INTRODUCTION

Imagine the scene. A gentry girl of, shall we say, fifteen, is sitting with her family in their parish church, in a private pew near the chancel. It is during Lent, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the priest has chosen for his sermon the well-worn theme of the seven deadly sins. He begins with the first mortal sin, pride, and among the admonitions our maiden hears this cautionary tale:

The dangers posed not only to a woman’s own soul but also to those of the men who might behold her fashionably dressed and adorned body are hammered home some minutes later when the priest, having been diverted onto other themes through discourses on wrath, envy, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, reaches his crescendo with lechery, which some called the sin ‘fyrþest … fro heuene’, because it damns two souls in one act. Again, our maiden and other female parishioners are urged to think on their carefully tended hair, their fine dresses, their eye-catching headdresses, and the desperate state of damnation which these could lead them, and others, into: