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

by Janina Ramírez

major casualty of this embittered religious turmoil was books. 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.18 Thousands of medieval manuscripts, the repositories of generations of knowledge and art, were declared heretical and destroyed. Those that survived were either accepted as orthodox, so almost exclusively written by educated men, or were hidden away. 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.