Before departing to commence his new-found vocation as a hermit, the fourteenth-century mystic Richard Rolle dressed in his sister's clothes. Procuring two tunics from his generous sibling, Rolle ripped and tore them, refashioning her garments so that ‘he might present a certain likeness to a hermit’. Recorded in the office of lessons and antiphons drawn up in 1380 in preparation for Rolle's canonisation, this is a remarkable scene. Escaping from his Oxford education, from the centre of patriarchal written and scriptural authority, Rolle chose an alternate religiosity: a choice marked by cloth, as he tailored and designed a new spiritual identity and experience. McNamer astutely writes of Rolle's ‘willingness to engage in feminine self-fashioning’, connecting the hermit's ‘gender performance’ to the use of the feminine as a locus of the affective compassion which is so central to his writing. Indeed, it is no coincidence that women's garb forms the basis of Rolle's makeshift ‘habit’ in this scene at the very beginnings of his eremitical vocation. Rolle not only dresses in his sister's garments, but participates in the very process of fabricating devotion and selfhood which we have seen so persistently coded as a female practice throughout the Middle Ages. Moreover, his actions position such feminine devotion as preferable to, spiritually richer than, institutional (patriarchal) Christianity.

Rolle's sartorial self-fashioning underscores the spiritual independence and satisfaction which could be located in and expressed through cloth in medieval England. Ameliorating women as sensory beings, highlighting even the exegetical capacities of Eve, the quintessential model of female transgression, textiles offered a particularly potent and powerful motif in devotional literature. Under the guise of socially coded feminine conventionality, cloth and clothwork repeatedly reified a form of exegetical interpretation and practice which brought women closer to Christ. Quite literally fabricating Christ's body, the Virgin Mary assumed a central role in both promulgating and interpreting the divine Word, a prerogative entirely maintained as that of the masculine priesthood in ecclesiastical culture. St Veronica turned to cloth in her desire to physically experience Christ, centring her own prayers around a textile object, and offering another example of the female fabrication of Christ.