Religious Materiality in Elizabethan Essex (1558-1603)

Abstract

Based on an analysis of over 11,000 Elizabethan Essex wills, this article presents the first systematic study of the everyday religious environment of Essex. While scholars of the English Reformation increasingly study the everyday behaviors, routines, and rituals which defined English Protestant life, this article articulates how smaller household objects expand our knowledge of religion, practice, and remembrance in post-Reformation England. It also reinvestigates the potential for using wills as a foundation for the study of objects. This, in turn, helps us better understand and appreciate the substantial role objects had as part of an English Protestant religious identity increasingly built around remembrance and memory and, more broadly, enables us to question our historiographical assumptions about the speed, spread, and efficiency of the Reformation.

Keywords:

• material culture
• materiality
• memory
• religion
• Reformation
• Essex
• early modern
• remembrance

Acknowledgements

The author warmly thanks Dr. Gabriel Glickman for his insight and encouragement of this article and the MPhil research upon which this article is based. Thanks are also due to Professor Ulinka Rublack, Dr. Harriet Lyon, Andrew Counsell, and the anonymous reviewers, who provided helpful suggestions and useful comments.

Notes

1 This idea is first proposed in Walsham (2010a,b) which challenges scholars to look beyond simple and sharp divides between Protestant and Catholic objects.

2 Early modern Catholic religious objects also carried multiple meanings that might be understood and appreciated in a variety of ways or on different levels by individuals across the social spectrum. See Corry, Howard, and Laven (2017).

3 Bibles are the most frequent bequest appearing over a hundred times in the Essex wills. A will was almost three times as likely to bequeath a Bible rather than another type of religious text. However, a wide spectrum of religious books do appear in the wills with twice as many books by continental scholars being given than by English theologians.

4 Previous studies have included sampling of 100 and 168 wills or probate inventories (Ago 2013, 13; Ivanic 2015).

5 This analysis included 9,763 complete wills with stated gender, profession, and name.

6 For examples of this type of familial language appearing in the bequest of Bibles see Agnes Holman’s bequest to her female friend of a Bible that “once was her fathers” and Joan Jerman’s bequest to her daughter with detailed instructions of who would receive it if her daughter died (Emmison 1991a, 44; 1991b, 131).

7 Contemporary wills, including those within this study, show a diversity of professions and economic positions, ranging from estates worth thousands of pounds to those poorer members of society whose estates held values of only a couple of shillings. In fact, only minors, the physically and mentally disabled, drunks, felons, and prisoners were excluded from making wills, although not every Elizabethan made or drafted a will, for that required a certain degree of wealth (James 2015, 11; Spicksley 2008, 278). Still, wills represented men and women across different levels of society more than other Elizabethan sources, such as published pamphlets, letters, or diaries, which typically only offered the opinions or beliefs of educated men, elite women, or those engaged in polemic. These wills suggest, then, relative consistency across society in the type of religious material imparted. Sacred objects, such as healing jewellery, Apostle spoons, maidenhead items, wedding rings, christening clothes, christening gifts, wedding attire, and remembrance rings appeared in wills across the social spectrum, although cross necklaces were found almost exclusively in elite wills, and christening clothes and wedding clothes were bequeathed primarily by men though they often mentioned that the objects once belonged to a wife or daughter. Additionally, as might be expected, elites did appear to have a larger number and better quality of religious objects to bequeath, such as a whole set of Apostles spoons rather than one or two. However, this was a difference in quantity or quality rather than type.

8 Alexandra Walsham has also explored the significance of place and purpose for recycled church furnishings post-Reformation (Walsham 2017).

9 Crosses were also reinterpreted within texts post-Reformation (Tarlow 2003).

10 These different values could also be interwoven into a total value which included economic, historical, familial, emotional, communal, and religious significance (James 2015, 91).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abigail Gomulkiewicz

Abigail Gomulkiewicz recently completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She received a BA International Honours in History from the University of St Andrews and the College of William & Mary Joint Degree Programme as well as an MPhil in Early Modern History from the University of Cambridge. Her work explores material culture through various lenses including religious objects, cloth, and clothing. Her doctoral thesis investigated Elizabethan aristocratic society through the dress of William Cecil and his household. It combined extant objects, written materials, and historical reconstruction.[email protected]