Barbara J. Harris’s English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1550, makes an immensely useful contribution to the study of religious change across this period, as well as to our understanding of the role played by elite women in this arena. The book owes much to Harris’s previous work on the political, social, and economic aspects of aristocratic women’s lives across the same late medieval–early modern cusp, not least to the unmatched amount of archival sleuthing that she has undertaken over the course of her career. No other historian can have amassed such an enormous body of information about a group of pre-modern women in the way that Harris has done, and this has allowed her to move seamlessly into new, yet familiar, terrain. The book, in Harris’ own words, is ‘the first comprehensive study of Yorkist and early aristocratic women’s role in the flowering of religious art—architecture, sculpture, stained glass, engraving, textiles, and plate ornaments—that transformed English churches in the century before the break with Rome’ (p. 17). It argues not only that much of the fabric of religion was chosen and provided by women during this period, a fact that has gone largely unnoticed, but that it can be used as a lens through which to study the subjectivity of these women, defined here as ‘women’s outward expression of their identity and the actions they took as a consequence of it’ (p. 19). As Harris explains, identity, for women, was complex; born into one family and often marrying multiple times, they accumulated families as they moved through life, retaining old ties while forming new ones. The choices facing them at the end of their lives, namely where and with whom to be buried, and precisely how they wished to be remembered and commemorated, were choices about perpetual identity and self-definition as much as they were about religion. The book therefore reinforces research arguing that religious and secular motivations were not mutually exclusive. It also taps into the existing debate concerning the state of the Catholic Church in England on the cusp of the Reformation, and Harris finds that the activities of these women support the work of scholars such as Duffy, who have argued for the continued vibrancy of the Church into the early sixteenth century.Footnote ¹

Five of the book’s seven chapters cover women’s contributions in terms of different types of material culture: tombs, chantries, church building, mass accoutrements, and alms-houses and schools. The sixth discusses all of these as forms of self-definition, and the seventh is described as an epilogue, detailing what happened to the fabric of piety over the course of the Reformation and beyond. What Harris does particularly excellently is statistical analysis. While noting that her figures are not intended as statistics in a modern-day sense due to the vagaries of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century source material, she has nevertheless included invaluable numbers and percentages in each chapter to give a sense of the frequency or magnitude of different kinds of patronage according to life-stage, circumstance, or status, with clear sample sizes throughout. Thus we are told, for instance, that 54 of 82 elite women, or 66%, bequeathed vestments or fabric to be made into vestments to their churches between 1450 and 1550 (p. 90). This book is therefore going to do for women and the material culture of religion what Harris’s last monograph, English Aristocratic Women, has done for women and their family lives more broadly: it will allow any scholar who comes across evidence of a woman’s activity in this area to place this in meaningful statistical context almost immediately.

The most meaty analysis of all this information appears in Chapter 6, ‘Defining Themselves’, which appears to be a reprinted version of her 2010 article on the same topic, though this is not explicitly acknowledged.Footnote ² This draws together much of the material outlined in the earlier chapters, asking and answering many of the bigger questions that had cropped up elsewhere: how did elite women’s patronage compare with elite men’s; was it explicitly, definably feminine; how did most women choose to define themselves with regard to commemoration; and what can this information tell us? The central conclusions of the book are showcased here amidst a more visible historiographical context than is apparent in the earlier chapters. It might perhaps have been helpful to see a little more ‘big picture’ analysis scattered through the other chapters. Although the statistical analysis given is both impressive and valuable, and the many detailed examples fascinating, occasionally it seems as though readers have been left to construe the wider significance for themselves.

Much of the core value of the text is evidently intended to lie in its appendices: there are nine of these, all lists of names and related raw data divided into forms of material patronage, such as patrons of tombs (Appendix 2), or those who commissioned stained glass windows (Appendix 6), with the addition of lists of the location of tombs in churches (Appendix 3), and choice of burial companion (Appendix 4). These are an invaluable resource for anybody working in this or related fields, and there is nothing approaching it anywhere else. English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety achieves its central aim of shedding light on the materiality of women’s piety with aplomb.