Gender and the Control of Sacred Space in Early Modern England

A gendered analysis of religious violence in early modern England has still to be written. It seeks to show that struggles over the symbolic meaning of the fabric of worship were gendered in more complex ways than existing interpretations suggest. Paradoxically, while some ministers in early modern England viewed menstruating women as corrupting of sacred space, almost all clergymen delegated the day-to-day tasks of cleaning the church and maintaining its liturgical equipment to female parishioners. Women were denied access to positions of formal authority within the Church of England. Quarrels about clerical costume were central to religious struggles between Anglicans and Puritans over the establishment of Protestantism in England throughout the early modern period. According to Cressy, Stuart ceremonialists sometimes made reference to the stains of childbirth in their Candlemas sermons, invoking comparisons between the purity of Mary under ancient Judaism and the condition of ordinary childbearing women in early modern England.