Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Janina Ramírez

‘I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon and stars.’ Hildegard of Bingen

This book comes with no apology. I am not here to convince you that it is high time we put women back at the centre of history. Many have done this before me. I’m also not here to draw a dividing line between male and female, to stress the importance of each in opposition to the other. Instead, I want to show you that there are so many more ways to approach history now. Far from being ‘unrecoverable’,1 developments in archaeology, advancements in technology and an openness to new angles have made medieval women ripe for rediscovery.

I am not rewriting history.

The difference is that I’m shifting the focus. The frame is now on female rather than male characters.

Approaching the past through women’s lives and stories offers a unique prism through which to find new and overlooked perspectives.

Women have always made up roughly half the global population. Why then should they not inform the way we perceive the past?

History is organic and the way we engage with it grows and changes. But how individuals have written history reflects the time in which they write, as much as the time they are writing about. Repackaging the past can influence the present. In times of colonial expansion, when support for the slave trade was required, the historian fed readers tales of explorers and conquerors. When soldiers were needed, ready to die for king and country, the historian gave them heroes and warriors. When society favoured male dominance and female subservience, the historian provided male-orientated history.

as all history is by its very nature subjective, no matter how objective we try to be.

Twenty thousand people attended her funeral, making it the single biggest ceremony for a non-royal in British history. Her death and her activism are what Emily Wilding Davison is remembered for. But there is another aspect of her life that underpins this book; one that is rarely mentioned in the huge body of literature on her. She was a medievalist.

But Emily Wilding Davison didn’t think the suffragettes were breaking new ground. For her, they were attacking a recent phenomenon of oppression. She wanted to return to an earlier time which she believed was populated by powerful women. In the medieval period she saw a model that challenged the pattern of misogyny embedded in the modern age.7 In fact, her view of the medieval world was one rich in diversity, with men and women as equals. In an essay published just one month before her death called ‘A Militant May Day’, she describes a crowd in an idealised medieval setting. It is international and multicultural, with English, Scots, French, Russians, old, young, male and female celebrating together, and a ‘little Saxon’ holding hands with a ‘little Jewess’. Instead of ‘God Save the King’, she claims the May Day motto is ‘God Save the People’.8

William Morris sought to combat the rise in industrial consumerism by embracing the handmade mediums of the medieval period. Augustus Pugin saw a national purity in Gothic architecture absent in the classical tradition, so used the medieval style as inspiration for the Houses of Parliament. John Ruskin encouraged a return to the romance of the medieval as a means of gaining ‘truth to nature’. For the suffragettes, however, the women they foregrounded displayed two essential medieval attributes: they were challenging societal norms by achieving power and influence despite their sex, and they were deeply religious.

The modern leaning towards science and reason over religion and spirituality has meant the deeply devout nature of the suffragette movement is often overlooked.

But the majority of women who took part in militant activity saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, promoting social cha...

Suffragette poster with Joan of Arc figure, Hilda Dallas (left).

The image of Inez Milholland astride a huge white horse leading a pageant through the streets of Washington DC on 3 March 1913 has become iconic.

Very few scholars have discussed these suffragettes who were fascinated by the medieval period. But understanding their medievalism subverts the general consensus that these twentieth-century women were fighting for agency in a vacuum, blazing a trail like never before. Rather than accept the misconstructions of the medieval period that had accrued over the intervening centuries, these suffragettes recognised a time when women had agency – and they wanted to return to it.

The Knight’s Tale’ is the first full story in the Canterbury Tales, and describes how Emelye was captured along with her sister Queen Hippolyta when Theseus laid siege to Scythia, home of the powerful Amazon women. She is taken to Athens, where she becomes the object of desire for two knights being held captive in a tower. To this end, she is idealised and objectified, but in many ways Emelye contradicts expectations of women in romance. First, the ‘Amazon’ women of Scythia were military-trained, and said to be able to ride horses, wield weapons and fight as equals to men.12 Second, Emelye expresses her desire to remain dedicated to the goddess of the hunt, Diana: ‘I Desire to be a maiden all my life, / Nor never would I be no lover nor wife.’ She tells the goddess that she prefers hunting and woodcraft to marriage and childbirth.

References to Emelye are full of suggestions that her freedom is limited, and her fate governed by forces beyond her control.

in her essay ‘The Price of Liberty’ Emily suggests that the militancy of suffragettes ties them back to strong women of the past: ‘The perfect Amazon is she who will sacrifice all even unto this last.’13

plans to appeal directly to the monarch. This idea has its roots in the medieval custom of the king as the ultimate arbiter of justice, who could be approached by his subjects as he travelled around the kingdom and asked for his intervention in their matters.

Theseus, expecting a hero’s welcome, is shocked by their behaviour and goes to dismiss them. But then one of the women ‘caught the reigns of his bridle’. His horse subdued, Theseus is compelled to hear the women’s grievances. This woman’s actions changed the course of history. Theseus wages war against Creon, the bones are recovered, and the ruler fulfils his oath to the women.

Grace Warrack

the first complete printed text of Julian’s work in 1901. It has never been out of print since,

By publishing Revelations of Divine Love, Grace provided twentieth-century women with one of their most impressive medieval foremothers.

anchoress,

her remarkable book, which is the first known text by a woman in English.

the motherly love of God for his creation

From the Reformation onwards, libraries were scoured for controversial texts. Various shorthand terms were used in catalogues to indicate which should be considered and potentially destroyed. Books were recorded as containing ‘witchcraft’, ‘heresy’ and ‘Catholic’ subject matter; the destiny of many of these texts is unknown, with the lists the only record of their existence. The title of this book – Femina – was the label scribbled alongside texts known to be written by a woman, so less worthy of preservation.

Catholics destroyed Protestant books and vice versa. The burning, destruction or removal of books carries with it two purposes: to destroy the physical objects, and to remove their contents from people’s memories.

While Julian’s book wasn’t heretical, it did sail close to the wind. She referred to Christ as a woman, suggested that sin was ‘behovely’ (‘necessary’), and she saw God as entirely forgiving no matter what a person did during their lives.

The book remained hidden until the sixteenth century, when it travelled to France to be met by nine young women escaping Protestant England to set up a Catholic convent in Cambrai, France. All were aged between 17 and 22, and among them was Gertrude More, great-great-granddaughter of famous Tudor Catholic and writer Thomas More.

the More family took an unconventional attitude towards educating women. Thomas insisted his many daughters received

the same classical education as his only son, with their intellectual capabilities impressing even King Henry VIII. The king was amazed to find a woman’s signature at the end of an ‘extremely erudite’ letter...

The Reformation impacted women significantly. As convents were closed, opportunities available to women narrowed to being a wife and being a mother. Nuns were returned to their families or made to marry, and educational opportunities were increasingly restricted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The situation worsened further for women as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers crafted ever more elaborate social divides between the sexes.

Here, everybody but a ‘great man’ suffers the indignity of being deemed insignificant. Women make up a significant portion of those dismissed of course, but also included are those Carlyle perceives as ‘little men’. This was the dominant approach of historians, and we still feel the pull of the so-called Great Man theory today.

Individuals like Alfred the Great fared well, preserved for posterity by Victorian historians as a great military leader. But his daughter Æthelflæd was overlooked. A military strategist and social reformer of a kind that almost eclipsed her father in her lifetime, she didn’t fit with Victorian notions of a woman’s place in society. Women of the past were recast as reflections of what Victorian society wanted them to be.

While seemingly engaging with the medieval period, Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian artists created sensual representations of the few medieval women they could access, once again filtering them through Victorian sensibilities. They are cast as virgin, victim, mother, whore or hag, with the image of an unobtainable maiden trapped in a tower repeated ad nauseum.

The way Millais has painted her parted lips is a tantalising invitation to stare lasciviously upon her downfall.

Over-writing – the practice whereby male writers would take the visions, words and ideas of female intellectuals and rewrite them for a largely male audience – was also common throughout the period.

empires. Controlling access to the past controls populations in the present, and determining who writes history can affect thought and behaviour.

At the time of writing this book there is a dangerous undercurrent to medieval studies, as the period is increasingly hijacked by the far right to promote extreme ideologies on race, ethnicity and immigration.32 Among the individuals who stormed the US Capitol in January 2020, the ‘Q-Shaman’, as he’s come to be known, was covered with Norse tattoos. The perpetrator of the Christchurch terrorist attack in 2019, who killed 51 and injured 40, had covered his weapons with medieval symbols of a crusader knight renowned for killing Muslims.33 And the so-called ‘War on Terror’ has exacerbated relations between East and West, with politicians like President George W. Bush drawing parallels with the Crusades.34

osteoarchaeology

All historical accounts are the products of the human concerns of their time and I freely acknowledge that I am focusing on a group I sympathise with, interpreting the evidence with my own interests at the fore. Yet it is ultimately an attempt to open up different ways of engaging with history.

We have little choice but to acknowledge our modernity, admit that our interest in the past is always (and by no means illegitimately) born of present concerns.

Our view of this time has been skewed by the historical writers that have come before us. It was a ‘dark age’, a time of ‘barbarians’: to be ‘medieval’ is shorthand for backwards, superstitious, reactionary, volatile.

Map showing the pilgrimages of Margery Kempe from King’s Lynn, 1413–33.

But even 90 years ago Grace Warrack would have been amazed that I could include the Loftus Princess or the Birka Warrior Woman in a discussion of medieval women. Through dedicated research and further advancements, it may just be a matter of time before others appear more fully.

What thing is it that women most desire?’ So speaks Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. The response she gives is that women want sex, money, land, independence and fun.

Equality is a frail veneer pinned precariously over some societies, and completely ignored or deliberately suppressed in others.