ࡱ> $&#7  bjbjUU %7|7|l  2444444$ vXXm22 .099The Good Women of the Parish: Visibility and Participation in Late Medieval English Parishes (forthcoming: University of Pennsylvania Press) Katherine L. French SUNY-New Paltz Women in the Late Medieval English Parish: Visibility and Participation will look at non-elite laywomens religious practices in the late medieval English parish. This book to examine how gender, status, and life-cycle shaped non-elite womens religious practices. It will argue that parish became the major forum for female visibility in the late Middle Ages. Their visibility came to include, but was not limited to, membership in all-womens groups, such as all-womens parish guilds, womens festivals, or activities in the womens section of the nave. Parish involvement allowed women to engage in collective activity which furthered their own subculture. This subculture emphasized issues of wealth, status, family, work, as well as relationships with men and other women. These concerns become themes in womens religious behavior. Parish involvement provided women with opportunities that were unavailable outside the parish, and this concerned the clergy. Thus, womens parish involvement and increasing visibility created a tension around parish life that the clergy and the laity tried to relieve by using womens participation as a means of affirming and defining expected female behavior even as their parish involvement expanded their opportunities. Fund-raising, work, and attendance at mass all directed women to draw on their family and domestic experiences as models for religious behavior and parish involvement. These models, however, were not merely imposed on women; women themselves also participated in the creation of a vocabulary of piety that revolved around their household duties. Their interests were not always separated from the patriarchal norms that governed them. While visibility made their voices louder and their concerns more obvious to the parish as a whole, they did not transform the parish into a female utopia. Thus, I argue, that the significance of womens involvement in the parish lies in the ways that it was a part of and not separate from or in addition to local religious life.  6OJQJOJQJ5:OJQJaJ!` d $a$$a$  # 01F/ =!"#$% i:@: Normal$a$CJ_HmH sH tH <A@< Default Paragraph Font!`000000000   )333 !_33]`bb hyscd@D:\BK Research\Parishes\Warwick Project\Website\French Women.doc@O TT@UnknownGz Times New Roman5Symbol3& z Arial9Garamond"qh‰‰@ HRYx203QH  THE GOOD WOMEN OF THE PARISH :  hyscdOh+'0   < H T`hpx!THE GOOD WOMEN OF THE PARISH: rosTHE HEHEHENormalOhyscdO2scMicrosoft Word 9.0T@ @o@o@ ՜.+,0 hp|  IBM !THE GOOD WOMEN OF THE PARISH: Title  !"%Root Entry F0!'1Table WordDocument%SummaryInformation(DocumentSummaryInformation8CompObjjObjectPool0!0!  FMicrosoft Word Document MSWordDocWord.Document.89q