Performing piety

The parish church was the touchstone of every community and it nourished the life experience of each medieval person. The key thresholds of the Christian life course were marked by the rituals of the sacraments, while the spatial geography of the parish church integrated the human body with the sacred scheme of the Christian cosmos. The spaces and rituals of the church were central to habitual learning and the individual sense of embodiment that was built up through the course of a lifetime. Multi-disciplinary sources permit the reconstruction of ritual action in the church: spatial movement and gestures, viewing and proximity to the eucharist and the ingestion of consecrated materials. The agency of parishioners was expressed through the commissioning of images and material culture for their church and through the performance of ‘pararituals’, material practices which complemented the formal liturgy. These sources of evidence allow us to search beyond what medieval people were doing to what these ritual actions may have ‘meant’, or signified (see Chapter 1.2).

The church was also the focal point for social interaction and exchange, providing the opportunity for regular meetings between friends, neighbours and courting couples, and bringing together interest groups united by factors such as age and occupation. It was the venue too for interactions between the living and the dead, through funerary and memorial practices, and by the perpetuation of beliefs surrounding the afterlife.