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Prayer beads have often been associated with women or a gendered form of piety, but little work has been done on exploring why this assumption has been made, or why and how the link was perpetuated. This article not only uses statistics to substantiate the connection but also explores some of the reasons behind it. Using a sample of wills from Lincolnshire in the period 1505–1534, the article undertakes qualitative and quantitative analysis to explore this connection and to examine the importance of these objects for their owners. It explores the significance of prayer beads for women in life in order to understand better what a testamentary bequest of such objects might have meant both for testator and recipient. Ultimately this article demonstrates that wills were places where the gendered nature of these objects was recorded, created and reinforced and, more broadly, shows the significance of prayer beads as ‘women’s goods’.
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