ABSTRACT
In their groundbreaking work on women in early modern England, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford relate the case of Mrs Hough who left a charity gift of two smocks to the poor in London in 1653.2 This prompted me to think about how the early modern rural deserving poor were selected as recipients of charity, how their bodies were dressed, and what any words of gratitude they were required to utter might reveal about female charity givers. Building on Patricia Crawford’s groundbreaking work on women, religion, and social action, as well as the gendered nature of material clothing culture, this chapter focuses on how women from the middling sort and below dressed the deserving poor women, children and men of rural parishes through the gift of clothing.3 Crawford has observed that ‘the very wealthiest’ of women demonstrated their ‘godliness and piety’ through charity and philanthropy. These women not only constructed their own individual pious identity through their charitable actions, but were also linked in the collective memory of their parish to other like-minded pious women. Here godly women demonstrate their political agency within the public forum of the parish, while remaining exemplary
role models within the private patriarchal godly household. Their charitable actions reflect the political agency religion offered women in both the public and private spheres of early modern society. I will be using charity rather than philanthropy as this is the term used by early modern archives to describe these gifts in these rural parishes. I want to explore how women used clothing as charity as part of their ‘wider range of social actions’ in society between 1500 and 1800.4 The provision of charitable clothing was a social action that offered women the power not only to include as well as exclude other women, but also to dress them, and potentially shape their behaviour within and across parish boundaries. While perceived to be inferior and unequal in the patriarchal model of society, women’s agency in matters of religion was publicly demonstrated by their pious behaviour and dress, as well as through the power of their public charitable actions. By giving or receiving charity, women’s individual as well as collective piety was recognized by their neighbours, family, friends, as well as enemies. Furthermore the clothing, as well as any sermons, these female benefactors provided, not only dressed, but also addressed the godly poor, and was intended to inspire other women to make similar charitable bequests within these rural parishes of early modern England. By accepting charity, the poor by their actions, dress and deeds publicly proclaimed their piety, as well as the charity and generosity of their benefactors. Women’s agency regarding charitable giving reinforced and reinscribed their own individual identity within their parishes, and also renegotiated and reconfigured the identity of the godly women selected as well as the ungodly that were excluded, within the public forum of the parish. Piety through charity clothing made both the giver and receiver visible within the parish.
