Remembering Women: Widows' Religious Identity in Late Medieval Mourning and Remembrance

My paper looks at the representation of widowed women in German and Low Country funerary sermons and memorial paintings in the late Middle Ages and early Reformation era. Medieval religious discourse on widows had established the image of the vera vidua or true widow as a laudable model of Christian chastity as well as an honorable monument to her dead husband’s memory. Through hagiography, sermons, literature, and law, the permanently chaste religious widow society increasingly became a visual and textual fixture in the medieval world. Often elided with beguines or third-order women, vowesses and chaste widows occupied a pivotal social and religious space. Many widows remarried or entered convents; the worldly yet religious widow remained an important alternative for female religiosity between the cloister and the world.

In this paper, I explore the various ways widows embodied this liminality at the time of a spouse’s death and in plans and preparation for his funeral and ongoing commemoration. I examine how widows were portrayed, sometimes by their own design, in the mourning and remembrance of their spouses in funeral sermons and in memorial paintings such as the Lord Raas of Hammstede and the Maestro AE’s memorial tablet of the family of Georg von Schleinitz. My inquiry focuses on the ways even newly widowed women embraced established modes of widowed piety. Paradoxically, fixed images of chaste widowhood conferred a recognizable social identity even as women of vastly different social situations and pious inclinations used their widowed identity to structure their post-marital lives.