Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture

Abstract

Cultural changes of the later Middle Ages were characterized by a shifting relationship between the laity and traditional religious institutions leading eventually to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The development of lay piety and the rise of vernacular literature were interrelated and were two of the more significant of these cultural changes. Expressions of lay piety have been attributed to a confluence of unsettling political, religious, demographic, and even climatological factors during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The breakdown of