Domestic Piety Research Articles

Sculptures and Accessories: Domestic Piety in the Norwegian Parish around 1300

Eagerly venerated and able to perform miracles, medieval relics and religious artefacts in the Latin West would occasionally also be subject to sensorial and tactile devotional practices. Evidenced by various reports, artefacts were grasped and stroked, kissed and tasted, carried and pulled. For medieval Norway, however, there is very little documentary and/or physical evidence of such sensorial engagements with religious artefacts. Nevertheless, two church inventories for the parish churches in Hålandsdalen (1306) and Ylmheim (1321/1323) offer a small glimpse of what may have been a semi-domestic devotional practice related to sculpture, namely the embellishing of wooden sculptures in parish churches with silver bracelets and silver brooches. According to wills from England and the continent, jewellery was a common material gift donated to parishes by women. Such a practice is likely to have been taking place in Norway, too, yet the lack of coherent source material complicate the matter. Nonetheless, using a few preserved objects and archaeological finds as well as medieval sermons, homiletic texts and events recorded in Old Norse sagas, this article teases out more of the significances of the silver items mentioned in the two inventories by exploring the interfaces between devotional acts, decorative needs, and possibly gendered experiences, as well as object itineraries between the domestic and the religious space.

Furnishing Piety: Beds in High Medieval Jewish Domestic Devotion

In recent years, pre-modern beds have generated extensive scholarly interest. Their social, religious, and economic importance has been rightfully highlighted in the study of domestic piety. Yet, concern has primarily focused on beds in late medieval English homes. This essay uses Hebrew texts from thirteenth-century Southern Germany, primarily Sefer Hasidim, to further this analysis of the role of the bed in shaping medieval domestic devotion. Jewish notions about the social, moral, and sexual significance of the bed reflect those identified in late medieval Christian culture. These ideas inspired numerous rituals practiced in Jewish homes. Yet, the bed and the remnants of sex assumed to be found in it also frustrated Jewish attempts to perform domestic devotion. These findings highlight the complicated nature of the home and how medieval people had to navigate both its opportunities and challenges in order to foster a rich culture of domestic devotion.

Marcia Oakes Woodbury and Religious Identity in Moeder en Dochter: Het Geheele Leven

This close reading of Marcia Oakes Woodbury’s 1894 watercolor triptych Moeder en Dochter illuminates three qualities of Christian piety from an American woman’s perspective: its private domestic nature, its characterization as feminine, and its melding of Catholic and Protestant forms. More specifically, Woodbury’s work, considered in conjunction with her papers in the Archives of American Art, reveals the interplay of traditional Roman Catholicism expressed as domestic piety, New England Congregationalism as the interpretive lens for that piety, and a newly emerging, unorthodox spirituality that inflected both.

Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher Christopher Haigh Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism. Edited by Lowell Gallagher. [Clark Memorial Library Series.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. 2012. Pp. x, 342. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4312-3.) This reviewer groaned as he began to read the barely comprehensible editorial introduction to this volume: more pretentious, jargon-ridden, English-lit. theorizing seemed in prospect, with little that is useful to historians of religion. It is striking how much of the work on early-modern English Catholicism is now being done in English departments in the United States, probably because so many of the easily available sources are literary texts of one sort or another, and archival resources of the kind historians often use are limited (and on the other side of the Atlantic). For all its achievements, this scholarly effort has unbalanced our understanding of post-Reformation Catholicism, with its concentration on poetry, hagiography, heroic piety, priests, and the nobility and gentry—at the expense of conventional practice, social relations, and the lower social orders. But this groaning reviewer fretted too much—although ten of the twelve contributors to this collection work in English departments, most of them can, unusually, write comprehensible English, and some make serious contributions to historical understanding. Eleven essays are organized in three sections: three in “Signposts” (on “signature topics”), four in “Poetics” (on Catholic poetry) and four in “Communities” (on confessional identity). Arthur Marotti looks carefully at Catholic responses to Protestant attacks on Catholic worship as idolatry, but finds there is more to say about John Donne and John Milton than Nicholas Sander and Thomas Harding. It looks as if Catholics gave up trying. Frances Dolan cleverly analyzes a ponderous official text exposing the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and a murder pamphlet from 1681, although it is not clear that they go together in any helpful way. Holly Crawford Pickett tells the stories of three “serial converts” (William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth) and suggests that they were irenic and ecumenical rather than hypocrites or shallow time-servers: in these three cases, it looks as [End Page 363] if she is right, although others are more problematical. Alison Shell sensitively examines Alabaster’s poetry and prose of conversion in more detail, and Richard Rambuss defends Richard Crashaw’s style as devotional, intellectual, and both Anglican and Catholic. Gary Kuchar convincingly characterizes St. Robert Southwell’s poem on St. Peter’s repentance as an alchemical allegory of transmutation, and Jennifer Rust presents a canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) as a response to Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares (1591).The “Communities” section is more obviously historical. Phebe Jensen shows neatly how traditional and Counter-Reformation Catholicism interacted in Catholic celebrations of Christmas, using manuscript collections of carols. Susannah Monta offers a thoughtful assessment of Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and other Catholic texts on holy living, as patterns of domestic piety that fostered communal identity and were copied by Protestants. Anne Dillon reconstructs in meticulous detail the piety and practice of the Confraternity of the Rosary that flourished at Cardigan House in London between c.1650 and 1678, and Stefania Tutino emphasizes the Catholic elements of Thomas White’s The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655). The editor’s introduction is probably best ignored, but the eleven other essays all have something useful to say and those by Pickett, Jensen, and Dillon in particular have real significance for historians of English Catholicism. It is, therefore, a worthwhile collection. But how can we convince editors in search of a title that “Remapping” and “Redrawing the Map” have been done to death? Christopher Haigh The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press

“Excuse what difficiencies you will find:” Methodist Women and Public Space in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine

Through examining conversion narratives by Methodist laywomen published in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine I argue that these women use the conventions of narrative to reform their subjectivities post-conversion and break down binaries between public/private, internal piety/external action, rich/poor. The entry of these women’s stories into print provides a glimpse of how spiritual experience authorized women’s entry into a developing evangelical public sphere and resisted the developing narrative of domestic piety. By focusing on ordinary laywomen we can understand how Methodism worked to redefine the relationship between gender, religion, and subjectivity during the long eighteenth century.

Mother–child relations and the discourse of maternity

In the critical assessment of the rise of what Jameson has termed the modern centred subject … the lived experience of individual consciousness as a monadic and autonomous centre of activity, significant attention has been devoted to the impact of the institutions of the late eighteenth century ‘bourgeois cultural revolution’ such as the family and the school. Less consideration has been given in this history of regulated subjectivity to the emergence within key centres of cultural production of the discourse of maternity and its lasting consequences for the understanding and representation of the mother–child bond as a matrix of both affectional relations and infant development. The late eighteenth century reconfiguration of the family as, in Jameson's words a private space within the nascent public sphere of bourgeois society intensified the ‘separation of the spheres’ begun in the early modern period and further formalised the zoning of the domestic experience as the defining site of emotional specialisation and individual growth. In the culture of early romanticism, this differentiation of domestic roles elevated children as the primary objects of a new regime of intergenerational care, replacing disciplinary control with intimate nurture and valorising a particular construction of motherhood as the ethical base of domestic piety and social stability beyond even the semantic reach of reason. Understanding the cultural processes by which this important ideological shift reshaped the paradigm of parent–child relations in industrial society – radiating beyond the realm of the family into the wider systems of childcare and education – enables us better to discern its continuing influence on perceptions of family life and motherhood today and to critically evaluate its potential contribution to changing conceptions of the place of the family in contemporary democratic society.

Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. By KIM BOWES.

It is only comparatively recently that scholars have granted as much importance to material evidence as they have to textual records of late antiquity. Bowes’s study of the phenomenon of private worship in the late Roman empire is a welcome addition to this, as yet, slight corpus. Illustrated throughout with photographs and architectural drawings, her work sets out to demonstrate the role of private or domestic piety in the process of Christianization of the empire. Bowes is keen to argue that Christianization was not a single, homogenous process, by which the population of the later Roman empire simply adopted a new system of faith and corresponding processes of worship. This idea is perhaps no longer new, however, while the swapping of traditional power structures from aristocrat to bishop, and from secular family to family of Christ, is also an increasingly familiar trope. Where Bowes’s work does add value is in the extra layer of nuance she brings to the view of the past, as she focuses on those within the society who did not conform to the ‘norms’ laid down by those who technically wielded legislative or religious power. There were those who established their own systems and places of Christian worship, and she can point to the archaeological evidence for household shrines, oratories, and chapels in support of her thesis.

Domestic Piety in Fourth Century Rome: A Relic Shrine beneath the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo

The late 4th century reliquary shrine found within the domus complex below the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Rome has already been noted in previous scholarship for the archeological and hagiographical problems this monument poses to scholarship. In the text that follows the main focus of inquiry are its owners—the wealthy and pious senator Pammachius and his wife Paulina who through their network of family and friends belonged to highest ranks of Christian patriciate in Rome. What was the function of this shrine within their household? What does it tell us about the domestic piety in Rome? Why did it remain an isolated example of a domestic shrine? Answers to some of these questions are found in the dynamic of domestic asceticism which was particularly strong in the social circle to which Pammachius and Paulina belonged. The thesis that has been put forward here is that the spread of house-bound piety resulted in building a shrine intended for ecclesia domestica, as Saint Jerome described such enviro...

Publicizing Domestic Piety: The Cultural Work of Religious Texts in the Woman's Building Library

The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 included many texts that could be classified as "religious." In bringing a large body of women's publications together in one place, the Woman's Building's organizers called attention to women's past achievements in order to carve out a larger space for women's public participation. Yet the project of expanding women's sphere coincided imperfectly with the domestic model of piety that most religious publications embodied. This essay explores tensions between the Woman's Building's goals of advancing women's power to shape the public sphere and the library's religious contents.

Aristocratie, église et religion au village en Provence (XIe -XIVe siècle )

Aristocracy, Church and Religion in Provence Villages (11th-14th Centuries). By the end of the 10th century, the Provence aristocracy played a significant role in the rise of castri and the recombining of the ecclesiastical fabric. But it is only at the end of the 12th century, at the time of the actual birth of the castrai village and of the settling down of great families, that a growing evidence of a genuine religious investment in the castrum on the part of the aristocracy can be observed. There were two forms of aristocratic religion. On the one hand, the creation of seigniorial chapels, often used as funeral sanctuaries, the presence of privileged chaplains and confessors as well as hagiographie texts show the rise of domestic piety, centred on the seigniorial house and consisting in peculiar practises that created a gap between the masters of the castle and the rest of the castrai community. On the other hand, aristocratic religion also appeared as public and ostentatious at the time of the celebration of great rites such as baptism, weddings and, above all, funeral ceremonies - moments when what was also at stake was the handling over of power. This binary dimension corresponds to different rhythms and moments in the social and religious lives of lords and castrai communities but, more importantly, it corresponds to different local social realities -the emergence of a domestic piety specific to lords only affecting families belonging to the higher aristocracy from the years 1230-1250 onwards.

Historicizing the Self-Starved Female Body in <em>A Woman Killed with Kindness</em>

In Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Anne Frankford responds to her husband’s punishment of her adultery by choosing to starve herself to death. Female selfstarvation was associated in the medieval period with spiritual transcendence and saintliness, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with domestic piety and wifely virtue, and by the end of the seventeenth century with medical pathology. This article recognizes the spiritual and material implications of Anne’s fasting; it also, however, associates her self-starvation with the monomastectomy attributed to Amazons who figure importantly in Heywood’s Gunaikeion and Exemplary Lives. Anne’s starvation, we argue, is a withdrawal of the power to nourish, and can be understood as a response to the social significance of food and eating as a form of control in the patriarchal economy of the early modern household. Further, the active agency and corporeality of Anne’s suffering replaces the passivity of her earlier representation in the play as a template for fallen female virtue.

Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions

Acknowledgements -- 1 Women, the Spirit, and the Reformation -- PART I -- The Puritan heritage -- 2 Wives and mothers in the colonial New England landscape -- 3 Prophesying women: pushing the boundaries of patriarchy -- 4 The devil's minions -- PARTII -- The rise of evangelical religion -- 5 Witnesses to the New Light -- 6 Gender, revolution, and the Methodists -- 7 Domestic piety: mothers, missionaries, and the Holiness movement -- 8 The reformer's pulpit -- 9 Voices and silence: women, the Spirit, and the Enlightenment -- Notes -- Bibliographic essay: further reading and research projects -- Works cited in bibliographic essay -- Index.

The Education of Jane Addams

PERHAPS as a final tribute to a nineteenth century individualism soon to be extinguished by the New Deal, Americans of the late twenties and early thirties frequently amused themselves in endless polls and competitions to find America's greatest men and women. The definitive order of greatness was never discovered, but in every poll Jane Addams did well. Included in Mark Howe's list of six outstanding Americans, she received Good Housekeeping's seal of approval as the greatest living American woman. But in 1933 the National Council of Women failed her. They declared her the second greatest American woman. First was Mary Baker Eddy. (1) Jane Addams, who treasured such symbols of fame, may well have felt considerable pique at being so linked with the founding mother of Christian Science. The two women certainly appear very different types. Where Mrs. Eddy achieved power through establishing a churchl, Jane Addams, except for one brief episode, was never involved in organised religion; where Mrs. Eddy exploited the world of the spirit, Jane Addams consciously entered the grubby world of the slum; where Mrs. Eddy sought to cure bodies through faith, Jane Addams' solution was better housing, higher wages, and better garbage disposal. Later historians have reinforced the contrast. Some have viewed Jane Addams as an energetic feminist, which Mrs. Eddy decidedly was not; Christopher Lasch, in the most widely accepted interpretation, has seen Jane Addams as the first of a new class, the intellectuals, whose animus was a revolt against middle class gentility and particularly against the constrictive atmosphere of the 19th century family. (2) MIrs. Eddy for all her interest in the mind, was no modern intellectual, nor did she reject the family. It is against such interpretations that this paper is leveled. In my view the National Council of Women may have spoken truer than they realized by joining Mrs. Eddy and Jane Addams. For Jane Addams' career was shaped by the same problem that impelled Mrs. Eddy: How did an ambitious egotistical woman in 19th century America break through the incredibly limited bounds which the domestic piety tradition had established for women. Woman's sphere was the home and family, but achievement could only be