Patterns of Piety

Offering a new interpretation of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in the English Reformation, this book explores its implications for an understanding of women and gender. It asserts that late medieval Christocentric piety shaped the nature of the Reformation, and reasseses assumptions that the "loss" of the Virgin Mary and the saints was detrimental to women. In defining the representative frail Christian as a woman devoted to Christ, the Reformation could not be an alien environment for women, while the Christocentric tradition encouraged the questioning of gender stereotypes.