Medieval Women: In Their Own Words

While medieval texts may best be understood as a collaborative production, not deriving from a single authorial voice, this blockbuster exhibition nevertheless successfully presents medieval women – from and in all walks of life – in their own words

Prayer book made for Queen Joanna I of Castile, Bruges (modern-day Belgium),1486–1586. © British Library Board.

British Library, London
25 October 2024 – 2 March 2025

by ANNA McNAY

One of my all-time historic heroes would have to be Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the German Benedictine abbess and polymath who was active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary and medical practitioner. As the art historian Janina Ramirez writes: “Her enormous output over the eight decades of her long life means that her reputation is rivalled by just a handful of individuals. Perhaps only the polymath Leonardo da Vinci, working three centuries after Hildegard, can compare to her. But as is well known, he rarely finished his projects, while Hildegard did.”¹ So why is the name “Hildegard” less well-known than “Leonardo”? I think it probably goes without saying, and it was doubtless a significant part of the premise for the British Library’s current groundbreaking exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words.

The exhibition opened to the public on 25 October, is an exciting and varied programme of related talks and panels (most of which can be attended online if not in person), and it is accompanied by a stellar publication – more than just your regular catalogue – comprising nine essays and 40 spotlight studies of well- and less-well-known medieval women.² All this becomes even more impressive when you consider that, in October 2023, the library was hit by a cyber-attack that meant access was lost to all image assets and thus all the photography for the book had to be done from scratch.

Eleanor of Castile, queen of England from 1274 to 1290. Replica, late-13th-century.

The exhibition opens with a large replica late-13th-century carved stone figure of Eleanor of Castile (queen of England from 1274 to 1290) from the Waltham Cross. It greets the visitor and ushers us in as our guide. The architecture of the exhibition is like that of a large church or abbey, which is really evocative, with tall windows and partitions casting long shadows across the floor. There are more than 140 objects on display, primarily manuscripts from the British Library’s own collection, but accompanied by some fabulous and rare loans. The idea for the exhibition grew out of a digitisation project on medieval and Renaissance women, during which many exciting discoveries were made of previously unlogged items in the collection. To set some parameters for what still remains a very wide scope, the curators, Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, decided to focus on women in Europe from 1100 to 1500. Aside from that, they were hindered by the bias of survival,³ but they actively sought out – and found – stories representing diversity: including disability, gender identity and different religions.

The exhibition is broken down into four chapters. First, Private Lives explores women’s bodies and health, as well as family life at home. Second, Public Lives focuses on women’s power and political involvement. Third, Working Lives looks at women at work and women’s creativity. Finally, Spiritual Lives covers women’s experiences as nuns, visionaries and, often innocently accused, heretics. Hildegard, it turns out, is a good wave to ride in on, since she effectively bookends the exhibition, through the display of a sumptuously gilded page from an illustrated 13th-century copy of her final and greatest visionary work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Works) (composed from 1163-73), showing her busily writing down one of her visions. But she was also of great consequence in terms of women’s bodies and health, of which she would, of course, have had a unique understanding, and she laid the foundation for the science of holistic healing with her medical book, Causae et Curae (Causes and Cures), which is still referred to today.

'Disease woman', from the Wellcome Apocalypse, possibly Erfurt, Germany, c1420. © Wellcome Collection, London.

Not everyone was as enlightened as Hildegard, of course. The prevalent belief during the middle ages was that the female body was inferior to the male. This is exemplified by a diagram of the so-called “disease woman” (from the Wellcome Apocalypse, c1420), which was the only popularly available medical diagram of female anatomy. It depicts a woman, her internal organs exposed, squatting, perhaps in a birthing position. It was probably intended as a basic teaching guide, but it reinforces the idea of the female body as inherently predisposed to disease.

Medieval medical manuscripts usually present a view of medicine dominated by university-trained male physicians. In practice, however, women performed many medical functions: as healers, midwives and even surgeons. Another item on display is a petition by Joan du Lee (c1403) to King Henry IV, in which she requests letters of protection enabling her to travel safely around the country performing the art of “fisik” (medicine), without attack from those who regarded her with contempt. There is also a 15th-century treatise fabulously illustrated with pictures of a woman administering a cupping treatment to a male patient. This method of drawing out toxins by means of a vacuum created by applying heated glass cups to the skin is still practised today (Gwyneth Paltrow attended a New York film premiere in 2004 with her back covered in round bruises from cupping).

In medieval France, roughly 1.5% of medical practitioners whose names survive were women. Of these, about 36% were midwives. Unsurprisingly, much of women’s healthcare focused on their sexual and reproductive health, reflecting the social value placed on childbearing. The 14th-century Breviarium Bartholomei, a medical compendium made for St Bartholomew’s hospital in London, includes a chapter on gynaecology, outlining procedures for testing virginity, making a woman appear to be a virgin, and contraception. Some of the key words in this latter section were written in code. For example, one method required a woman to wear a charm made from weasel testicles, with the Latin word mustele (“weasel”) written in code as “lxtufmf”.

The Sekenesse of Wymmen, England, 15th Century. © British Library Board.

Another of the most widely read gynaecological texts was the 15th-century The Sekenesse of Wymmen. The pages on display illustrate potential complications due to the position of the baby during childbirth. These are accompanied by instructions to the midwife on how to help the mother-to-be by moving the baby into the head-first position or by using remedies such as hot baths, poultices, ointments and herbs. Similarly, an Italian, early-14th-century Latin translation of the Kitab al-Tasrif (The Method of Medicine), originally written in Al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) by the surgeon Al-Zahrawi (936-1013), explains various surgical operations and the instruments required for them, with the page on display describing the procedure for removing the remains of a foetus and placenta from the womb following a miscarriage.

Such advice was much needed, since, in medieval England, approximately one in every 20 aristocratic women died in childbirth. More prevalent than good medicine, however, were the myriad superstitions and beliefs. The pregnant Margaret Paston writes to her husband John (Norfolk, England, December 1441), for example, urging him to wear a ring depicting St Margaret of Antioch, an early Christian martyr, who purportedly emerged unharmed from the belly of a dragon and accordingly became the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth. Another beautiful example is a parchment birth girdle (early 15th century and one of only nine medieval English birth girdles known to survive), covered with protective prayers and charms, as well as a life-sized illustration of Christ’s side-wound, through which, according to medieval interpretations, he gave birth to the church. Touch was key to activating the protective powers of the girdle, as evidenced by the fact that the centre of the wound is worn, where it has been rubbed and kissed.

In an effort to engage our contemporary senses, the exhibition includes a “sensory station” devised by Tasha Marks, where the visitor can, for example, smell a breath freshener and a hair perfume (which would have been combed through the hair), created following medieval recipes. Not everything has changed as much as one might think, with at least 30 of the plant ingredients used in a 12th-century, southern Italian recipe collection still being used in modern-day cosmetics and pharmacology.

One rather lovely object on display is a woodcut from Johannes Brugman’s Vita Sanctae Lidwinae (Schiedam, 1498), depicting the eponymous St Lidwina of Schiedam (1380-1433) being helped up after a fall on a frozen river while ice-skating with her friends as a teenager. Lidwina broke a rib in the accident, and this somehow developed into an abscess, which went on to cause debilitating chronic health conditions that kept her bedbound for much of her life. She turned to religion, experienced visions and practised healing, being named, as a result, the patron saint of chronic pain and ice-skating. Full marks to the curators for invisible-disability inclusion.

This story segues neatly to the one the curators found relating to gender identity: the transcript of the testimony given by the sex worker Eleanor Rykener when caught in the act and arrested. Rykener, who calls herself Eleanor throughout the interrogation, was born John – a fact that caused confusion for the scribe, who flips between masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. This was the least of the uncertainty, however, since it remains unclear whether Rykener was arrested for prostitution, sodomy, both or neither. No outcome was recorded for the case.

Slaves were also expected to perform sexual acts for their masters, and a document recording the sale of a 22-year-old Russian woman, Marta, as a slave, in Venice, on 7 February 1450, states that she is sound of mind and body, but that they cannot be sure she hasn’t been pregnant (significant in light of her expected duties). What makes this document especially interesting is that one of the signatories is a woman – thus one asset provides us with two quite opposite sides of a story.

Beyond slavery and prostitution, medieval women were active in many walks of life. The late historian Eileen Power notes: “Medieval industry was open to women, and they played a by no means inconsiderable part in it. There was hardly a craft in which we do not find women. They were butchers, chandlers, ironmongers, net-makers, shoemakers, glovers, girdlers, haberdashers, purse-makers, cap-makers, skinners, bookbinders, gilders, painters, silk-weavers and embroiderers, spicers, smiths and goldsmiths, among many other trades.”⁴ The 14th-century Luttrell Psalter has a range of beautiful illustrations depicting women at work. For example, on the pages on display, we see them reaping barley with sickles and feeding chickens with distaffs under their arms. Alongside this, we can see a farmer’s account roll from Stebbing, Essex (1483-84), listing 27 men and 16 women who had been hired to bring in the harvest, paid four pence and three pence each respectively – the gender pay gap is nothing new.

Medieval women were active and vocal in standing up for their rights, and there is an anonymous written account from Cambridge (a 16th-century copy) detailing the shouts – “Away with the learning of clerks, away with it!” – of a certain Margaret Starre during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Another example of an outspoken woman is the case of the Bolognese noblewoman Nicolosa Sanuti, who, in 1453, wrote a treatise arguing against the church’s new laws restricting what women could wear. She put forward that women had contributed greatly to society and thus had surely earned the right to wear what they wanted. Although unsuccessful at getting the laws repealed, she can certainly be viewed as a sartorial trailblazer.

One of the women to be “spotlit” in the exhibition is Christine de Pizan (1364-1431). Born in Italy but raised in France, De Pizan was a keen learner and is usually taken to be the first professional female author in Europe. She started out as a scribe and lyric poet, and, after the death of her husband, served as court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French royal dukes. In a series of letters to the scholar Jean de Montreuil, Christine defended a woman’s right to be considered an individual, equal to a man in her moral and intellectual worth: “God has given women such beautiful minds to apply themselves, if they want to, in any of the fields where glorious and excellent men are active.” Latterly, she went on to establish her own workshop specialising in the production of manuscripts of her writings, which she personally supervised. A most beautiful example of these is the Book of the Queen, made c1410-14 for Isabeau of Bavaria, queen of France, which is on display, open at the page showing the authoress at work, writing in her study.

When it comes to royalty, it is fascinating to learn that, in Europe between 1100 and 1600, there were 20 reigning queens whose rights depended on birth rather than marriage – a greater number than today. Joanna I of Naples reigned for 39 years in the mid-14th century, but she continually had to defend her throne against male relatives. To support her right to rule, she had an illuminated genealogy produced, tracing her roots back to mythological heroes and classical gods (on display, from the library’s collection). This sits alongside the stunning and intricately carved ivory plaques from the psalter of Queen Melisende, who ruled over the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1131 to 1143. The text of this book – which is also on display – is in Latin, but the illustrations are in an eastern Christian style, featuring Greek inscriptions.

The Talbot Shrewsbury Book (1444-45), a collection of romances and chivalric treatises prepared as a wedding gift for Margaret of Anjou on her marriage to Henry VI, is shown open at its first pages, with an illustration of the book being presented to the queen on her throne. For those less interested in illuminations, however, Margaret is also represented by the skull of a barbary lion. It is known, from an account book recording expenses for her journey to England, that she was accompanied by such a beast, who was to be kept in the Tower of London, where, at the time, there was something of a royal menagerie. This skull was found in an excavation of the moat in the 1930s, and carbon-dating suggests it belonged to Margaret’s lion.

Another type of display intended to hold the attention of those less keen on letters and manuscripts is the digital interactive. One asks the visitor various questions to determine whether they are a witch (although witchcraft does not feature large in the exhibition, since, as Jackson explained in the curator’s talk, it really was more of a 16th-century phenomenon). Another explains how to divorce your medieval husband according to the Welsh code of law known as Llyfr Iorwerth (The Book of Iorwerth). Who would have thought that a medieval woman could leave her husband within seven years of marriage, retaining her rights and possessions, on one of three grounds: if he had leprosy; if his breath stank; or if he was impotent. To prove the latter, the couple would be required to have sex on a newly washed white sheet to ascertain whether the husband ejaculated.

A Carthusian anthology of theological works in English, including Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love (the Amherst Manuscript). © British Library Board.

Medieval women were not permitted to become priests, but, alongside Hildegard, there were a number of renowned female religious leaders, one being another of the spotlit women, Julian of Norwich (c1343-after 1416). Her Revelations of Divine Love, the first work in English known to be written by a woman, is an annotated account of a series of 16 visions that she experienced while ill in bed in 1373. The priest had been called to read Julian her last rites, and, in so doing, he held a crucifix up to her face. Her visions were then of this crucifix coming to life and the voice of Christ speaking directly to her. Julian was so dedicated to sharing her visions that she became an anchoress and spent the rest of her life in a cell next to a church, learning to read and write, and producing this book. The manuscript on display is a 17th-century copy made by one of a group of English nuns who fled to France during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. The copies they took with them were lost to the French Revolution, but they had copied out passages in their personal prayerbooks. Key to Julian’s understanding of her visions was the concept of a loving God who would save all souls. This was fundamentally at odds with a church that believed in eternal damnation, and so Julian was deemed heretic.

There was indeed a fine line in medieval times between sainthood and condemnation, and another case in point is Margery Kempe (c1373-after 1438), a Christian mystic and author of the first “autobiography” in English. Kempe was born to a wealthy merchant family in Norfolk. After the birth of her first child, she began experiencing visions. Ultimately (after bearing 13 further children), she persuaded her husband to live a sexless marriage, so that she could devote her life to religion and pilgrimage. The book narrates her personal life and her visions of and conversations with Jesus, God and the Virgin Mary. As Ramirez points out, what makes it so valuable and interesting is “not necessarily the intrigue, but the more mundane details it preserves”.⁵ The story of the discovery of this manuscript, however – the only one of Kempe’s books to survive – is anything but mundane. It was found in an English country house in 1934 when Colonel William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-Bowdon was rummaging about looking for balls to play a game of ping-pong with visiting friends. As the story goes, he was searching through a pile of old books and exclaimed: “I’m going to put the whole bloody lot on the bonfire tomorrow!” But one of his friends, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, intervened, thus saving Kempe’s words from extinction.⁶

The opening page of the Book of Margery Kempe. © British Library Board.

Although not a heretic, Kempe was often accused of being one, probably because, at that time, devout women often took part in secretive heretic “conventicles” (assemblies for prayer and preaching). Additionally, she refused to enter a convent or become an anchoress, yet came dangerously close to preaching. (She is also known to have visited Julian in her cell.) She attempted to get her story written twice, but the first scribe rendered it illegible. The surviving manuscript, written in 15th-century East Anglian prose, was scribed by a man named Salthouse, and carries at least four sets of annotations – tracing mystical themes, imagery and mentions of other mystical writers – which were added by various monks in the half century following Kempe’s death.⁷ Throughout, Kempe is referred to in the third person, as “this creature”, making it clear she did not write down the words herself. Nevertheless, she is “undoubtedly the main subject, protagonist, and source”.⁸ The book is therefore of significant interest in relation to the question of authorship. Professor of medieval studies and translator of the manuscript, Anthony Bale, says: “Taken at face value, the difficult genesis of The Book of Margery Kempe bears out the requirement on the part of medieval women to rely on educated or ordained men in order to write … It is unclear how far these roles should be considered ‘scribal’, compositional, or authorial.”⁹ He also notes, however, that Kempe checked the priest’s work, citing from the beginning of the text, which states: “He read it over in the presence of this creature, and she helped at those times where there was any difficulty.”¹⁰ Bale concludes that, instead of looking for a single “author” for The Book of Margery Kempe: “We would do better to acknowledge the collaborative, and sometimes haphazard, way in which medieval writing was produced.”¹¹

This idea of medieval textual production as a collaborative venture is explored further by the medievalist Diane Watt, who argues that the use of the term “this creature” to refer to Kempe “simultaneously underlines the humility of the post-conversion Margery, and emphasises the closeness of her relationship to God the Creator”,¹² and, moreover, that “the criteria of originality that is so central to post-Romantic definitions had no relevance to medieval definitions of authorship ... God was considered the ultimate author or auctor, and the Bible was the source of all written authority or auctoritas.”¹³ As fellow medievalist Jennifer Summit puts it: “The modern idea of the author as a single, creative individual holds limited relevance for medieval textual culture … and limited application to the writings of medieval women.”¹⁴ She asks rhetorically: “Who is the author: scribe or visionary, hagiographer or saint?” and offers the answer that: “All position themselves not as originators but as recorders of divinely inspired text that originates elsewhere.”¹⁵ Watt writes that later in the book (chapter 28), Kempe laments that we do not “support Our Lord’s own secretaries whom He has endued with love”,¹⁶ noting that while the Middle English term secretari(e) could be used in the modern sense of “one employed to write for another, a scribe, a secretary”, its primary meaning at the time was “one entrusted with private or confidential matters, a confidant; a trusted servant or counsellor; one entrusted with the secrets of God”. Kempe, Watt suggests, can best be described as “God’s secretary”, in the sense that she communed intimately with Him, and He entrusted her with revelations that it then became her duty to share with others. The notion of “secretary” is thus distinct from that of “scribe”, both of which are distinct from that of “author” (which, aside from referring to God, was only used for ancient poets, philosophers and theologians).¹⁷

Besides manuscripts, letters comprise a mainstay of the objects in the exhibition, and documents such as the Paston letters provide further examples of the use of a scribe. The Paston family, also based in Norfolk, climbed the social ladder from peasantry to landed gentry during the 15th century. A cache of about 1,000 personal letters sent to and from the family survives, again providing valuable insights into everyday medieval life. Most of the Paston women wouldn’t have been able to write and thus relied on scribes to pen their messages for them. An endearing example of these is the oldest surviving Valentine’s Day letter in the English language, sent by the then Margery Brews to her fiancé John Paston III in 1477. In the short poem she includes with her text, the strength of her feeling is clear (“My herte me byddys euer more to love yowe, Truly ouer all erthely thing”¹⁸), as is the strength of the relationship and level of trust between a woman and her scribe.

Letter of Joan of Arc to the citizens of Riom, 9 November 1429. Letter signed by Joan of Arc. © Town of Riom, Municipal Archives, AA.

To close, there is a spotlit name that most visitors are bound to have heard of: Joan of Arc (?-1431). Alongside copies of the proceedings of her trial, which resulted in her burning at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431, and those of her posthumous trial in the 1450s, at which the charges of heresy were nullified,20 sits what both curators deem their “star loan”: a letter bearing the signature of Jeanne la Pucelle (the real name of Joan of Arc). Written on 9 November 1429, this letter has never previously left Riom, the town in France to which it was sent by Joan almost 600 years ago. It is one of only a handful of her letters to survive and the earliest of just three to bear her signature. Joan would have dictated her letter to a scribe, but then she took the pen to sign her name. Despite being illiterate, she clearly understood the value of the written word. This one short document therefore exemplifies the problematic for historians of medieval women’s illiteracy, and the risk they ran, if outspoken, of being accused of heresy; but, at the same time, it also demonstrates the tenacity and strength of medieval women, and their participation in aspects of life reaching far beyond those which even today we would consider feminine.

Such, too, is the achievement of this exhibition, which draws people in with names they know and then goes on to introduce them to a great many more they might otherwise never have encountered. It paints an detailed picture of life for all these women, at all levels of society, in medieval Europe between 1100 and 1400, and, moreover, it successfully prioritises the idea of making this presentation “in their own words”. I left the library after the two-hour press slot feeling the immediate need to go back to better appreciate the sumptuous yet rarely displayed manuscripts, as well as the stories they tell. By the sounds of it, I ought to get booking sooner rather than later. This could be the blockbuster show of the year – if not the decade, or perhaps millennium.

References
1. Femina. A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez, WH Allen, 2022, page 179.
2. Medieval Women: Voices and Visions, edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, British Library Publishing, 2024.
3. Ramirez notes that the title of her book, “Femina”, was “the label scribbled alongside texts known to be written by a woman, so less worthy of preservation” (op cit, page 11).
4. Medieval Women by Eileen Power, Cambridge University Press, 1975, page 59.
5. Ramirez, op cit, page 287.
6. ibid, page 279.
7. The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by Anthony Bale, Oxford University Press, 2015, page xix.
8. ibid, page xviii.
9. ibid, page xix.
10. ibid, page xx.
11. ibid.
12. Medieval Women’s Writing. Works by and for Women in England, 1100-1500 by Diane Watt, Polity Press, 2007, page 130.
13. ibid, page 9.
14. Women and Authorship by Jennifer Summit in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, Cambridge University Press, 2003, page 91.
15. ibid, page 99, cited in Watt, op cit, page 9.
16. Watt, op cit, page 118. nb. The Bale translation does not use the contemporary word “secretary” for the original secretari(e), and he chooses a paraphrase in line with Watt’s argument, namely “those whom our Lord has entrusted with His secrets” (Bale, op cit, page 66).
17. ibid, page 119.
18. “My heart bids me ever more to love you, Truly over all earthly things”. See Jackson and Harrison, op cit, page 63.