 for walking the London streets “in a preestes array & clothyng in rebuke and reproche of the Ordre of presthod.” Her arrest forms part of Judith Bennett and Shannon McSheffrey’s discussion of sex worker cross-dressing in late medieval England.62 Chekyn’s use of masculine clerical clothing is presented by the court record, and treated by Bennett and McSheffrey, as a professional choice intended to excite male clerical clients. Given that she seems to have been a known sex worker and was caught in bed with two priests, this is undeniable. However, Chekyn is the only late medieval female sex worker discovered in Bennett and McSheffrey’s survey to have dressed as a priest, and so it may be worth holding a door open to an additional interpretative possibility: that her prosecution was in part motivated by the particular male clothes, and male company, in which she was found. Indeed, it seems unlikely that a woman dressed as a priest in the company of priests should not stimulate a degree of unease about the boundaries of gender and status roles. As the chroniclers Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham had implied, a woman in priest’s clothing symbolized a world turned upside down. There may also have been an element of nonnormative gender expression in Chekyn’s dress, which is further discussed in chapter 6.

Returning to Wantage, another reading of events, one not incompatible with the parishioners’ grievances, is plausible: Hardyng’s wife was doing her best to make up for her wayward husband’s many failings as a parish clerk. What with him being so hopeless and so negligent, perhaps she stepped in to ring the bells. Maybe she did try on the vestments, maybe not, but local belief that she had done so could have arisen from her willingness to support the provision of divine service in the church. She was clearly close to the work her husband was supposed to do and perhaps by extension close also to the responsibilities of the bona fide parish priests. She may also have had an economic interest in helping out. Although they were said to take vestments home with them, perhaps for washing, the precariousness of their living arrangements is made clear by the fact that the whole family sometimes had to sleep in the church.63 Opportunities for acting outside the usual feminine gender role therefore arose because three conditions coalesced: first, there was uncertainty about the distinction between clerks and ordained clergy, which projected her husband into ambiguous territory; second, for this married couple, there was a continuum between domestic and sacred space and objects; third, she had—so it would seem—the knowledge and confidence to take the action she believed was required.

Although ecclesiastical anxiety about women fulfilling clerical duties is most visible in high-profile cases like that of Walter Brut, we cannot explain it without asking how, where, and when Brut’s claims resonated. The evidence of this chapter suggests that when churchmen heard justifications for women priests, it was likely they would have been able to call to mind a story from their own diocese: a woman who had stepped into a priest’s role or a priest’s clothing when the clerical men around her were unreliable or absent. Constraints on parish incomes during the great depression that lasted from the late fourteenth into the early sixteenth century made those absences more likely. Women’s remedial action may not have been frequent in absolute terms, but our evidence shows when they stepped from rectory to church or from nave to chancel, they were likely to become locally notorious. And while the knowledge that all women could confer the sacrament of baptism did not apparently raise the specter of female usurpation of the clergy, assuming a clerical role in church did. Even if local clergy were supportive, parishioners disagreed, and bishops were horrified.

Women and the Power of the Keys: Binding and Loosing

One of the most momentous powers vested in the ordained clergy was known as “binding and loosing,” or, in reference to St. Peter’s control of the locked gates to heaven, “the power of the keys.” It combined sacramental with jurisdictional authority, linking the world of the parish to the realm of the church courts. “Binding” referred to the imposition of penances and excommunication, while “loosing” involved absolution and releasing people from excommunication. In mainstream Christian theology, God’s power lay behind these ritual transformations, though they were brought about by the ordained ministry of the clergy. How this clerical mediation of divine power was understood, misunderstood, or rejected by ordinary people in the later Middle Ages is an important subquestion throughout the following discussion.

The sacraments of baptism and confession involved binding and loosing: baptism, because it “washed the baptized [person] clean of every sin, original and actual” and confession, because priests imposed penances and absolved penitents from their previous sins.64 Only ordained, male priests ordinarily possessed this authority. However, as we have now seen, the exceptional circumstances in which women could baptize occurred very often. In addition to this, there was some perfectly orthodox support for women to hear confessions when there was no alternative. In 1349, during the first late medieval plague pandemic, Ralph of Shrewsbury, the bishop of Bath and Wells Diocese, wrote to his clergy instructing them to tell their parishioners that “if when on the point of death they cannot secure the services of a properly ordained priest, they [parishioners] should make confession of their sins, according to the teaching of the apostle, to any lay person, even to a woman if a man is not available.”65

Admittedly, this text did not extend the authority to hear confessions to the power to require and remove penances, but it came tantalizingly close. It was a radical step, taken in unprecedented times. Normally, even the hearing of confessions by unbeneficed priests was hedged about with all sorts of conditions.66 Granting such authority to laymen and laywomen was exceptional. And yet for the bishop to have anticipated any degree of popular acceptance for this emergency decree, there must have been some prior currency to the idea of women’s capacity to bind and loose, perhaps connected with the widespread knowledge of female baptism. Bishop Ralph was clear, though, that any sins confessed to a layman or laywoman should be confessed again to a priest if the subject lived long enough. As with church statutes on baptism, and as in Walter Brut’s defense of women’s abilities, female ministry was yet again curtailed and made conditional.

Before he backtracked on the conditions under which women should carry out priestly functions, Brut’s case for female binding and loosing had sounded absolute. He began from the premise that since women were able to baptize, and since baptism entailed the remission of sins, therefore “women have the power of releasing from sin.” Although binding and loosing was “said to have been granted to priests” alone, this logic supported the view that “women do not seem to be excluded from the Christian priesthood even though their power is restrained so long as others are ordained.”67 In Bishop Trefnant’s condemnations, Brut’s line of argument was summarized as follows: “women have power and authority to preach and make the body of Christ, and they have the power of the keys of the church, of binding and loosing.”68 Constructing the caricature of his views that we have already encountered, one of Brut’s opponents suggested that the power of binding and loosing arose from women’s ability to “create form”—that is, gestate a fetus.69 Once again we have here the ingredients for intense masculine anxiety about the ghostly power of women, something to be held firmly in abeyance.

Besides Brut’s assertions, the general, if grudging, acceptance of female baptism and the remarkable permission granted for women to hear confessions during the plague, there is also evidence from visitations of individual women claiming the power of the keys. Although, among those records I have consulted, this amounts to only two examples, their significance arises from what they reveal about the circulation of ideas among the laity and the potential for women to aspire to roles reserved for ordained men. The first of these instances may in fact have been connected with Brut’s influence, as it comes from the 1397 visitation of Bromyard in Hereford Diocese.70

The parish representatives of Bromyard were concerned to ensure that their church was properly lit, that the bells were rung when they should be, and that their neighbors should meet their financial obligations to the parish.71 These were all bread-and-butter parochial faults, easily dealt with by the bishop. But one report was more troubling, entailing a matter of belief, something that came up but rarely at visitations. The parishioners said that “Alison Broun maintains that when she curses any man, that by her imprecation God without delay will take vengeance on him, and she has often boasted about this, which is against the catholic faith and tempts God.” Broun at first denied the charge, but this was struck through on the page, and replaced with a note that she abjured, which is to say she admitted her words and actions, and promised not to repeat the offense. She was also reported for trading in the church, selling hemp and flax, but that entry in the manuscript is partially destroyed and no more detail survives.72

The key word here is curse, a capacious term in medieval usage. There were many types of curse, ranging from magical spells to sentences of anathema issued by bishops and popes, and they are hard to distinguish from one another.73 At this date, curse did not encompass swearing in the sense of uttering profanities: that was described as the careless use of oaths (which would lead us into an equally interesting etymological thicket, but not one directly related to the issue at hand). Alison Broun was said to curse in the sense of wishing ill-fortune on people. This practice found extensive precedent in the Bible and was well nourished by monasteries during the early Middle Ages: monks used curses to threaten anyone who infringed their property rights.74 By the later Middle Ages, it was firmly lodged in the popular consciousness and was sometimes seen as a form of verbal magic. But in what way did it have anything to do with the priesthood?

At the other end of the spectrum, “cursing” was widely understood as a Middle English synonym for excommunication, the process by which someone was barred from church services and the sacraments and excluded from communion with other Christians. From the later twelfth century onward, it was used as a judicial sanction in two ways: first, and most commonly, it was a provisional punishment meant to incentivize accused persons to appear in the church courts; second, it could be incurred automatically by anyone committing certain offenses.75 Long lists of these offences, together with the words of the accompanying condemnation, circulated in later medieval England under the title of the “Great Sentence of Cursing.” While parish clergy could pronounce such general sentences, only someone with proper authority (higher clergy or a judge) could issue major excommunications; women were never permitted to do so.76

Alison Broun’s cursing was described as being “against the catholic faith” because it tempted God. This was a reference to a persistent and widespread misapprehension about juridical excommunication: many people thought that the words of the curse, uttered by a human being, were what bound a person’s soul to punishment. In fact, the theology behind excommunication ascribed all agency to God. The human utterance was considered merely an outward indication of a change—damnation—brought about by God. Tempting God meant setting oneself up as the agent of damnation, with God merely responding to the will of the person doing the cursing. While Broun does not seem to have imagined herself actually to be a judge, she was nonetheless judging and “binding” people, claiming that her utterance would bring “divine vengeance” down on them. This, as Sarah Westphal has pointed out, would have taken her into territory that was firmly gendered masculine.77 It was an assumption of authority.

In fact, there was no safe territory for women at all along the wide spectrum of cursing. Verbal magic was of course proscribed, and careless invocation of divine or diabolic power was often associated with women more explicitly. In Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, for instance, a mother who calls on the devil to take her child, after the girl has been too slow in fetching her mother’s clothes, is herself spirited away to hell.78 A better-known literary example is the widow Mabely in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” a woman to whose entanglements with a caricatured summoner we return in the final chapter. Mabely, so Chaucer has his friar-narrator tell, was harassed by a summoner, one of the “apparitors” whose job was to cite people to appear in the church courts. Motivated by greed, the summoner accused the aged Mabely of fornicating with a friar or priest and offered to rescind his citation if she paid him off, first suggesting a bribe of twelve pence and then threatening to take her pots and pans. Mabely responded with a curse:

“Unto the devel blak and rough of hewe

Yeve I thy body and my panne also!”

The narrator describes these words as a curse, and they seem intended to mirror the summoner’s earlier threat of excommunication against Mabely. A few lines later, the widow again calls on the devil to take the summoner’s body “but he wole hym repente” (unless he will repent).79 The significance of this line, which has not been noted by any literary commentator on the Canterbury Tales, so far as I am aware, is that Chaucer’s friar-narrator responds to a summoner’s improper exercise of the power of the keys (threatening to excommunicate someone without authority and for personal gain) by putting the canonical words of “cursing” into a woman’s mouth.80 She is written as someone who accurately understands the provisional character of excommunication.

As we have seen, properly conceived, the words uttered by a human did not in themselves “damn the soul to the devil”: that is merely what the words called for. Damnation was in God’s power, and humans should not “tempt” him, as Alison Broun was accused of doing. The canonist Gratian had been very clear that God would not be bound by the sentence of an unjust judge, while English texts of the “Mode of Pronouncing the Sentence of Excommunication” instructed priests to declare that offenders would be damned “unless they come to their senses and come to satisfaction”—in other words, unless they repent.81 Having the widow Mabely parrot the official version of excommunication is an interesting authorial choice. However, Chaucer being Chaucer, it is unclear what we ought to make of this. It is Mabely who utters the orthodox words, but they are put into her mouth by the friar-narrator, and a good deal of satirical intent may lie behind having that figure tell a story about corrupt churchmen. It seems unlikely that the poet was intimating his own veiled support for the jurisdiction and ministry of women. I think the opposite conclusion is more likely: Chaucer exploiting the satirical potential in having a woman express the authorized line on binding and loosing. But was it also a warning? If men are corrupt, women may well step in and show themselves competent in clerical ministries.

We find such anxiety in every case dealt with so far in this chapter, including the charge leveled at Alison Broun. When a woman went beyond the act of cursing to make explicit claims about the power of her speech, as Broun is alleged to have done, it was treated as a usurpation of the clergy’s prerogative.

Our second piece of visitation evidence includes details not present in the Herefordshire case, allowing us to probe a little further. At Milton in Kent, in 1511, the parish representatives reported to Archbishop Warham’s visitation that “Roos Slattere widow hathe an erroneous oppynione saying that when soever she shalle curse by this words ‘I curse the by seynt Germaynes curse,’ they shalle never prospere in bodily helthe nor in goods.” When Rose Slattere appeared before the commissary, she denied the accusation, saying it was motivated by malice and that she had never used those or similar words; regardless, the commissary warned her not to speak that way in future, under pain of excommunication, and then dismissed her.82 Although she denied her neighbors’ allegation, we are in no position to judge the truth of the matter. For the purposes of the present analysis, the plausibility of such a charge against a woman is what matters more.

There are some revealing similarities with Alison Broun’s case. First, Slattere’s action (cursing) is presented as secondary to her opinion about her abilities. Here it is worth noting that both our cases arose in visitations that were contemporaneous with major heresy investigations. The churchmen and the parishioners involved were likely to have been highly attuned to any hint of wrong belief, especially to assertions of lay—and female—possession of ecclesiastical power. Describing two women talking about their powers, and not just exercising them, was also a procedural echo of the prosecution of heresy—to hold a wrong belief put someone in error, to communicate it could be heresy.83 If Broun and Slattere were exceptional in talking about their powers (and reminding bishops of heresy), it could be suggested that women cursing without bragging about it was in fact much more common. Perhaps we only know about these women because there happened to be heresy in the air. The second similarity concerns the substance of their alleged actions and words. They claimed the efficacy of verbal curses to cause ill effects for their victims.

The additional details in Slattere’s case are even more revealing. First, like Mabely in Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” she was a widow. The association of dangerous speech with old women who were no longer under the patriarchal control of men, was a strong one. It is also interesting that the report included the words she was supposed to have used, which help us understand the bases of female binding, or cursing. Rose Slattere is said to have cursed people “by Saint German’s curse.” Saint German, or Germanus, was a fifth-century bishop of Auxerre in Gaul who came to Britain to combat the Pelagian heresy. His invocation in an early sixteenth century curse, over one thousand years later, thus requires some explanation. The biographical tradition concerning Germanus began with the later fifth-century author Constantius, whom historians regard as reliable in certain respects, and was augmented in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum attributed to the monk Nennius. It was Nennius’s version that seems to have captured the imagination, riding the coat tails of his influence on the later medieval King Arthur romances. According to Nennius, as part of his support for the Christian Britons against the pagan Saxons, Germanus confronted the Saxon leader Vortigern about his incestuous relationship with his own daughter, just one of his many sexual partners. Vortigern tried to discredit Germanus by having his daughter claim that Germanus was in fact the father of her child. Having revealed his adversary’s lie, Germanus prayed and fasted until fire fell from heaven and destroyed Vortigern.84 This early medieval story was retold by the fourteenth-century chronicler Ranulph Higden and was soon translated into Middle English by John Trevisa. It was then that the detail so crucial for our understanding of Rose Slattere was added, with Germanus’s prayer becoming an explicit “curse” against Vortigern.85

It is exceedingly unlikely that an otherwise unattested Kentish widow would have been familiar with Ranulph Higden, but the chronicler’s mention of a curse suggests that both she and he were aware of folkloric remembrance of Germanus, perhaps influenced by a now lost sermon tradition. The saint’s memory was also kept alive in church dedications, the closest to Kent being at Faulkbourne in Essex. We do not know what particular associations “seynte Germayne’s curse” had for Slattere. Was it simply an all-purpose curse for one’s enemies? Or was it associated with the substance of the Germanus-Vortigern story? Does her invocation of Germanus tell us that she had identified pagans (perhaps heretics) in Kent or an incestuous relationship?86 While it is frustrating that we do not know the answer to any of these questions, naming the curse suggests that it did have some special meaning. We can extrapolate from this that Slattere selected from a repertoire of curses for different purposes and occasions, that this knowledge was bound up with popular claims to the power of the keys possessed by saints, and that when it was exercised by a woman, some people found that troubling.

Women and Preaching

Besides claiming jurisdiction, Broun and Slattere faced an uphill struggle toward respectability because they encroached on the male preserve of public speaking. In a culture that coded many aspects of female speech as suspect, malicious, or an enticement to sin, claims that women’s words could be authoritative in the sphere of salvation and damnation were especially likely to draw hostile attention.87 This was even truer when the speech could be construed as religious teaching. In a dictum that was often repeated in the later Middle Ages, St. Paul had said, “I do not permit a woman to teach” (1 Timothy 2:12); medieval authors elaborated on this, arguing that women were deficient in their minds and bodies, lacked sufficient wisdom, and were liable to inflame the lust of men when they spoke.88 However, St. Paul’s prohibition came to be understood as applying only to speaking in public or to mixed audiences of adults. By the later Middle Ages, it was therefore common to encounter the idea that women could teach in private, but not preach in public. On the ground, even this line was open to a certain amount of interpretation, ostensibly encouraged by some well-known literary and legendary exceptions to the prohibition.89

Wives were expected to teach their husbands and children: the former by alluring persuasion, the latter by parental admonition and example. The author of an influential confessors’ manual of the early thirteenth century, Thomas Cobham, wrote that “it should be enjoined upon women to be preachers [predicatrices] to their husbands, because no priest is able to soften the heart of a man the way his wife can.”90 There is no hint that he intended the title predicatrix to imply a general license to preach, but it shows where the boundary between the proscribed and prescribed could be unclear. Diocesan and provincial statutes also frequently required parents to teach their children the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary, although responsibility for this instruction was shared with parish priests.91 This was unequivocally private teaching, though its content was that which priests were expected to preach to their parishioners. Chaucer’s retelling of the legend of St. Cecelia in the “Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale,” recently reinterpreted by Mary Beth Long, demonstrates his awareness of this textual tradition, which itself suggests that he expected his readers to be au fait with its ambiguities. St. Cecilia was an example to all by her “good teaching”; Chaucer writes that she spoke “pryvyly” to her husband Valerian, persuading him to convert to Christianity. By her conformity to ecclesiastical gender norms, Cecilia eventually earns the right to speak publicly, confronting a pagan king, but only once she has been permitted to do so by male authority figures.92 She therefore represents the late medieval trope of the wife who teaches in private, but her subsequent public preaching is offered teasingly by Chaucer, who was aware of the political heat in this issue.

The distinction between public preaching and private teaching seems so slight that we might imagine there to have been many women who transgressed it in the later Middle Ages. There is, however, even less evidence for female participation in this ministry than we have found for binding and loosing, conferring sacraments, assisting at the altar, and so on. This seems odd at first. Preaching is, after all, the most studied aspect of female ministry in the later Middle Ages, encompassing—besides literary and legendary women—famous prophets and visionaries and well-known figures such as Margery Kempe. It has also sometimes been treated as an obvious extension of the better-evidenced (though until the 1990s understudied) field of female writers, compilers, book owners, patrons, and readers of the later Middle Ages.93 However, book-owning and book-making was one thing, preaching quite another. We do not find complaints about women usurping the pulpit in the English visitation evidence.

While being aware of how rare their subjects were, scholars working on female preaching nevertheless assume that such women represent something bigger than the evidence allows us to see. For instance, when Kerby-Fulton notes that Margery Kempe seems “more parochial” than the luminaries of the continental scene, her words simultaneously suggest that Margery’s background makes her an unusual outlier and that she represents an unattested popular phenomenon.94 This seems to me to be a symptom of the stage that scholarship on this topic has reached: the desire to celebrate what women were doing in the Middle Ages may be diverting attention from the significance of what they were not allowed, or did not allow themselves, to do. Similarly, Genelle Gertz-Robinson implies that it was more common than we might think for women to assume a preaching role. She writes of the “important continuities” between Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth and Anne Askew in the mid-sixteenth century, and the space that both women “carved out” for female preaching.95 But did anyone in fact occupy that space?

Margery Kempe certainly spoke publicly of God, Christ, sin, and redemption wherever she went while being intensely alert to the prohibition on women preaching. She was careful to toe the line, even while—to all intents and purposes—she confidently stepped across it. In the Book of Margery Kempe, a work written by a male clerk in close collaboration with Margery herself, we hear her version of an audience with the archbishop of York, Henry Bowet. Kempe had come seeking the archbishop’s blessing for her vow of chastity, but some of his household accused her of preaching unlawfully. She replied, “I preche not, ser; I come in no pulpytt. I use but comownycacyon and good wordys, and that wil I do whil I leve.” Not only did the archbishop let this pass, he urged her to repeat a moralizing story she knew about a sinful priest, which she proceeded to do. The Book calls this a “tale,” but it is structured and told as a homily.96 Kempe was preaching to the archbishop and his household, while maintaining her stance that this amounted to no more than private teaching. Rosalynn Voaden has argued that this incident should be seen as part of a “preaching tour,” which would be an accurate description of Kempe’s activity.97 But is Kempe so singular an example that she cannot illuminate anything apart from her own life?

The answer to this must be a careful “yes and no.” On the one hand, there is evidence for real women treading a similar path to that taken by Kempe. Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416), for example, is often cited in connection with Kempe. Kempe met the anchorite Julian, who seems to have made a deep impression on her, early in her “ministry.”98 In a similar manner to Kempe, Julian navigated her own authority to “speak of the goodness of God” by appealing to duties that fell on all Christians and by representing her speech as private “showing” and “telling” rather than preaching. Female anchorites were severely constrained in their bodily freedom, spending their lives locked in cells attached to parish churches, but they could become sought-after and authoritative figures within local and regional communities of devotion. Indeed, Liz Herbert McAvoy has characterized the anchoritic life as opening a “window of opportunity” for women who desired a ministerial role within the church.99

To a limited extent, opportunity could also be found within lollard communities, where a small number of women taught other women, and men, in domestic or informal settings.100 The degree to which they could be said to have preached publicly, usurping the privilege reserved for ordained clergy, is unclear, however. It seems that they were aware of the prohibition against women preaching in public and perhaps also wary of the unwelcome attention such activity would bring to them and their fellows. Peter Biller’s work on Waldensian women suggests that caution may have been a common feature of female evangelizing within dissenting groups.101 It was only in the fevered orthodox imagination that heretical women set themselves up as clerical preachers.102 If we take as examples the two most prominent women in the best-evidenced sets of late medieval English heresy trials, Margery Baxter and Alice Rowley, we can see where teaching was thought to shade into preaching, as prosecutors and witnesses used any hint of the latter to besmirch the suspects.

Margery Baxter was a charismatic figure among the lollards of Martham in Norfolk. She was married to another lollard, William Baxter, a wright and a leading tenant of the bishop of Norwich (who was lord of the manor).103 William was literate, reading the Gospels in English to gatherings held at their home, to which Margery invited confidants and neighbors. The principal evidence against Margery came from one of those she sought to proselytize, Joan Clyfland, who testified to Bishop Alnwick’s investigation in 1429 how Baxter had questioned, taught, and cajoled her. Baxter had spoken at some length to Clyfland and two of her female servants about numerous articles of belief and aspects of church politics, often illustrating her arguments with physical demonstrations and metaphors, such as her outstretched arms being the true cross of Christ and—as we saw previously—her womb containing a figurative charter for salvation. All this was defensibly within the bounds of private teaching, and so the medium of communication did not in itself add to the evidence for heresy. One incident, reported at slightly greater length, does seem to have raised concerns of this sort, however. According to Clyfland, Baxter had tried to intimidate her with a story about what Baxter had done to a Carmelite friar who threatened to report her for heresy: she accused him of having wanted to have sex with her. If Clyfland tried likewise to report her, Baxter promised she would make some similar counteraccusation. The detail of this altercation most likely to have rung alarm bells was that Baxter had “expounded the gospel to this friar in the English tongue.” This was Baxter’s final flourish in an encounter that had begun with her berating and admonishing the friar for his way of life.104 Although she had only been addressing one man (the friar), Baxter’s communication pushed the boundary of how women were permitted to speak. Personal reproofs or admonitions were allowed, but expounding the Gospels in English was a transgression of Paul’s prohibition against female preaching. As such, it was a moment when Baxter exhibited unusual recklessness regarding where and to whom she “preached.”

Alice Rowley was probably the more important figure, but she was altogether more circumspect than Baxter and so has attracted less attention from historians. Rowley was the widow of a leading member of Coventry’s civic elite. Between the 1490s and 1512, she instructed a group of women and men in lollard opinions, assuming the leading role that her wealth, literacy, and widowhood permitted her.105 The record of her trial includes witness statements testifying that she “taught” against images and pilgrimages, and “had communication” with other members of the group, “talking . . . about heretical things.”106 It is noteworthy that the prosecution could not find evidence of her preaching in public; if it had, that would have been reflected in the questions put to the witnesses. Rowley is, then, a perfect example of a woman who had the capacity and the inclination but held back from public preaching, perhaps knowing that it was too risky, perhaps constrained by the gendered expectations of the men in her circle.

In one respect then, Baxter and Rowley were similar to women such as Margery Kempe as well as to Katherine Prowd and Margaret Markawntt. All came from locally prominent families, whose officeholding and economic position seems to have fostered the self-confidence, and insulation from some of the inevitable opprobrium, necessary to put themselves forward as leaders and teachers within their immediate milieus. But as convicted heretics, and without the support of the parish clergy that Prowd, Markawntt, and the servants Isabel and Agnes had enjoyed, they were held up as examples of what women risked if they came even close to usurping the preaching role of the male clergy.107

We are left, then, with examples that point in two directions: challenging the male monopoly on preaching and toeing the line. Sometimes it is difficult to say for sure what a particular woman was doing. Kempe can seem audacious as well as cautious, Baxter may have overstepped the line despite herself, while Rowley looks to have been held back only by the knowledge that a suspicion of heresy left her no room for maneuver. Despite its apparent negotiability, the line between preaching and teaching exerted a strong force on the aspirations of women. Very few could be a Hildegard of Bingen (exploiting her status as a well-connected abbess) or a Catherine of Siena (benefiting from being politically useful and protected). This helps us understand the absence of female preaching (beyond Broun’s and Slattere’s boasting about efficacious cursing) in the English visitation evidence. Over the course of the later Middle Ages, it is also possible that churchmen became more troubled by the potential of women to disrupt the hierarchy between laity and clergy; the challenge of Wycliffism, especially from the 1410s onward, stimulated a hardening of boundaries of all sorts. And as more women became active readers and writers of devotional texts (as part of the general increase in the literacy and literariness of lay piety that characterized the “multiple options” of the fifteenth century), this was met by textual revisions to the lives of female saints, so that they presented more passive role models: crucially, this meant erasing examples of women preaching.108 Stepping into the pulpit was simply too strongly associated with the prerogatives of a male clergy for it to be available as an option for most women, even where the circumstances—clerical absence or incompetence—were favorable. In this sense, preaching was more strongly gendered masculine than the other ministries and clerical tasks discussed in this chapter.

The parish system of late medieval England was far from uniform and its characteristics changed over time. While there had always been a very uneven distribution of resources for the provision of clergy—with wealthy parishes able to support several priests and others struggling to find just one—this situation was exacerbated after the Black Death, particularly during the long slump in demesne and rent profitability from the 1370s to the 1520s. Alongside these changes, parishes were more and less fortunate in the arrangements for pastoral care made by absentee or institutional rectors. Even when there was a sufficient number of clergy in a parish, predictable human frailty and fallibility meant there was often a shortfall between what parishioners expected and what was happening before their eyes. Across the long fifteenth century—when all our examples of women stepping into sacerdotal roles occurred—fewer and fewer parishes could afford the additional priests they had previously enjoyed. The changing economic fortunes of parishes may go some way to explaining the occurrence of our examples during this period, but it is also probable that Brut’s case and the emerging association between heresy and claims for female ministry made authorities more sensitive to the issue and more likely to respond. The conjunction between the heresy scare and the economic crisis created an inflection point in the history of women’s relationships to the priesthood.

The women discussed in this chapter stepped in when men failed or when the system of male ministry cracked under economic strain. Women knew about their duty to baptize newborn children when there was no priest available; they could not bear to see basic tasks like bell ringing neglected; they valued the proper provision of divine service above maintaining the gender hierarchy that separated clergy from laity. This is not to say that they rejected the gender hierarchy: indeed, their actions can plausibly be interpreted as a rebuke to the failures of individual men, not to patriarchal norms as a whole. They may, on occasion, have acted on a belief in the irrelevance of sex to clerical ministry, but the effect of their actions was to reinforce gender hierarchy. Every instance of boundary transgression drew attention to what was usual and unusual, making the male monopoly seem more, and not less, natural.

How wide was the “window of opportunity” for women’s action? How common was it for women to step into clerical roles? In purely numerical terms, the answer would have to be “not very,” but the evidence of this chapter has indicated that is not the whole story. In a sense, every instance we have encountered was exceedingly common, in the sense of feeling rather ordinary, suggesting that while windows of opportunity might not open very wide, they could be found almost anywhere. Women stepping into the chancel, serving at the altar, ringing the bells, baptizing infants, and possibly, in the exceptional circumstances of the plague years, hearing confessions, was part of everyday life. As we saw in chapter 3, in almost every parish women ran guilds, organized fundraising, and contributed their labor to the menial but essential tasks of maintaining a respectable church. They were also indispensable to the operation of clerical households. They knew the routines of the church, having observed them at close quarters all their lives. They knew who was supposed to do what, and they knew the weaknesses of their clergy. We may reasonably speculate that quite a few women also knew that—as in the case of baptism—it was theoretically permitted to them to assume responsibility for Christian ministries when priests failed or were not present.

What this chapter has described is a vast groundwater reservoir, or subterranean mycelium, of untapped female potentiality, a ghostly presence that was usually held in abeyance but which, from time to time, seeped out or pushed its way upward when the conditions were right. It was not a secret feminist movement, just ordinary women doing what they thought they had to. While they sought to criticize the failure of the male monopoly, that does not mean they were challenging the gender hierarchy of the church itself. But that is what churchmen were afraid of.

The trial of Walter Brut brought that fear out into the open. It was a moment of panic. A revealing one to be sure, but male clerical anxiety did not usually manifest itself in such explicit ways. More commonly it found expression in the institutions and discourses of late medieval church government. It manifested in the masculinization of church discipline at the level of the parish—the grounds of censure and regulation discussed in chapter 4—and, beyond the parish, as unease about itinerant, unbeneficed, and semiclerical individuals, whom bishops found it hardest to govern. To parishioners of all genders, the maleness of the clergy was made to seem natural, and women were excluded by default. When clerical gender anxiety was brought into contact with the nonparochial clergy and with people at the fringes of the clerical estate, it led not just to the suffocation of women’s potential to perform clerical ministries but also to the enforcement of a binary sexual order and heteronormativity. That is the subject of the following, and final, chapter.