Widows are Doin' It for Themselves: Piety and Power in the Tomb of Alice Chaucer (Cahill-Patten & Holmberg)
Updated: Jul 16
In this episode, Zelda Cahill-Patten and Sofia Holmberg explore the unusual tomb of Alice Chaucer, a wealthy and influential noblewoman living in fifteenth-century England. Thrice-widowed, Alice was the granddaughter of the famous poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and amassed vast lands and political power in her lifetime. Today, she is best remembered for her exquisite memorial, a double-decker transi tomb that represents her body as an emaciated cadaver. The tomb can teach us not only about Alice’s attitudes towards death and the afterlife, but also her lived experience as a medieval woman. Together, Zelda and Sofia unpack clues that reveal Alice’s life as a pious and powerful widow, from her religious practices of bodily discipline, to the books she read and commissioned, to the striking monument itself.
Zelda Cahill-Patten studied medieval literature and art history at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute. In autumn 2026, she is due to begin a PhD on the Middle English Prose Brut, at Kent’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Sofia Holmberg studied history and art history at the University of Glasgow and medieval art history at the Courtauld Institute. Her research interests include medieval ideas about and visualisations of the female body as well as questions of otherness, monstrosity and the macabre.
Further Resources
Archer, Rowena E., ‘Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk (d.1475), and her East Anglian Estates’, in Wingfield College and its Patrons: Piety and Prestige in Medieval Suffolk, eds. Bloore, Peter, and Martin, Edward (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015).
Barker, Jessica, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture (United Kingdom: Boydell & Brewer, 2020).
Bleeke, Marian, ‘He was a Manly Man, to be an (Arch)Bishop Able: Transi tombs and Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 8 (2022), 1-27.
Goodall, John A.A., God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth-Century Almshouse (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001).
King, Pamela, ‘My Image to be made all naked: Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women in Fifteenth-Century England’, in The Ricardian 23 (2003), 294-314.
Meale, Carol M., ‘Reading Women’s Culture in Fifteenth-Century England: the Case of Alice Chaucer’, in Mediaevalitas: Reading the Middle Ages, eds. Boitani, Piero, and Torti, Anna (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996).
Sauer, Michelle M., ‘The Meaning of Russet: A Note on Vowesses and Clothing’, in Early Middle English, Volume 2, Number 2 (2020), 91-97.
Walker Bynum, Caroline, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Welch, Christina, ‘Exploring Alice: the theological, socio-historical, and anatomical context of the de la Pole cadaver sculpture’, in English Alabaster Carvings and their Cultural Contexts, ed. Murat, Zuleika (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019), 276-295.
Additional Credits
Gregorian chant: Wikimedia Commons, File: Ad.te.levavi.VIII.Ton.ogg [public domain]. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ad.te.levavi.VIII.Ton.ogg
Featuring Jago Cahill-Patten as William de la Pole
Episode transcript (Note: For a time-dynamic transcript, access the episode through a free podcasting platform such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify):
Zelda: In the village of Ewelme, just outside of Oxford, you can visit the parish church of St. Mary the Virgin.
Sofia: From the outside, it looks like a relatively ordinary late medieval church, but if you open the door and walk to its east side chapel, you will see one of the most extraordinary survivals of 15th century Britain, a monumental alabaster tomb.
Zelda: This tomb is what's known as a transi tomb, a type of monument that appeared in Britain and Northern Europe in increasing numbers in the late medieval period. These memorials might seem morbid by modern standards. They show the deceased as an emaciated cadaver rather than an idealized effigy, confronting viewers with a very real picture of what death might have looked like.
Sofia: This particular tomb has two levels. At the top, there's an effigy of a woman dressed in widow's clothes with a serene expression on her face. But as you drop your gaze to the bottom of the tomb, you can see in between delicate archways, a carving of a shriveled corpse clutching a shroud with one bony hand.
Zelda: Paradoxically, the cadaver effigy almost appears more alive than the upper effigy. Its lips are parted, and its eyelids are half open. Concealed within the tomb and visible only to the half-open eyes of the carved cadaver are two devotional paintings depicting the Annunciation, John the Baptist, and Mary Magdalene.
Sofia: On the side of the tomb, a brass plaque reads, "Pray for the soul of the most serene Princess Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, patron of this church, and first founder of this alms house, who died on the 20th day of May in the year of our Lord, 1475."
Zelda: Who was this woman, and why was she buried inside this unusual tomb?
I'm Zelda.
Sofia: And I'm Sofia.
Zelda: And the woman commemorated on the tomb is Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of the famous poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and a fascinating figure in her own right.
Sofia: In this episode of the Multicultural Middle Ages podcast, we're going to explore her life and legacy in a bit more detail. We've been interested in Alice since both writing our dissertations on her while studying for MAs in medieval art history at The Courtauld Institute.
She's a fascinating example of a medieval woman with a huge amount of agency, both in her life and in death, and we think it's time that more people knew her story.
Zelda: Ultimately, this unusual tomb illustrates Alice's high degree of patronal control. The way that Alice chose to live her life, both as a powerful social agent and pious widow, is very much reflected in the monument's design.
Before we begin, we want to express our thanks to the Medieval Academy of America for giving us a platform to share our research, and also to Logan Quigley for all his help.
Sofia: Alice was born around 1404, probably in Ewelme, the only child of Thomas and Maud Chaucer, a prosperous and politically powerful couple.
By the age of 11, she was already married. While this wouldn't have been the experience of all medieval women, it was not untypical for girls from wealthy or powerful families, especially heiresses, to be married off at a young age. At 12 years old, Alice was already a widow. She was to remarry and be widowed two more times in her life.
Her most important and longest marriage was to William de la Pole, her third husband, with whom she had her only child, a son called John.
Zelda: Throughout her marriages and widowhoods, Alice acquired vast lands and wealth. She was a shrewd businesswoman, and by the end of her life she owned 130 manors, 144 parcels of land, two London residencies, and five castles, and her income was estimated to be around 2,000 pounds a year.
This made her one of the wealthiest people in England.
Sofia: She was also active in the political sphere. Alice was a lady-in-waiting to prominent women at court, such as Margaret of Anjou, and arranged a politically advantageous marriage for her son. She managed to hold on to power throughout the political turmoil of the Wars of the Roses.
Before William de la Pole died, he sent a letter to his seven-year-old son that reveals the trust he put in his wife's intelligence and judgment. He told John... "
Narration: Alway to worship your lady and mother, and alway obey her commandments, and to believe her counsels and advises in all your works."
Zelda: Around 1466, 16 years after William's death, Alice made Ewelme Manor her primary residence, bringing with her an impressive range of furnishings and books, which are recorded in the Ewelme inventories.
In 1437, Alice and William had founded an almshouse in the village. God's House, as it was called, supported 15 men to say daily prayers for the couple and their family to speed them through purgatory. The almshouse is directly next to St Mary's Church, where Alice's own tomb came to stand, placing her at the heart of this religious community even after her death Sophia and I visited Alice's tomb together in the spring of 2024 as field research for our dissertations.
I remember reading a lot of scholars who would describe the cadaver effigy as ugly or a source of disgust, but I think the reality of the tomb is quite different from that. Sophia, what were your first impressions of the monument?
Sofia: I agree. Seeing the tomb in person really changed my perspective on it. My research focused on the representation of the female body and the cadaver effigy, and I had done a fair amount of reading about the tomb before the visit.
And in addition to being described with words like ugly and repulsive, the cadaver effigy has often been described as being hidden or concealed. During the site visit, I was instead struck by how visible the cadaver effigy actually is. There are several large windows in the chapel, so there is quite a lot of light coming through, and the arches at the bottom of the tomb are very narrow and delicate, which means that the cadaver is not at all difficult to see, even from a distance.
Zelda: Yeah. It's clearly visible between the arches, and I think we both found it quite peaceful and strangely beautiful. It's carved from alabaster, which is relatively unusual for cadaver effigies, giving it this luminous quality. And there's still traces of coloring: gold for the hair and red in the mouth. My research focused on the tomb paintings, which hadn't really been the subject of much scholarship before.
The site visit confirmed that they're incredibly difficult to see. They're painted above the cadaver effigy's face and feet, and so are not visible from the outside unless you lie on the floor. I was surprised by how large they are, almost a meter wide. They span the whole width of the tomb. But from photos, I'd assumed they were quite small.
Sofia: Yeah. I think a main takeaway from the site visit for us both was the importance of actually seeing things in person and not just relying on photos, if this option is open to you. Seeing the tomb in person really changed the trajectory of my research.
Zelda: Can you speak a bit more about the direction your thinking took?
Sofia: Well, scholars sometimes make an argument that Alice's tomb was designed to conceal the cadaver effigy for reasons of female modesty. It's easy to see why this view has become so prevalent. The majority of cadaver tombs made for men typically have large openings through which the cadaver effigy is visible.
The middle of Alice's tomb is instead shaped like a closed tomb chest and only opens up at the bottom. However, rather than concealing, I came away from the visit thinking that actually the design of Alice's tomb encourages an even more intense engagement with the cadaver effigy than many similar tombs.
The window-shaped arches at the bottom of the monument encourage you to get down on your knees and peer inside to get a closer look. Down on the ground, you're rewarded with a very intimate encounter with the effigy of Alice's completely bare and exposed body. If Alice had been worried about this being visible, she would surely have chosen to be commemorated by a different type of tomb, or, as is the case with a few other similar tombs with female cadaver effigies, made sure the lower effigy was completely covered by a shroud.
Alice's effigy, in contrast, only draws a shroud over its groin. I think we have to grant Alice a bit more agency in this process. She commissioned a tomb which shows her body naked and on display for a reason. So my research came to focus on Alice's religious practices and how the cadaver effigy embodies several elements which were central to late medieval female piety.
Alice was clearly a very pious woman.
Zelda: Well, we've thought a lot about hierarchies of virtue for women's different roles in the Middle Ages, and how this was linked to sexual activity. So it was seen as highly desirable to be a virgin. For example, a nun who had taken vows of chastity. But the state of widowhood was also exalted because it meant that you were no longer sexually active, or, in the words of William Langland, "Widowhood, more worthier than wedlock, as in heaven."
Sofia: There is some evidence which suggests that Alice may have become a vowess in her final widowhood. That is, a woman who had sworn an oath of chastity before a bishop without taking the vows of poverty and obedience sworn by nuns. In 1542, the antiquarian John Leland described the upper effigy of Alice's tomb as wearing the habit of a vowess crowned.
The clothes of widows and vowesses were essentially indistinguishable, but it's possible that the paint that originally covered the effigy was tied to a particular religious order. Whatever the case, the fact that Alice chose to be represented wearing these clothes clearly indicates that she valued her unmarried state and the chastity that came with it.
Zelda: Two of her husbands actually specified in their wills that they wanted to be buried with Alice, but she ignored their final wishes and is buried alone, which is very interesting in itself. You could say that her tomb elevates widowhood above marriage.
Sofia: The cadaver effigy also indicates a concern with chastity.
Like we mentioned earlier, it's strangely animated for a depiction of a dead body, and while the body is almost completely naked, it's lying on a shroud and uses one hand to draw the cloth over its groin, and some have called this a gesture of sexual self-control.
Zelda: Well, one of the figures depicted in the tomb paintings is Mary Magdalene.
A lot of medieval widows had a particular devotion to Mary Magdalene because she had been sexually active, but then renounced her sexuality and became one of Christ's most valued followers. And this is definitely at play in Alice's tomb. But another interesting aspect is that it was believed Mary was the daughter of a wealthy landowner.
Her cognomen was said to come from the Magdalen, the name of one of her ancestral properties. Earthly riches were thought to stand in the way of entering Heaven, but Mary, who had come from wealth and privilege, served as a model for upper-class women's piety.
Sofia: In the last 30 years of her life, Mary Magdalene was believed to have retreated to the desert where she lived as an ascetic and penitent, forsaking her vast properties, luxurious clothing, and even food.
And just like the Magdalene rejected her wealth, rich people were expected to give up some of their wealth to the poor in order to achieve salvation.
Zelda: Images of Mary Magdalene had also become conflated with another female saint in this period, St. Mary of Egypt. Mary of Egypt began as a sex worker, but then became a penitent living in the desert.
Supposedly, her hair grew long and wild, and her skin wrinkled in the extreme heat. Because of this conflation, Mary Magdalene was often portrayed similarly, as an emaciated woman enveloped by long hair. Alice's depiction in her cadaver effigy seems to nod to this.
Sofia: If the nakedness of Alice's cadaver effigy as a whole recalls images of the two Marys, the inclusion of the withered and shrunken breasts may point towards Alice's commitment to charity.
The foundation of God's House was of course an act of charity, as it supported a community of 13 poor men and two priests who received shelter, food, and payment in exchange for their prayers. In the codicil to the will of Alice's second husband, there is also a stipulation making provisions for Alice to feed three poor people with meat, bread, and milk from her own hands on a daily basis.
And in a 1462 indenture between Alice and the prior and convent of the Hull Charter House, which was a de la Pole foundation, provisions were made for the erection of statues of Alice and her husband William in the refectory. The document stipulates that the prior of the convent should give food to two alms folk in the presence of these statues in perpetuity.
With this in mind, I find the rendering of the breasts on the cadaver effigy really intriguing. They're carefully sculpted and picked out in a different texture to the rest of the body. In the Middle Ages, images of the Virgin breastfeeding the Christ child were very common, and breasts were a potent sign for religious as well as physical nourishment.
It doesn't seem unlikely that the effigy's empty breasts would've signified the nourishment Alice had provided to others in her life Charity and food distribution in particular played a central role in the lives of countless female saints, and often went hand in hand with self-starvation. Mary Magdalene was the saint most associated with fasting in the Middle Ages.
And in addition to her devotion to her, Alice may have been devoted to another saint known for her extreme fasting and bodily discipline. The Ulm inventories list what has been interpreted by some scholars as a legend of Radegund.
Zelda: This now lost book would have contained the story of St. Radegund. In the inventory, the manuscript is described as covered in a solopel.
Carol Meal has identified this solopel as a chemise binding, a loose cover of leather or cloth. These bindings were often associated with women's private devotional reading. In fact, one of the most famous 15th century depictions of a woman reading is a painting by Rogier van der Weyden, which shows Mary Magdalene absorbed in a prayer book that is wrapped in a white chemise.
We can infer that Alice's legend of Radegund was a text that she studied in private, perhaps one that she returned to often, and that its content was personally significant to her.
Sofia: Radegund was a sixth century Frankish queen who escaped her marriage to become an abbess. In the late 15th century Life of St.
Radegund, the English poet Henry Bradshaw repeatedly emphasizes the saint's aversion to food, describing, for example, how Radegund would invite poor people into her hall and feed them from her own hands while shunning food herself. Considering the extreme emaciation of the cadaver effigy, I find it really interesting that Alice was seemingly devoted to these two saints known for their extreme fasting.
While peering into her tomb, you're able to count the sharply obtruding ribs that line her torso, and marvel at her deeply sunken stomach. While no written evidence survives that tells us if Alice herself engaged in fasts beyond church-mandated fast days, the design of her tomb indicates to the viewer that the body hidden beneath her widow's weeds was a starved body.
Ordinary religious women were taught to emulate holy women, and some were known to engage in similar religious practices. An example I considered in my research is Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, and another much-married heiress of similar social status to Alice. She was at one time the ward of Alice's husband, William.
And after William's death, Alice arranged a marriage between her son and Margaret, which was later annulled. In a commemorative sermon delivered by her personal confessor, John Fisher, after her death, Margaret was commended for having fasted beyond what was prescribed by the church. Based on what we do know about Alice, as well as trends in late medieval female piety, I think the tomb itself is an intriguing piece of evidence suggesting that fasting may have played a key role in Alice's religious practice.
Zelda: One of the other female saints that Alice was devoted to was the Virgin Mary. Of course, the image of the Annunciation, the moment where Mary first conceives Christ, is directly above the half-opened eyes of the carved cadaver, implying an ongoing process of spiritual contemplation and visual prayer. The painting includes typical Annunciation imagery.
Mary is being visited by the angel Gabriel, who interrupts her while she is reading a book. This book is clearly rendered in the tomb with a red cover and black lines meant to indicate text. The reading detail is apocryphal. It stems from a belief that physical purity gave rise to intellectual purity.
Mary's exemplary virginity was therefore linked to her bookishness. Ambrose of Milan, a church father, believed that Mary was reading the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 when Gabriel visited her, providing an early model for female scriptural exegesis. This passage said that a virgin would give birth to a son, the Emmanuel, so it was the prophecy which Mary herself came to fulfill.
The idea that Mary was reading during the Annunciation exploded into popularity in the late 11th century in Britain, coinciding with a significant growth in women's literacy. Educated medieval women may have used images of the reading virgin to authorize female study and celebrate their intellect, reaching beyond Mary's role as exemplary mother.
Alice, of course, was a highly literate woman herself. She was a literary patron to the poet John Lydgate, and the Ewelme Manor inventories list 21 books that Alice transported to Ewelme. 14 of these were ecclesiastical in content, probably used by the clergymen at the chapel, but seven of the books were more literary and perhaps designated Alice's personal library.
One, for example, was a copy of The Book of the City of Ladies, a book by Christine de Pizan, which celebrated female virtues and learning and honored the Virgin above all other female saints. It's exciting to think of Alice as a named female reader engaging with this text. The inventories also list a tapestry which showed the story of St.
Anna, Mary's mother. She was most commonly depicted teaching the Virgin Mary how to read, an apocryphal episode first popularized in England in the early 14th century. Alice's tapestry almost certainly included a representation of this story, indicating that Alice had a personal interest in, and devotion to, images of literate biblical women, particularly Mary.
I believe, therefore, that the painting of the Virgin reading within Alice's tomb was deeply personal in nature, linked to Alice's own literacy and reading practices. Alice may have had a personal cult to the literate Virgin, so that the painting's iconography was influenced by images Alice favored in life, demonstrating the depth of her patronal control.
During my research, I also became interested in why the concealed paintings were included within the tomb at all. There aren't very many parallels with Alice's tomb paintings in Britain, but one interesting comparison is the grave paintings that were produced in Flanders from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
These beautiful paintings, which often included the Virgin and Child and the Crucifixion, were created within the graves themselves so that no living person would have seen the images after the graves were sealed. Medieval Christians had a strong belief in the resurrection of the body at the end of time.
It is thought that the paintings might have been created to be the first thing that the occupants of these graves saw when they rose from the dead. Something more complex is going on in Alice's tomb. The carved cadaver is not Alice's actual body, but it does stand in for her flesh, and its relationship with the tomb paintings feels similar to what is going on in the Flemish grave paintings.
Tellingly, Mary Magdalene was the first person to witness the risen Christ. Alice's tomb paintings then could suggest belief in universal resurrection at the Judgment Day. The images within Alice's tomb may have been created for perception by her newly resurrected body, just as the painting of Mary Magdalene would perceive Alice's risen flesh.
We have no way of knowing if any medieval graves in Britain have paintings within them, but it does seem like a possibility in a culture that believed so potently in bodily resurrection.
Sofia: In the Middle Ages, the mouth was thought to be the place where the soul entered and left the body. The cadaver effigy's open mouth then can be viewed as an indication of the soul's departure from Alice's body.
But at the same time, it anticipates the soul's return, again linking to these ideas of bodily resurrection.
Sofia: We hope that we've demonstrated how Alice's tomb is a completely unique and fascinating monument, especially considering it was commissioned by and made for a medieval woman. The construction of such an elaborate monument would not have been possible without Alice's wealth and high social status, making it inextricably linked to the power she held within 15th century English society.
Zelda: So many details in its design are closely linked to the choices that Alice made in life, her charity, her pious widowhood, and her reading practices, demonstrating the patronal control she exerted over its creation. But there are many other interesting aspects of her tomb that we haven't covered today, from the Order of the Garter that the upper effigy wears around its forearm, to the carved angels that bear Alice's many coats of arms.
Sofia: Once again, we want to express our thanks to the Medieval Academy of America and the Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast for giving us a chance to share Alice's fascinating monument with you all.
Zelda: And we really encourage you to go and visit her tomb in person yourself, if that is possible. Maybe you, too, will become a fellow member of the Alice Chaucer Fan Club.
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