Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It

by Janina Ramírez

Emily had enrolled in the Women’s Social and Political Union in November 1906, and over the seven years leading up to her death she had become increasingly militant. She was arrested nine times, went on hunger strike seven times and was force-fed 49 times;

Described by Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter Sylvia as ‘one of the most daring and reckless of the militants’, Emily was treated as a martyr after her death.

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.5

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.

the majority of women who took part in militant activity saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, promoting social change framed within religious terms.

Under the heading ‘Magic and Witchcraft’ a manuscript was labelled ‘Revelations to One Who Could Not Read a Letter, 1373’.15 She had found what she was looking for – the earliest surviving copy

Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.

Julian was born in the city of Norwich around 1343. She was 30 years old when, paralysed and resigned to death, she received a set of visions or ‘revelations’. She would go on to make a full recovery, but her life had been changed forever. When she returned to health, she chose to be enclosed as an anchoress, and received the last rites before being holed up in a single room for the rest of her life. She spent another three decades or more in her cell, contemplating the visions she had received and writing her remarkable book, which is the first known text by a woman in English.

Her famous phrase – ‘all shall be well, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’ – is not a trite piece of consolation, but rather a meaningful and considered statement of divine intent.

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.

The title of this book – Femina – was the label scribbled alongside texts known to be written by a woman, so less worthy of preservation. We can only wonder how many other texts were dismissed or destroyed as the work of ‘femina’. Revelations of Divine Love should have gone the same way and fallen victim to the book burnings of generations of reformers.

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.18 Thousands of medieval manuscripts, the repositories of generations of knowledge and art, were declared heretical and destroyed.

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.19 She would have kept her writings secret while inside her anchoress cell, but they eventually made their way out into the world.

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.

They made multiple copies of her text and the community preserved it through times of hardship, until the French Revolution when the convent was disbanded and the nuns, fearing execution, escaped to Stanbrook Abbey in Yorkshire. They took Julian with them.

Stillingfleet embraced deism, the idea that empirical reason and observation of the natural world provide enough evidence of a supreme being and that, therefore, revelations cannot be divine in origin.

As women were excluded from universities and theological discourse, their texts were not empirical, instead dealing with spiritual matters through their lived experience of revelations. They also tended to write in the vernacular rather than in the Latin learned by male scribes. The works of medieval ‘feminae’ were the perfect target for the reformers of the later generations.

Nuns were returned to their families or made to marry, and educational opportunities were increasingly restricted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.24

The relegation of women to the role of the second sex was firmly embedded in Protestant communities,

The divide was gender specific, with women increasingly confined to domestic activities and restrictive clothing. But there was also a class-based rift.27 What was acceptable for an upper-class lady was dictated by matters of taste, while men and women suffered similar degradation through poverty in industrial Britain.

As Britain competed with other European powers to expand its reach, absorbing entire cultures through the exploits of privileged Western men, so history was recorded in a way which placed them centre stage.

This was the dominant approach of historians, and we still feel the pull of the so-called Great Man theory today. Those who didn’t fit the moral code of Victorian England, or sat outside the narrative of conquest, were repackaged or removed from the record. Individuals like Alfred the Great fared well, preserved for posterity by Victorian historians as a great military leader. But his daughter Æthelflæd was overlooked.

The truth is that the foundations of Victorian-era medievalism lay on shaky ground. The texts preserved and copied down the centuries had already suffered from multiple stages of editing and erasure. The versions read in the nineteenth century had been repeatedly revisited, with women cast in socially acceptable ways for ever-changing audiences.

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.31 This meant that both oral and written accounts by women were subsumed into those of later authors and remain unacknowledged.

Teaching children about ‘great men’ enforced a sense of a great nation, a version of history which could be distributed along the length and breadth of vast empires. Controlling access to the past controls populations in the present, and determining who writes history can affect thought and behaviour.

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.

This scope is intentional: the medieval world was not a small, parochial one where everyone lived and died within view of their local church. Some people travelled vast distances in their lives, via boat, on foot and by horse. The route covered by this book is very similar to the journeys taken by medieval women in their own lifetimes.

From 1979 to 1981 he was part of a team that discovered Neolithic cairns and Iron Age settlements on this unassuming crop of land surrounding Street House Farm. One discovery in particular set this site apart: a unique structure, radiocarbon-dated to around 2200 BC.

the absence of any other convincing suggestions, it was declared a ‘ritual site’, where unknown ancient ceremonies took place, and named the ‘Wossit’ (from ‘what-is-it’).4 It acts as a reminder that when we look backwards through time our investigations are tentative and we must keep asking the question ‘what is it?’

The early medieval burial ground at Loftus is unusual. More than 100 graves are arranged in a rectangle, forming a clear outline. They’re all oriented east to west, common in Christian burials, with the head placed in the direction of the rising sun.

Grave 42 had a burial mound raised up over it so that it could be seen from a distance. Although the bone, wood and fabric had vanished, the remaining metal objects indicated how the original burial would have looked. Eroded iron cleats and scrolled headboard fittings were all that was left of a very fine wooden bed. This was by no means the only bed burial found in England, but it was the only one this far north.

But the most exceptional find was the central ornament, a shield-shaped golden pendant with rows of cloisonné gemstones around a scallop-shaped garnet nearly two centimetres across. The first of its kind to have been found, it suggests that the person honoured in grave 42 was very important – most probably a member of royalty or nobility. It also suggested that she was a woman.

Without bones to analyse, the gendering of the graves at Street House was based on the finds. Weapons and paired blades were considered male objects, while beads, keys and jewellery were female. This, of course, is not exact. When examining other sites with skeletal remains, the gendering of objects is sometimes reversed.

The pendant offers fascinating insights into its owner and the world she was a part of. Now known as the Loftus Princess, only someone important would be buried with such honour and with such beautiful treasures.

Sutton Hoo ship burial,

And in the same year as the Loftus Princess was discovered, metal-detectorist Terry Herbert dug up a staggering 3,500 pieces of cloisonné jewellery in the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found – the Staffordshire Hoard.

The Loftus jewel is no such battle trophy. It was placed in the ground as part of a burial; presumably the personal possession of the Northumbrian woman who wore it. By making such a statement through her burial, she and her community have left behind insights into their world which we can finally unearth.

The many surviving pieces of cloisonné jewellery tied their owners back to an earlier Germanic world. They were symbols of identity as well of power and wealth.

One grave found in Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire – the Smith’s Hoard – contained tools which suggest the deceased worked with metal.11 It was a lone burial, which reflects the respect in which smiths were held. He may have been an itinerant tradesman who died while travelling and was granted this honour by the community.

Finds from his grave include an iron bell, which he would have rung to drum up trade, his tools – snips, hammerheads, tongs and punches – and scraps of metal, probably stored together in a bag. By placing these items in the ground, the community were revering him, laying his status symbols alongside his body and providing him with what he might need in the afterlife.

Burial goods implying what a person did in lifse

In the seventh century smiths were seen as powerful and important members of society. This was a hangover from the Germanic pagan religion practised across England before the arrival of Christian missionaries.

For a society organised around a warrior elite often on the move, small, personal, portable pieces of art – namely jewellery – were more valuable than large-scale paintings, sculpture or architecture. These jewels were the masterpieces of their time and the people who made them displayed an almost god-like ability to work metals; turning rough rocks into liquid form, then back to solid, preserved as a glittering, eternal piece of alchemical wizardry.

The epic poem Beowulf frequently mentions gold, given from lords to secure the loyalty of followers, with ancient heirlooms used to secure treaties and oaths. Hrothgar says he gained trust from Beowulf’s father by sending ‘old treasures to the Wylfings over the sea’s spine; he swore oaths to me’. More relevant to our exploration of the Loftus Princess, gold is placed in the ground and protected by both a terrifying dragon and the curses of ‘famous chieftains’ spoken over the burial mound to ensure no one would dig it up:14

While the precise origin of her garnets is not known, comparison with other similar pieces suggests the gems were imported along extensive trade routes. The small garnets from the Staffordshire Hoard, for example, came from Eastern Europe, while the larger ones originated around India. The princess was well-connected, powerful and wealthy.

England was not using an established monetary system at the beginning of the seventh century, so these coins were either foreign imports or ancient pieces being reused.15 Coins such as these were collected and prized for their material worth, and for the status of the exotic, powerful people of the past they connected back

Were these gems originally an heirloom, something precious to a family member and reset in a new context? Or was the war gear of an ancestor broken up, their memory preserved through the gems in this pendant? The fact that this woman chose to have a new piece designed incorporating second-hand stones is another example of a pattern seen across the Loftus site, where the artefacts and structures of previous generations could be reused and reappropriated.

in grave 21, two first-century coins were found alongside a string of beads. Both coins have galloping horses on one side and were carefully arranged on either side of the neck so that the horses appear to run across the chest and away from the body.

In this way they recall other objects from the so-called ‘conversion period’ of the seventh century, like the Eccles buckle.19 This unassuming piece has knotted snakes and a double-headed serpent on the front

The period from the fifth to eighth centuries in England has been called a ‘Dark Age’ because of the lack of surviving textual evidence.21 It’s true that when the Romans left at the beginning of the fifth century, they took with them their meticulous record keeping, although some writers such as Gildas continued to record events into the sixth century.

We’re taught that Christianity disappeared with the Romans, only to return on that date drummed into English schoolchildren; the ‘arrival of Christianity’ in AD 597. This was when St Augustine led a conversion mission on the instruction of Pope Gregory the Great and landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent.