Porta Caeli: Lay Piety and Marian Devotion in the Parochial Lady Chapels of East Anglia 13 views

Unlike Books of Hours and other elite forms of Marian material culture, parochial Lady Chapels were the site of communal Marian devotion for all parishioners during the medieval period. Lady Chapels are critical to understanding an organic and non-linear cultivation of medieval, lay devotional practices, as the parish church was the primary setting of lay control. Through their financial and liturgical participation in these chapels, lay people directly exerted control over their devotional lives. This dissertation, the first to examine parochial Lady Chapels, analyzes these spaces as a primary and often only surviving source of evidence for lay devotional practices. This evidence reveals that lay people were far from passive recipients of clerical authority but were rather active agents in one of the primary devotional cults of the medieval period. To forefront lay Marian devotion, this project analyzes why the laity chose to construct and adorn Lady Chapels as well as to understand the experiential nature of such spaces for lay people. Specifically, the project examines the architecture, material culture, and documentary evidence of examples found in East Anglia, an area with a large number of surviving Lady Chapels and a major Marian pilgrimage site at Walsingham. The project demonstrates how local architecture mediated personal and collective devotion, the performance of Marian liturgy, and the experience of pilgrimage. This perspective redefines how we understand the gendered production of sacred space, showing that the Lady Chapel functioned as a key architectural and social mediator.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Lay Piety; Mariology; Medieval Parish Churches; England; Architecture

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-04-29