Introduction

Summary

Medievalists are fortunate to be able to draw on a great deal of insightful scholarship that has uncovered the devotional practices of medieval women (both lay and religious). There has been much fruitful discussion of the representation and veneration of female saints, and the ways in which lay piety was informed by ideals and practices that can be identified as ‘feminine’. Indeed, ‘femininity’ has often been presented as the dominant discourse through which late medieval religion was both envisaged for and experienced by lay people, alongside discussions of the development of an individualised affective or Christocentric piety and the female readership for vernacular devotional works. This scholarship forms part of a wider project to uncover the lives and experiences of medieval women, a crucial corrective to traditional accounts which focused almost exclusively on men. However the comparative lack of studies of medieval men and religion informed by gender means that the impression sometimes given is that the devout person at this time was either female or feminised, that male religious (monks or clerics) were motivated by career considerations rather than spirituality and that lay men, while engaging in parochial and devotional practices actually felt ‘left out’ of religion and used the Reformation as a way to regain control of it via a more theological and patriarchal version. This alleged lack of male religious vocation fits neatly into the long-standing historiographical model of later medieval monasticism as an institution in terminal decline, both in terms of the quality of its practitioners and its relevance to the spiritual lives of the laity.