Women in church and in devotional spaces

Abstract

The interaction between sacred space and sacred writing is a multifaceted one, especially in the seventeenth century when the nature of sacred space and the nature of sacred writing, particularly women's writing, are subject to so much change. The meaning of 'church' in the period under consideration is fought over in words and, occasionally, in battles. Sometimes, for women and for men, words take the place of physical buildings, and become a kind of sacred space in themselves - this can be true of books, particularly the Bible. However, throughout the early modern period there are examples of women writing prayers and devotions of the kind that could be used in the Church of England, from Elizabeth Tyrwhit's 1574 Morning and Evening Prayer, with divers Psalmes, Himnes and Meditations , included in Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrones (1582), to Elizabeth Percy's Meditations and prayers to be used before, at, and after the receiving of the holy sacrament of the Lord's Supper a century later. Such writing, anchored in the physical space of the Church of England, had a rather different significance in the late sixteenth century than it was to have in the late seventeenth century. Elizabeth Tyrwhit's 1574 volume exists in a single, tiny, gilt girdle-book in the British Library, which may once have belonged to Elizabeth herself, and which is reminiscent of the way that Catholic Books of Hours, so popular with women until the Reformation, were seen as dress accessories. This volume is at once intimate jewellery and political theology, from a woman closely associated with Catherine Parr: its contents are an individualistic adaptation of the Church of England liturgy.