ABSTRACT
Widows have become an important focus for scholars who study medieval women because their marital status allows them to appear as actors in medieval documents. While some evidence of the services for vows of chastity for widows survives from the Anglo-Saxon period forward, substantive documentation, which provides the names of significant numbers of individuals. Even as widows, individuals are often identified in reference to a father, husband, or son. Information on religious widows lies scattered through a wide variety of medieval records. Ecclesiastical documents such as bishops and archbishops registers, visitation reports, cartularies, wills, papal records, and penance manuals attest to the participation of widows in religious vocations, including those of anchoress, nun, hospital sister, and vowess. Other records such as patent rolls, close rolls, civic chronicles, and pedigrees also provide information on the individual women involved in these endeavors. The religious vocation of these women, at which they are noted in these records, is not disputed among historians.
