A close examination of religious texts illuminates the way in which parish priests dealt with their female parishioners in the middle ages.

Using a variety of sources and disciplinary angles, this book shows the many and varied ways in which pastoral care came to play such an important role in the day to day lives of medieval people. 1 volume, 335-page, 17-chapter, English-language survey of study of medieval pastors (priests, bishops, abbots, abbesses, popes, etc.) and their relationship to their respective congregations (1215-1536).

New essays on the burgeoning of pastoral and devotional literature in medieval England.

This collection of commissioned essays explores women's vernacular theology through a wide range of medieval prose and verse texts, from saints' lives to visionary literature. Employing a historicist methodology, the essays are sited at the intersection of two discursive fields: female spiritual practice and female textual practice. The contributors are primarily interested in the relation of women to religious books, as writers, receivers, and as objects of representation. They focus on historical approaches to the question of women's spirituality, and generically unrestricted examinations of issues of female literacy, book ownership, and reading practice. The essays are grouped under four main themes: the influence of anchoritic spirituality upon later lay piety, Carthusian links with female spirituality, the representation of femininity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English religious poetry, and veneration, performance and delusion in the Book of Margery Kempe.

Fresh perspectives on the English clergy, their books, and the wider Anglo-Saxon church.

Narratives of medieval women offer new insights into networks of female book ownership and exchange.

Nuns and devout noblewomen were sometimes celebrated for their achievements in the literature of the medieval period, but more often than not these women only appear on the side-lines of history, while the ordinary wife and mother is virtually invisible. These papers, written by historians and archaeologists, discuss the religious devotion and spiritual life of medieval women from all walks of life. From an analysis of the architecture and economic organisation of nunneries, to an assessment of the medieval Church's response to the pain and perils of childbirth, these papers consider the influence of the church on the lives of women, and the influence that women had on the life and worship of the Church.