Widows are Doin' It for Themselves: Piety and Power in the Tomb of Alice Chaucer (Cahill-Patten & Holmberg)

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Upper and lower effigies of the tomb of Alice Chaucer, Ewelme, Oxfordshire. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Upper_and_lower_effigies_of_the_Alice_Chaucer,_Ewelme,_Oxfordshire.jpg

Rogier van der Weyden; The Magdalen Reading; c. 1435; oil on wood; 62.2 × 54.4 cm; The National Gallery, London. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rogier-van-der-weyden-the-magdalen-reading

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

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