‘An Afterlife in Memory’: Commemoration and its Effects in a Late Medieval Parish

Abstract

Investigations of the more routine expressions of pre-Reformation spirituality inevitably tend to dwell on the conventions employed by individuals to ease the progress of the soul. The pious attestations and exhortations that some men and women recorded may merit the closest attention for the insight they afford into beliefs and aspiration; but hardly less instructive, and much more common, are the services and good works that individuals commissioned both to express repentance and expedite deliverance. Focusing in this way on individuals poses problems, however. While a few had the means to establish a ‘freestanding’ institution – such as an almshouse the great majority channeled penitential activity into the arena, and to the benefit, of their parish. Individuals ordinarily acted as parishioners, contributing towards and depending upon the services of a well-defined, broader community, within which they did their best to enhance collective memory and experience to their own advantage by securing the benefit of others. If anything, ensuring the benefit of others was reckoned the essential, practical prerequisite for personal advantage. As a result, if we accept that the desire to be saved – and as expeditiously as possible – spurred on most contemporary Christians, the doctrinal emphases in the centuries before the Reformation predicated a series of distinctive consequences, two of which are of particular significance here. First, many parishioners assured themselves of long remembrance, amounting to an afterlife in the world and in the consciousness of those that came after.