ABSTRACT
Medieval women are most visible when dead. Their presence remains in their effigies or brasses and in their testaments or wills. Some women were pious but not necessarily more so than many men, and it may not always have been their primary concern. Both men and women generally concurred with the belief in the efficacy of post-mortem prayers as a way of purchasing remission from time to be spent in purgatory for their sins on earth. Conscientious individuals could travel a different path. Alice was also patron of St Peter and St Paul’s at Fox-earth. Little remains of the original decoration of the medieval church, which was restored in Victorian times by John Foster, the incumbent in the mid-nineteenth century who was a member of the Oxford Movement. The inscription on her brass could be either a reflection of common practice, or else an idiosyncratic expression of a level of independence, confidence and self-awareness.
