Everyday Women and the English Reformation: Gender and Religion in the Diocese of Salisbury, 1450-1600

As religious reform altered the religious landscape of sixteenth-century England, the parish persisted as the primary site for salvation, social regulation, and sociability. Men and women negotiated what it meant to belong to Christian community while the very definitions of “faith,” “worship,” and “Christian” shifted around them. “Everyday Women and the English Reformation: Gender and Religion in the Diocese of Salisbury, 1450-1600” reconstructs fifteenth and sixteenth-century English women’s everyday religious worlds through their association with their most proximate institution, the parish church. By focusing on archival records from one diocese in England, the Diocese of Salisbury, and embracing ambiguity over answers, this project examines the texture of non-elite laywomen’s experiences of sixteenth-century religious restructuring, adding their stories to our understanding of the period now known as the English Reformation. This study argues that, rather than accepting or rejecting Protestant restructuring and its repercussions, women strategically adapted to reform and called upon individual and collective parish memory to meet their spiritual and social needs. Through varied sources—namely visitation articles, presentments, and returns; churchwardens’ accounts; testamentary records; and prescriptive and didactic texts— this dissertation analyzes how women navigated varied uncertainties to contribute to their church communities, familial networks, and social circles. Looking beyond the most visible agents of Reformation flash points and theological disputes allows a focus on the lived religion of local parishioners as they navigated temporal concerns on their way to eternity. Chapter two explores the shifting stage of the parish analyzing how women engaged collective community memory as they experienced Reformation continuity and change. Chapter three addresses moments of perceived misbehavior, focusing on women’s agency and shifting notions of gender and transgression. The fourth chapter shifts to a discussion of household hierarchies, investigating how ideas of marriage, gender, and subordination overlapped with Protestant restructuring and parish administration. The final body chapter focuses on women’s testamentary practice, specifically how their wills reflect Reformation adaptations and project their identities into the future. Instead of looking for what late medieval practices “survived” the Reformation, the evidence considered in this dissertation highlights what was adapted, resulting in a flexible hybridity where lay men and women made space for their priorities, their habits, and themselves.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/176678/1/simsta_1.pd