1. Femininities and the Gentry in Late Medieval East Anglia: Ways of Being
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Femininities and the Gentry in Late Medieval East Anglia: Ways of Being
KIM M. PHILLIPS
In present-day Norwich one can visit a version of the church where the recluse who called herself Julian spent perhaps forty years of her life. I say ‘version’ because although St Julian’s Church, off Rouen Road in the south-east corner of the city, looks medieval it was largely reconstructed following severe damage suffered during bombing raids in 1942.1 ‘Mother Julian’s Cell’ is an entirely modern structure built from scratch in the early 1950s. It adjoins the south wall of the church and is accessible via a Norman doorway moved to the site from the bombed-out church of St Michael at Thorn. Despite the cell’s recent construction, Norwich tourist literature confidently asserts that it is ‘on the site of her original cell’ or that the present structure is ‘Julian’s cell … now enlarged and furnished as a chapel’.2 Like so much about modern reconstructions of Julian’s life, this is a fiction. The cell is no more medieval than the post-war housing estates in modern Conisford. The site of Julian’s anchorhold is not known for certain, but Roberta Gilchrist and Marilyn Oliva comment that it would be unusual for an anchoress’s cell to be placed against the south wall of a church, given that most surviving examples are on the north side.3 Compelling counter-evidence is also offered by the eighteenth-century antiquarian Francis Blomefield, describing the church he visited: ‘In the East Part of this Church-yard stood an Anchorage, in which Ankeress or Recluse dwelt ‘till the Dissolution, when the House was demolished, tho’ the Foundations may still be seen: In 1393, Lady Julian the Ankeress here, was a strict Recluse, and had 2 Servants to attend her in her old Age.’4 If we are to believe Blomefield the cell was never attached to either the north or south wall of the church, but was a freestanding structure. On a brief visit to St Julian’s in January 2007 I peered over the churchyard wall towards the place where Julian’s cell may once have stood and felt the futility of over-enthusiastic attempts to reconstruct details of Julian’s life.
The two versions of Julian’s revelations – especially the later Long Text, A Revelation of Love – deliberately omit autobiographical narrative, unlike Margery Kempe’s account or those of many other contemporary mystical writers. The few biographical details that one can be reasonably sure about are summarised by Liz Herbert McAvoy in the Introduction to this volume.5 Julian’s personal identity has been almost emptied out. Although we cannot know whether Julian or later scribes were responsible for this drastic editing of the authorial self, the point remains: for a woman who left readers so much of her thought, she left little else of herself. Yet many modern readers, because they admire Julian and her message, have spun webs of fantasy around her. She was a nun before becoming a recluse, or she had been a wife and mother; she was learned in Latin and theology, or she had no more formal or Latin learning than other women of her era; she was intensely orthodox and her ideas were steeped in patristic authorities, or she was original and radical in her construction of a distinctively feminine theology.6 The level of speculation sometimes becomes painful, even in the writings of the most reputable scholars. ‘Had her young husband died either of plague or in war?’ asks Benedicta Ward, contending that Julian had been a mother and widow before entering the anchorhold.7 What a cruel fate for her husband – so recently invented, to suffer such a death! Some build teetering contextual structures on ill-founded premises: ‘It is also possible that if [Carrow Abbey] was the source of Julian’s education and she had thereby come to the notice of the cathedral priory, she might have been eligible for a special arrangement which made books from their library of theology and spirituality available to her,’ ponders Grace M. Janzten. Alternatively, ‘[i]f Julian had had a brother who went to such a [grammar] school … she could have learned from him.’8
It is perhaps too easy to mock, and it is understandable that an author who has moved and stimulated so many readers will inspire curiosity about her life. Moreover, historicist practitioners argue that we gain better understanding of creative works if we are able to place their production in a secure biographical and historical context. Alexandra Barratt has, however, issued a slightly different historicist challenge: not for the reconstruction of a biography as such but a more developed context: ‘We already celebrate [Julian] as a visionary and as a citizen of heaven: let us now start to recuperate and reconstruct a “social” Julian.’9 This in some respects echoes remarks made earlier by Felicity Riddy, who argued that we must relinquish the ‘gothic’ mental picture of Julian as isolated recluse, walled up alive and alone in her cell, and recognise the social aspects of her authorship – her urban location, contact with her bishop and other officials of the Church, her contemporary audience, possible collaborators and so on.10 Barratt undertakes a clever rereading of Julian’s vocabulary, suggesting that her demonstrable familiarity with the language of service, worship and lordship indicates that Julian’s social background was of the gentry or minor aristocracy. Rather than undertake a speculative exploration of Julian’s pre-anchorhold experiences, then, we could take Barratt’s suggestion about her probable social status as a starting point and attempt to flesh out her context by considering the forms of femininity experienced by women of gentry status in late medieval East Anglia. Linguistic experts have suggested that Julian may have grown up in northern England, noting certain northern forms present in her writing;11 however, East Anglia was the region she lived in for the majority of her adult life, and therefore offers the most relevant setting. This essay, therefore, is in part a response to Barratt’s challenge, although the results are probably quite different from what she had in mind.
East Anglia was a prosperous and populous region during the later Middle Ages due to its role in wool production and its ports, which provided a gateway to continental Europe. The area was home to numerous families whom one might label members of the ‘gentry’: the Boleyns, Brewses, Calthorpes, Castells, Cleres, Hoptons, Knyvets, Townshends and Woodhouses, to name a few, as well as the more famous Pastons. Gentry society is not particularly easy to define, as a ‘gentleman’ or ‘gentlewoman’ did not occupy a legally recognised category in the way a ‘peer’, ‘knight’, ‘esquire’ or ‘serf’ did, yet we can identify activities and preoccupations common to the group: possession of landed estates and control over the villagers who worked them, concern with lineage and future family prospects, the holding of local offices such as Justice of the Peace or Member of Parliament, service to royalty or members of the great nobility, prudence in financial matters and preoccupation with courtesy and conduct.12 Moreover, as Philippa Maddern observes, gentility was performative: ‘To be a member of the gentry was to be constantly undertaking a performance: behaving like a gentleman/woman in the eyes of the world, and particularly for the benefit of the “gentry” society whose recognition alone could establish who was gentle and who was not’.13
As members of a self-conscious group, gentlewomen shared the values and ambitions of men of their status. However, I am keen to find a way of talking about a gentry femininity not entirely constrained by ‘class’ concerns; rather I wish to find terms that can work both within and across divisions of rank, and in this capacity I have been influenced by R. W. Connell and his now classic Masculinities. Connell’s framework for thinking about masculinities derives from a desire to understand the ways men compete for supremacy or negotiate their position in the masculine hierarchy:
To recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit, and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity.14
Connell identifies four main varieties of masculinity in modern western societies.15 ‘Hegemonic’ masculinity is ‘the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations’. It is the form of masculinity ‘culturally exalted’ above all others in a given time and place – that is (like the other forms of masculinity discussed here), its expression changes according to social context. ‘Subordinated’ masculinity is hegemony’s opposite: any male behaviour or attributes seeming to fall short of the hegemonic ideal. For example, gay, effeminate or physically non-robust men fit the category in the modern West. ‘Complicit’ masculinity marks the mass of men who do not fit the elite hegemonic group, yet support – or do nothing to oppose – its aims. Such men ‘realize the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy.’ ‘Marginalised’ masculinities are affected by social subjugation through class or race. We could refine this definition by contrasting subordinated with marginalised masculinities: where the former are the subject for derision, antipathy or contempt they are nonetheless permitted to exist; the latter are met with more forceful modes of exclusion and suppression by legal or violent means.
It is fruitful to think about femininities in a similar way – thinking about femininities as they relate to women, that is, as Connell’s discussion of masculinities focuses only on men – but not simply by imposing Connell’s terms. Hierarchical relations within femininity, though they exist, are not as socially or politically significant as in masculinity because in most cultural contexts women are the already subordinated sex. Connell’s categories are all structured around his hegemonic archetype. Masculinity is about being hegemonic, failing to match the hegemonic type, complying with hegemony or occupying a space of dangerous marginality in relation to it. Given that social dominance is not generally open to women the exercise of jostling for position is of limited importance.
I therefore offer the following categories of femininity. Like Connell’s headings, these are meant to be broad and flexible enough to fit a range of historical contexts and to be applicable either in conjunction with categories of class or independently of them, though here the emphasis is on their applicability to late medieval society:
1. Consort femininity. Consort status applies to women who have gained the benefit of the ‘patriarchal bargain’; that is, they have entered into inegalitarian marriages but in return receive benefits such as financial security, social prestige, marital companionship, the chance to bear children in a socially sanctioned environment, and household authority or dominance in widowhood.16 Wives of men in ‘hegemonic’ or ‘complicit’ positions in late medieval society, whether of aristocratic, gentle, mercantile, or yeoman status, could be counted as consorts. Their reward for maintaining or furthering family status was a comfortable position within the status quo.
2. Vocational femininity. This applies to women who have avoided consort status (although, in some societies, they may actually be married or in partnerships) and built their lives around other pursuits, for example higher learning, religious life, literary or artistic activities, organisational or charitable work, profession, or political activity. Some succeed highly in spheres usually associated with masculinity. They possess a degree of independence or self-determination but this can only ever be limited. Although individually successful and even personally fulfilled, they operate within prefabricated structures of government, religion and profession.
3. Deprived femininity. This applies to women whose gender subordination is compounded by further negative factors: poverty, illness, disability, religious oppression or infirm old age. That is not to say that all old, ill or disabled women were entirely deprived, just that these factors would commonly have a negative impact. Deprivation can fall on women even of privileged social status, for example through sexual scandal which diminishes their worth in the eyes of the world or their own families, forced and unhappy marriages, or other misfortunes.
4. Alternative femininity. This refers to women who have given up the attributes of feminine gender regarded as conventional within their society, so far as it is ever possible to do so. They have female physiology and biological life-cycle markers but in other ways have stepped aside from normal femininity, perhaps by rejecting motherhood, sexual relationships with men, ‘women’s work’ and so on. Their divergence from established gender structures will be compromised to a degree – for example, women in all eras must find a material basis for living, even if through marriage. The nature of their alterity will depend on the society they spring from; what they have in common is that in some fundamental way they break the rules of gender.
These categories are offered as a set of lenses for looking differently at femininities in history, and for working around and within social rank or religious status. While they might seem unreasonably negative, Connell’s categories for masculinity are not necessarily positive. ‘Complicit’, ‘Subordinate’ and ‘Marginalised’ are all negative terms.
Late-medieval East Anglia offers no shortage of impressive gentlewomen occupying the status of ‘consorts’. We should understand these consorts as akin to senior business partners in a small or medium-sized firm. From the moment she got up in the morning to when she lay down at night, a consort devoted her energies to the betterment of the family she had married into. Her work could be quite hands-on: in addition to directing servants and overseeing general management she provisioned the household with foodstuffs,17 ordered cloth and items of clothing from town,18 made medicines and treated the sick.19 Her maternal cares centred on bringing up the children to the greater benefit of the family, thus boarding girls in greater households, seeing to it that the boys received formal education and taking charge of finding suitable marriage partners.20 Commenting on the harsh upbringing of the Paston daughters, Ann Haskell wonders how ‘medieval girls became adult women of such self-assurance’. Like soldiers first taught to obey so that they might later command, gentry daughters learned discipline and the values of strict hierarchy. ‘[T]hose who could survive such subjection in early life, earned the right to command it later’.21 The lessons in demure, quiet and submissive femininity taught in various media, from conduct books to devotional literature, would have had little real-life application for gentlewomen once they were married.22
Both Agnes and Margaret Paston were left in charge of home estates while their husbands were away in London, having to take care of legal disputes, rent and debt payment, and dealings with tenant farmers, overseeing building repairs and the condition of stock and crops.23 Most notoriously, Margaret commanded the armed defence of Gresham Manor on 28 January 1449 when Lord Moleyne’s men came with swords, knives, bows and arrows, battering rams and pans of fire to take the estate by force.24 This is an exceptional event, but in other respects there was nothing obviously ‘East Anglian’ about the activity of gentlewomen. The women of the Yorkshire Plumptons and Oxfordshire and Berkshire Stonors similarly demonstrate the practical capabilities of keeping home and manors functioning effectively in their husbands’ absence.25
To be a consort does not require a living husband. Some widowed gentlewomen remarried, but those who chose not to do so remained preoccupied with their marital families and with protecting their own financial interests. Agnes Paston battled for possession of her dower land and Margaret joined her sons in quarrels over Sir John Fastolf’s estate.26 Looking to other East Anglian families of the fifteenth century, the sheep-farming Townshends possessed a determined matriarch in the shape of Eleanor Townshend, née Lunsford, who in her widowhood emerged as a forceful negotiator. She assumed control of the considerable Townshend interests, trading wool, buying land, building a mill, selling produce, leasing holdings and pursuing numerous debtors through the Court of Common Pleas even in the last year of her life. It is telling that accounts of household documents were written in English for her benefit rather than the usual Latin during this period of matriarchy.27 Elisabeth Brews, second wife of Sir Thomas Brews, is best remembered for her role in helping to secure the marriage of her daughter Margery to John Paston III in 1477, but the charm displayed in her letters hides a steely and determined character. When Sir Thomas died in 1482 Elizabeth embarked on a lengthy legal battle with her step-son William, Sir Thomas’s heir by his first wife Margaret Calthorpe. The dispute was not settled until twenty years later, a matter of months before Elizabeth’s death.28 Elizabeth Clere, née Uvedale, was also widowed young and enjoyed a calm prosperous widowhood of forty-seven years in which she managed her affairs with great skill and competence.29
It would be misleading to imply that these women were solely concerned with social status. There is plenty of evidence for their religious devotion, and gentlewomen and their husbands gave valuable financial support to the Church through the patronage of devotional art, local priories and recluses.30 An intriguing, though indirect, connection between Margaret Paston and Julian of Norwich is indicated in Margaret’s bequest of three shillings and fourpence each to the anchoresses at Conisford, Friars Preachers and White Friars in Norwich on her death in 1484.31 Julian was of course long dead by then. Lay gentlewomen had an eye to the next world, certainly, and seem to have been genuinely devout, yet their primary energies were reserved for the affairs of this world. It would also be inaccurate to suggest that lay gentlewomen were always happy or successful in the consort role. Sometimes marriage could go badly wrong, as it did for Alice Wodehouse when she married Sir Thomas Tuddenham around 1418. It seems that their marriage was never consummated, and Alice had an affair with her father’s chamberlain and bore him a child. Consequently she became a nun at Crabhouse, possibly under pressure from her father, yet the bishop of Norwich called the parties to court and the marriage was annulled on the grounds of adultery in 1436.32 Alice may have made a superficially ‘good’ marriage, but sexual scandal and failed marriage take her out of the ‘consort’ category: she better fits the ‘deprived’ category. Young women married against their will were also victims of misfortune. Gentlewomen were not immune from ravishment (abduction, sometimes combined with forced intercourse), as is illustrated by the experience of Joan Boys, daughter of a Norfolk lawyer, who was abducted by Robert Langstrother in 1451.33 She cried out her protest against ‘the knave’ as she was carried off and in each village they passed, vowing that she would never consent to him, yet married Langstrother a few days later at Wiggenhall St Mary. Following the marriage she seems in some respect to fit the ‘consort’ model – bringing joint law suits with her husband, moving with him to London, and being named co-executor in Robert’s will of 1463 – but they had no children together. The true nature of their marriage and Joan’s feelings about it are lost to us.
Lay gentlewomen could experience deprivation, but the consort role was the standard model of femininity for women of this status. Consort femininity required dedication and a commitment to the worldly goals of advancing familial status. To maintain gentility required constant energies on the part of family members and the role of the consort was crucial. Such women, having married into prominent even if not truly elite families, reaped the rewards of the ‘patriarchal bargain’ for their tremendous efforts: financial security, social respectability, and authority in mid and later life, especially in widowhood.
Even if she had been a wife and mother before entering anchoritic life, the consort category does not appear to fit the fragmentary ‘Julian’ we can claim to know. There is no strong indication in her writings of the concerns of the consort gentlewoman. She writes of the motherhood of God but, as Christopher Abbott points out, her metaphor refers to having a mother, not being a mother.34 Although she uses the languages of service and ‘worship’ she turns them to quite different purposes from their uses in lay contexts. ‘Service’ for the lay gentry was something others performed for them or which they performed for social superiors in order to improve their own prospects; ‘worship’ was a quality which gentlemen and women sought for themselves as they worked to enhance their position in the social structure. Julian’s metaphorical uses of such language hold none of the self-interest of their meanings for the laity. The ‘deprived’ category does not seem suitable either, despite the illness which Julian describes as the prelude to her first visions. The ‘vocational’ category, however, looks more promising.
Gentility is usually defined in lay terms, but a good number of gentlewomen stepped sideways to enter the religious life. Was becoming a ‘bride of Christ’ simply to be another type of consort? Not really; for gentry daughters or widows, monastic life offered a future fundamentally different from matrimony. It was the chief ‘vocational’ form of femininity available to medieval English gentlewomen, and in a family with a number of daughters it would not have been unusual for at least one to take the veil. Dorothy Calthorpe, daughter of Sir Philip Calthorpe, was a nun at Bruisyard Abbey.35 Roger Townshend I’s daughter Agnes entered Barking Abbey in Essex in the late fifteenth century when her elder sisters Thomasine, Elizabeth and Anne had already been placed in good matches with sons of the Woodhouse, Cressener and Castell families respectively, while Cecily Fastolf became prioress of Bungay Priory in the early sixteenth century.36 An estimated 64 per cent of East Anglian nuns derived from the lower or ‘parish’ gentry, with another 10 per cent from the more elite gentry families.37 There were eleven female monasteries in the diocese, none of which were very large or wealthy, but monastic life may have had certain attractions for women who aspired to a degree of authority.38 Oliva has argued for meritocracy over aristocracy in the office-holding patterns within these nunneries, noting numerous instances of parish-gentry nuns in positions from second chambress to prioress.39 Prioresses and abbesses possessed seigneurial rights over their lands and tenants – collecting rents and fines, controlling mills, holding manor and leet courts, keeping gallows, possessing rights to the view of frankpledge and assizes of bread and ale – rather like lay consorts with charge over familial estates, although prioresses’ authority extended beyond that of consorts. They possessed spiritual rights over churches, chapels and rectories, with the power to appoint parish priests and collect tithes from these institutions, in return having the responsibility for their upkeep.40 Lesser office-holders naturally had more narrow responsibilities, yet undertook important roles, such as those of cellaress, sacrist and almoner. To receive any kind of office presumed a level of maturity and seriousness – usually a woman had to have been professed for several years before attaining even a lowly post such as doorkeeper.41
Yet to enter the monastic life, even for those women who took on positions of authority within the nunnery, was never to become ‘like a man’. Medieval monasticism was sharply gendered, and monks and nuns did not occupy equivalent social or spiritual positions. Nunneries had to answer to higher male ecclesiastical authorities – the bishop of the diocese, or male superiors of their order.42 Enclosure was in theory much more vigorously enforced on nuns than monks in the wake of Boniface VIII’s bull Periculoso of 1298 (although in practice the order was regularly breached),43 and of course no nun could be a priest as a monk could.
The theory that Julian had lived as a nun, probably at Carrow Priory, before entering her anchorhold was first posited by her editors Colledge and Walsh and is supported too by her recent editors, Jenkins and Watson.44 My preference is to leave such questions aside; what we can say is that she assuredly fits the category of vocational femininity, if not through the monastery then certainly through her life as a recluse. Anchoresses were women who avoided the consort role (or left it behind in widowhood) to enter a form of living which sits in comfortable parallel to matrimony: offering a degree of authority or limited autonomy, but in a manner quite unthreatening to broader cultural structures. Anchoresses, like nuns, lived and worshipped within institutional and ideological formations well-established within the society and culture of the late-medieval West, and received status and validation by contemporaries. Although their life choice might appear extraordinary, even radical or outlandish to modern eyes, it was certainly not extremist in their own historical context. Our society does not look benignly on individuals who seek out a solitary life but the ‘desert’ – real or symbolic – had an ancient and esteemed lineage in medieval Christianity. As Ann K. Warren says, these women should not be seen as ‘exotics, deviants, or as individuals peripheral to medieval religious history’, but rather ‘at the apex’ of the perfect Christian life.45 Anchoresses remained tethered to the world, as they required a licence from their bishop and the support of the institution to which they were attached (parish church, cathedral or monastic house), and also of local communities who might be called upon to help maintain anchoresses. There are six surviving ‘rules’ for English anchoritic women, all authored by men, suggesting strong masculine intervention in shaping their experiences and spiritual selves.46 Anchoresses were valued for their prayer, their intercessory function and as counsellors.47 It was not normal for them to become authors in their own right, much less to compose complex and highly original theological tracts as Julian did.
Women recluses rarely lived in the wilderness. Their ‘desert’ was a state of mind and their cell was most probably attached to a church in a bustling suburb or a monastic house on the edge of a town. Julian would have shared with other anchoresses the paradoxical situation of having ‘withdrawn’ from the world only to find herself in a comparatively ‘public’ position, and at certain times of the day and season anyone could draw upon her time and energies to seek spiritual advice at her window. The potential psychological agonies of the anchoritic life were acknowledged by contemporary authors, and the dangers of falling into variants of accidie such as indolence, languor, apathy and despondency were cautioned against.48 Some anchoress’s cells were very small, most must have been rather dark, and their usual northerly outlook would have blighted them with a permanent chill. Recluses were not always as strictly enclosed as one might imagine – some kept gardens or gained permission to go on pilgrimage49 – but as they were expected to live an enclosed life their spiritual reputation would have relied on them staying in the cell most of the time. The anchoress needed to ‘learn to suffer, and to suffer well’. In so doing she sought spiritual reward, but stayed well within the parameters of socially sanctioned ways to lead a feminine life. In Chris Cannon’s words, ‘eagerness for self-torment is a very odd sort of empowerment and might be better described as a procedure for furthering social domination.’50
‘Alternative femininity’ is the least well-documented feminine way of being, and the most difficult to identify. Heretical women, of which there were significant numbers in East Anglia, were certainly transgressive in their choice of religious belief but it is more difficult to demonstrate that they were transgressive in their femininity, as many joined with their husbands and communities in adopting dissident spirituality.51 Better candidates are the groups of ‘sisters’ who lived together in informal communities in Norwich and Ipswich and appear to have dedicated themselves to chastity, poverty or some kind of religious vow, although they were not formally recognised by the Church. Norman Tanner suggests that these informal clusters of spiritual sisters resemble Continental beguinages, but Gilchrist and Oliva feel the term ‘beguine’ may veil distinctive East Anglian forms of feminine piety.52 Although some of these communities may have followed a rule which dictated their hours of rising and bedtime, their dietary practices, the wearing of hairshirts and the saying of constant prayers,53 they stand outside of institutional structures and may have been self-governing. Such women had moved beyond conventional frameworks to adopt a more daring way of being a woman.
Julian stepped into a pre-determined non-marital role when she became a recluse. She needed the approval of her bishop, her church and her community and, even though she was probably not required to live by a rule in the way that nuns did, the norms and expectations surrounding the anchoritic life would have ensured that her conduct was regulated and observed by men in authority and more informally by her community. In these respects she chose a vocational framework for living. Yet Julian was not a standard English anchoress. If other recluses produced written work dealing with visionary experience then little or none has survived to the present.54 If any other anchoresses of her time engaged in high level and original theological thought then no trace remains of their ideas. To produce a substantial piece of writing of any sort, with or without the help of a secretary, was uncommon behaviour for women of Julian’s day. Indeed, Julian is regarded as the ‘earliest known woman writer of English’.55 She may not have been well known for her written work during her own lifetime but the fact that she produced it is still remarkable. Like her contemporary Margery Kempe, in these respects her femininity was of the alternative sort although, unlike Margery, she combined her authorial bravery with an approved vocation, in this way softening the choices she made for herself as a woman of her time.
In answer to Barratt’s call to reconstruct a social Julian, then, I have focused on considering the forms of femininities open to her, while trying to avoid excessive conjecture about her pre-reclusive life. Barratt is anxious that ‘[w]e do Julian a profound disservice if, with the laudable desire of making her accessible to our own time, we occlude the way in which she is firmly embedded in a specific historical era’,56 which is true in many ways, yet occlusion of biographical detail seems to have been just what Julian wanted. Julian’s cell has long since crumbled away and the details of her life along with it. What we can say is that as a woman of her time she was at once conventional and extraordinary. Readings of Julian tend to be personal, and mine is no exception. I am content to let the pre-reclusive Julian go, to admire the choices she evidently made to become a anchoress, mystic, author and thinker, and ultimately to let the focus of scholarship rest on her work, not her life.
1 Drawings and photographs of the church at different stages from the nineteenth century to the present day may be found at http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/norwichjulian/norwichjulian.htm (accessed 20 February 2008).
2 ‘Norwich Mini Guide’, produced by the Norwich City Council, current in January 2007; Robert Llewelyn, ‘Julian of Norwich’, pamphlet available in St Julian’s Church, Norwich, current in January 2007.
3 Roberta Gilchrist and Marilyn Oliva, Religious Women in Medieval East Anglia: History and Archaeology c.1100–1540, Studies in East Anglian History 1 (Norwich, 1993), pp. 76–7.
4 Francis Blomefield, continued by Charles Parkin, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 5 vols (Norwich, 1739–75), vol. 2, p. 546.
5 See also the remarks of Julian’s most recent editors, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (eds), The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 4–6.
6 For example, Fathers Edmund Colledge and James Walsh contended that Julian had been a nun before becoming an anchoress, that she was highly learned and literate in Latin theological works, and that her theology was highly orthodox: A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols (Toronto, 1978), Introduction, p. 43; Sister Benedicta Ward made the case for Julian having been a wife and mother before entering the anchorhold, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kenneth Leech and Benedicta Ward (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11–35. Annie Sutherland is among those who have recently argued that Julian’s learning was derived not from Latin literature but vernacular sources and oral devotional culture: ‘ “Oure feyth is groundyd in goddes worde”: Julian of Norwich and the Bible’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1–20; and Joan M. Nuth, though she goes along with Colledge and Walsh’s arguments for Latin learning, argues that Julian offered a distinctly feminine theology: Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York, 1991). This is just a sample of a wide literature.
7 Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, p. 25.
8 Grace M. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (New York, 1987), p. 19. A number of more recent scholars have argued that we should steer clear of speculation: for example, Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), p. 2; Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘ “And Thou, to Whom This Booke Shall Come”: Julian of Norwich and Her Audience, Past, Present and Future’, in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden and Roger Ellis (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 101–13, esp. pp. 101–2.
9 Alexandra Barratt, ‘Lordship, Service and Worship in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 177–88 (188).
10 Felicity Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization’, in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchinson (Cardiff, 1998), pp. 101–24, especially pp. 105–6.
11 Book of Showings I, ed. Colledge and Walsh, pp. 28–32; The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1993), p. 20. Christopher Abbott says that ‘the dialectical characteristics of the manuscripts of both Long Text and Short Text are little help, since they possibly employ the preferred and native dialectical forms of the early copyists rather than Julian’s own’, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), p. 2, but see Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization’, pp. 111–12.
12 Philippa Maddern, ‘Gentility’, in Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove (Manchester, 2005), pp. 18–34.
13 Ibid., p. 28.
14 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, 1995), p. 37.
15 Ibid., pp. 76–81.
16 Deniz Kandiyoti developed the concept of ‘patriarchal bargains’ in her work on sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim Middle East: ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, Gender and Society 2, 3 (1988), pp. 274–90. It has been applied to medieval society with excellent effect by Judith M. Bennett, most recently in ‘Patriarchal Equilibrium’, in Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenges of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 54–81, at pp. 59–60.
17 Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century [PL and P], ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols (Oxford, 1971–6), I, nos 130, 148, 149, 211 [from Margaret].
18 PL and P I, no. 28 [from Agnes]; nos 125, 127, 130, 135, 140, 149, 156, 192 [from Margaret].
19 PL and P I nos 141, 218, 219 [from Margaret]; Elaine E. Whitaker, ‘Reading the Paston Letters Medically’, English Language Notes 31 (1993), pp. 19–27.
20 PL and P I, nos 13, 19, 27, 28 [from Agnes]; 150, 174, 186, 201, 203, 206, 216, 226 [from Margaret]. Also note the active role of Thomasine Hopton, second wife of Sir John Hopton, who made a secret deal with Roger Townshend to let him have more in the way of dowry for her daughter, Eleanor Lunsford, than Sir John had been prepared to give: C. E. Moreton, The Townshends and their World: Gentry, Law, and Land in Norfolk c.1450–1551 (Oxford, 1992), p. 20; Colin Richmond, John Hopton: A Fifteenth-Century Suffolk Gentleman (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 126–7.
21 Ann S. Haskell, ‘The Paston Women on Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England’, Viator 4 (1973), pp. 459–71, at p. 470; also Colin Richmond, ‘The Pastons Revisited: Marriage and the Family in Fifteenth-Century England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985), pp. 25–36; Candace Gregory, ‘Raising the Good Wife: Mothers and Daughters in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. Douglas L. Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden, 2004), pp. 145–67; Anna Dronzek, ‘Gender Roles and the Marriage Market in Fifteenth-Century England: Ideals and Practices’, in Love, Marriage and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 63–76.
22 Normative and alternative models of femininity are examined in Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 77–97.
23 Haskell, ‘Paston Women on Marriage’, p. 460. See PL and P I, nos 128, 132, 136, 146, 149, 154, 164, 178, 179, 180, 182, 189 [from Margaret].
24 PL and P I, nos 36, 129–131.
25 Joan W. Kirby, ‘Women in the Plumpton Correspondence: Fiction and Reality’, in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to John Taylor, ed. Ian Wood and G. A. Loud (London, 1991), pp. 219–32.
26 PL and P I, nos 12, 18, 32 [on Oxnede]; nos 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205 [from Margaret regarding Caistor].
27 Moreton, Townshends and their World, pp. 107, 144, 173; Richmond, John Hopton, p. 127. On varieties of literacy among gentlewomen see Alison Truelove, ‘Literacy’, in Gentry Culture, ed. Radulescu and Truelove pp. 84–99, especially 87, 91–2, and Philippa Maddern, ‘A Woman and Her Letters: The Documentary World of Elizabeth Clere’, in Maitresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, ed. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 29–45.
28 Moreton, Townshends and their World, pp. 95–9.
29 Colin Richmond, ‘Elizabeth Clere, Friend of the Pastons’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 251–73; Maddern, ‘A Woman and Her Letters’, pp. 29–45.
30 Gillian Pritchard, ‘Religion and the Paston Family’, in Daily Life in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Richard Britnell (Stroud, 1998), pp. 65–82; Eamon Duffy, ‘Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’, in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1990), pp. 175–96; Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989), pp. 19–46; Joel T. Rosenthal, ‘Local Girls do it Better: Women and Religion in Late Medieval East Anglia’, in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove, and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden, 2002), pp. 1–20, here at pp. 14–18.
31 PL and P I, no. 230.
32 Roger Virgoe, ‘The Divorce of Sir Thomas Tuddenham’, Norfolk Archaeology 34 (1969), pp. 406–18. Virgoe supplies an abbreviated translation of the annulment case brought before the Norwich Consistory Court in 1436 in his article.
33 PL and P I, no. 45; Roger Virgoe, ‘The Ravishment of Joan Boys’, in East Anglian Studies: Essays Presented to J. C. Barringer on his Retirement, ed. Adam Longcroft and Richard Joby (Norwich, 1995), pp. 276–81.
34 Abbott, Julian of Norwich, p. 2.
35 Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 54 and 201.
36 Moreton, Townshends and their World, pp. 21–2.
37 Oliva, Convent and Community, pp. 52–61; see also her ‘Aristocracy or Meritocracy? Office-Holding Patterns in Late Medieval English Nunneries’, in Women in the Church, ed. Sheils and Wood, pp. 197–208.
38 Oliva, Convent and Community, pp. 9–10, 22–7, 41; Gilchrist and Oliva, Religious Women, pp. 24–5. The average population of East Anglian nunneries over the period 1350–1540 was twelve and a half nuns. This would seem comparable with the average population of male monasteries of around fourteen. However, the latter figure veils much wider variation in population, from over fifty to only one or two. Derived from Oliva, Convent and Community, pp. 41 and 42, tables 7 and 8.
39 Oliva, ‘Aristocracy or Meritocracy’, pp. 204–8.
40 Oliva, Convent and Community, pp. 27–30.
41 Gilchrist and Oliva, Religious Women, pp. 54–5; Oliva, Convent and Community, pp. 75–99.
42 Oliva, Convent and Community, p. 32, where she also notes some exceptions.
43 James A. Brundage and Elizabeth Makowski, ‘Enclosure of Nuns: The Decretal Periculoso and its Commentators’, Journal of Medieval History 20 (1994), pp. 143–55; Oliva, Convent and Community, pp. 35–6; John Tillotson, ‘Visitation and Reform of the Yorkshire Nunneries in the Fourteenth Century’, Northern History 30 (1994), pp. 1–21.
44 See above, n. 6; Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 4. On Carrow see Christopher Harper-Bill and Carole Rawcliffe, ‘The Religious Houses’, in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London, 2004), pp. 73–90, at pp. 88–91.
45 Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 1, 2. She provides a summary of the concepts of anchoritism and eremiticism in Christian history, pp. 7–14; also Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914); E. A. Jones, ‘Hermits and Anchorites in Historical Context’, in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dyas, Edden and Ellis, pp. 3–18; Christopher Cannon, ‘Enclosure’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 109–23; Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards (eds), Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2005), pp. 6–26; Liz Herbert McAvoy (ed.), ‘Introduction: Place, Space and Body within Anchoritic Rhetoric’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Place, Space and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 111–26.
46 A helpful annotated list is in Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, Appendix 2, pp. 294–8.
47 Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, pp. 146–55; Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 110–13.
48 Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 124.
49 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 77–8.
50 Cannon, ‘Enclosure’, p. 117.
51 Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1414–1520 (Philadelphia, 1995); Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–1431, Camden Society 4th series 20 (London, 1977).
52 Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), pp. 64–6, 130–1; Gilchrist and Oliva, Religious Women, pp. 17, 71–4, 95–6.
53 B. Zimmerman, ‘The White Friars at Ipswich’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 10 (1891–1900), pp. 196–20, at p. 198.
54 Although a recent article by Mary C. Erler makes out an excellent case for the late medieval visionary text, ‘A Vision of Purgatory’ as having been written by a Winchester anchoress. See Mary C. Erler, ‘ “A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422); Reform and the Politics of Female Visions’, Viator 38 (2007), pp. 321–47.
55 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. ix.
56 Barratt, ‘Lordship, Service and Worship’, p. 177.