THE RAPID GROWTH IN THE production and circulation of vernacular religious texts from 1400 to 1530 and the sustained investment in church refurbishment and decoration over the same period are rooted in the laity's desire to take greater personal control over its devotional and spiritual life. I have argued elsewhere that the laity's burgeoning sense of itself as a literate community can be explored through depictions of books and readers in the art of the parish church. These links between lay reading habits and artistic patronage can be followed in many other directions, most obviously through the influence of book illustration upon images in other media. One area of particular interest is the relation between the increased availability in English of devotional and contemplative texts in printed books from the early 1490s which included those of a number of Continental women mystics, and the appearance of painted images of these mulieres sanctae, especially Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Elizabeth of Hungary, on late-medieval church furniture.

The use of devotional images of these women is not of course a late fifteenth-century phenomenon and illustrations of Bridget and Catherine are found in English manuscripts from the early fifteenth century. Naturally enough these kinds of illuminated manuscripts were produced for wealthy patrons for whom Continental mystics represented empowered and empowering feminine religious experience, members of what Denise Despres has called a ‘spiritually elite circle of women influenced by the Carthusians or Brigittines’.