| The parish was central to the spiritual life of the late medieval laity. In England's thousands of rural and urban parishes, lay people made confession and heard sermons, communed with the dead, and worshipped and performed the sacraments in a corporate setting. In addition to both the spatial entity comprised by church and churchyard, and the set of ritual practices performed in those spaces, the parish was also a spiritual fellowship of "even-Cristen" and a neighborhood whose bounds exceeded the limits of the churchyard wall. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the parish became both sponsor and object of an outpouring of vernacular sermon collections, exempla, penitential handbooks, and catechetical treatises. But the parish itself, as both spatial entity and spiritual community, was also a new literary and artistic subject in fourteenth-century England. My dissertation examines representations of the parish in Middle English literature, penitential handbooks, parish wall paintings, manuscript illumination, and liturgical texts. While the space and community of the parish were central to lay spiritual identity, the fourteenth-century parish was also haunted by the threat of foreclosure as devotion became increasingly privatized. As the primacy of the parish was challenged by the proliferation of books of hours and spiritual guides intended for lay use, as well as the predatory advances of hermits, friars, and pardoners, authors such as Robert Mannyng, John Mirk, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer grappled with the changing shape and status of the parish in late medieval England. |
