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

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

The medieval world was fluid, cosmopolitan, mobile and outward-looking.

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. What about writing history now, at a time when so many are striving for greater equality?

You cannot be what you cannot see. So, let’s find ourselves in what has gone before, and reframe what we value going forward.

Emily was treated as a martyr after her death. 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.

many of the modes of discrimination we vigorously challenge today are not always products of the medieval or pre-medieval periods, but of the last few centuries.

Emily and the suffragettes were not alone in finding medievalism a source of inspiration for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century challenges. 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. For many today they are seen as political rather than pious. But the majority of women who took part in militant activity saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, promoting social change framed within religious terms.

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.

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 of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Over the course of one month Grace transcribed the full text and translated it from medieval to modern English. She then returned to Edinburgh and managed to persuade the publisher Methuen to print the first complete printed text of Julian’s work in 1901. It has never been out of print since, and generations of scholars have discovered the medieval masterpiece thanks to Grace’s translation.

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. 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. 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. Tracing the rare survival of Julian of Norwich’s work can shed light on why so few medieval women have been recorded down the centuries.

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 Reformation impacted women significantly. As convents were closed, opportunities available to women narrowed to being a wife and being a mother.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Her grandparents were the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, Clovis I, and the celebrated Burgundian Princess, Saint Clotilde. Meaning ‘famous in battle’, Clotilde’s name reflects the idea that early medieval rulers – male or female – primarily held power through military might.

When her sons – heirs to the Merovingian dynasty – were deciding whether to overthrow the young heirs of Burgundy and take their lands under their control, they placed the decision in their mother’s hands.

Clotilde was true to her name. She chose the sword. This decision brought about the murder of two young princes, aged seven and ten, killed by Clotilde’s older sons on their mother’s instructions. But she remained ‘honoured by all’ and celebrated for her humility and grace. She also influenced the Franks in the way Bertha would influence the people of Kent, persuading her husband to convert to Christianity and establishing a new Christian dynasty which would rule for over two centuries. She is still celebrated as a Roman Catholic saint.

The sixth-century historian Gregory of Tours describes their complex marriage, explaining that they separated after Ingoberga discovered her husband was in love with the daughters of a poor wool worker. He would later go on to marry one of them, making her Queen of the Franks in Ingoberga’s place.

Pope Gregory wrote to King Æthelberht about the ‘fame’ Constantine secured by accepting Christianity, and even compared Bertha to Helen, the Emperor’s mother, who was dedicated to supporting the newly empowered religion.

In AD 580, almost two decades before Gregory the Great would send Augustine on his mission, Bertha was sailing across the English Channel with a Christian bishop by her side.

Today the word ‘illiterate’ is associated with a lack of education. But the methods of passing down information in the non-literate communities of early medieval England were incredibly sophisticated.34 Individuals could recite poems from memory over the course of many hours, if not days. They had to retain information on bloodlines, land possession, law codes, as well as a vast body of stories, myths and history. To be illiterate was not to be ignorant, but rather to utilise more of the memory actively. It was Christianity that brought literacy and Latin to a people who had depended for three centuries on oral tradition and memory. It could be argued that with writing came complacency, bureaucracy and rigidity.

Æthelburg’s daughter, Eanflæd, was the first person baptised by the Roman mission in Northumbria. Eanflæd would go on to play an important role in the newly emerging northern church, marrying her father’s successor and then becoming the first abbess of the freshly founded double monastery at Whitby.

The word ‘leger’ in Old English meant both ‘bed’ and the grave – ‘a place where one lies’

Like that great converting queen of the Franks, Clotilde, Hild of Whitby’s name means ‘battler’.

Other finds from Hartlepool suggest that this early monastery, founded by a woman in the seventh century, was a place of wealth, privilege, power and learning. A gilded hairpin may have belonged to one of the nuns. Its imagery is not Christian, but more reminiscent of the interlacing biting beasts found on the Sutton Hoo treasures. This was an expensive item, designed to display the owner’s status. Despite Bede’s claims that no one at Hild’s monasteries was rich or poor, holding ‘all things in common’, early English medieval convents were not places of simple living and modesty. These first-generation converts did not have to give up all the luxuries of their secular lives, and as wealthy noblewomen, they brought their finery with them.

Cynethryth is approaching her fifties and her decades as co-ruler to the powerful Offa of Mercia have etched their lines on her face. Now a widow, she owns this micro-town of Cookham outright and coordinates everything from religious worship to the trade up and down this stretch of the river.5

One of the few scholars to pay sustained attention to Cynethryth says: ‘If the political women of the Early Middle Ages demand our attention everywhere, they certainly should receive it in the history of the Mercian kingdom.’

Cynethryth is the only early medieval woman in the West to have her own coinage minted.

Irene’s supporters had gouged out her own son’s eyes to secure her position as sole ruler, and with her rivals out of the way Irene demanded she rule not as empress, but as emperor. She signed her letters with this title and even had coins minted referring to the ruler as ‘Emperor of Rome’.

This coin indicates that the Mercian court was in contact with Islamic lands and sought to directly copy their style of inscription, even if the English version indicates little knowledge of written Arabic.

Eadburh had become an incredibly powerful and influential ruler through her marriage to Beorhtric of Wessex. She signed two charters in 801 as ‘Regina’ (queen). But her life is recorded by Alfred’s biographer Asser as a cautionary tale. Her ‘headstrong and malevolent’ ways are explained as the reason why, in the ninth century, no subsequent wives of the king of Wessex were allowed to use the title ‘queen’, or even sit beside their husbands.

Asser himself laments that his court in Winchester continued the ‘perverse and detestable custom’ of demeaning the wife of the king, but this story lays the blame with the strong women of Mercia themselves. It is testament to how different the role of women was in these two kingdoms that, despite the fact Alfred’s wife was a Mercian royal, she didn’t sign a single charter and was not even named in his biography.

The Irish Annals give details of how Æthelflæd protected the city when in 907 the Wirral Vikings joined with Danish troops and attacked Chester. She ‘gathered a large army about her from the adjoining regions’. After an initial battle Æthelflæd sent messengers to the enemy troops. She stated she was ‘queen who holds all authority over the Saxons’. Through requests of loyalty and the promise of rewards, she convinced the Wirral Vikings she had treated so generously to switch their allegiances and join her forces and together they pushed back their attackers.

In the twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon declared her to be ‘so powerful that in praise and exaltation of her wonderful gifts, some call her not only lady but even king’. In a poem, he praised her as ‘worthy of a man’s name’ and ‘more illustrious than Caesar’.

Æthelflæd herself was well educated, having been taught at the court school in Winchester, and it is clear that throughout her reign she was enriching a knowledge hub at Worcester. Four prayer books dating from the ninth century were written by and for women here, with one containing a gynaecological prayer.

It is her military exploits, recorded by chroniclers, which have left an impression. With the support of her brother, she secured some of the most significant victories in battle of the early tenth century. In AD 917 she led troops to reconquer the Viking city of Derby, one of the ‘Five Boroughs of the Danelaw’. She clearly led with the same sense of ‘commitatus’ (loyalty to one’s lord) as male warriors, as the Mercian Chronicle records how she lost four of her thegns at Derby ‘who she particularly loved.’

The twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury records that she declined to have sex after bearing a daughter because it was ‘unbecoming of the daughter of a king to give way to a delight which, after a time, produced such painful consequences’. He also suggests that she shied away from ‘marital obligations’ because of the risks it posed her life. It may be that Æthelflæd had suffered physical difficulties through the birth and pregnancy. True to the Mercian queens that had gone before her, however, she believed a female heir was as capable of ruling as a male one. She put in place insurances, securing the promises of the Mercians lords that her daughter, Ælfwynn, would succeed her.

Her achievement is notable, as her ascension as ruler of Mercia after Æthelflæd’s death is the only time rule passed from one woman to another in early medieval England. But she was not destined to follow her mother’s successes as Lady of the Mercians. After a few months her uncle, King Edward, removed her from Mercia and, like Queen Cynethryth, she probably lived the rest of her life in a monastery.

Æthelflæd was able to rule with ‘strength of character’ for two decades at the turn of the tenth century, a pivotal point in English history.

A Worcester chronicler records she was ‘merciorum domina, insignis prudentiae, et iustitiae virtutique eximiae femina’ (a woman of prudence, justice and extraordinary strength of character). This reputation carried down the centuries immediately following, with this twelfth-century poem a testament to how she was perceived a quarter of a millennium after her death: Heroic Æthelflæd! Great in martial fame, A man in valour, though a woman in your name: Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed, Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid.

To later Norman writers she was like an English Joan of Arc, a warrior woman who deserved fame. But when her story no longer served the dominant narrative, her reputation was eclipsed. Over the last three centuries, it is her father, Alfred, who has become a rallying point of national pride, held up as the exemplar of a great Englishman. But during her reign, and for centuries after her death, many recognised Æthelflæd as ‘more illustrious than Caesar’. She was a victim not of medieval prejudice, but of modern attitudes towards female leadership.

In 1876, German designer Carl Emil Doepler created the stage costumes for a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Wanting the Viking-age characters to appear more impressive on stage, he put horns on the headdresses of the evil characters, while the heroes wore headdresses with wings. The popularity of this visual image – ancestors harnessing the strength of animals in a form of supernatural shapeshifting – meant it became a way of celebrating all things ‘Germanic’. The hijacking of Viking culture by German nationalists was a deliberate strategy, and in just twenty years the horned helmet was reproduced on everything from cruise menus to children’s books. Tying Germany to a perceived Viking ancestry only intensified under the Nazis.

In early medieval texts, the Old Norse word ‘víking’ describes an activity a group of ‘víkingr’ (explorers, merchants, travellers) would carry out as they took to the seas on expeditions. These could include raiding, trading, diplomacy, settlement and intermarriage. And when their violent attacks were recorded, their victims never called them ‘Vikings’. Instead, they were Norse, Swedes or Danes. If written about in a damning way they were ‘pagans’, ‘heathens’ or ‘wolves’.

Kennings describing the Valkyries emphasise their bloodthirstiness, and one describes them as ‘the desiring goddess of the excessively drying veins.’40 They are women thirsting to feed from the ruins of war; they swoop over the battlefield like the carrion beasts of Odin, pecking over their spoils. These stories were not for the faint-hearted, and they position female spiritual beings at the vanguard of warfare. It’s important to note that our very notion of modern warfare is at odds with the Viking Age. Today we envisage war as a moment when two distinct forces engage in battle. Warrior culture for the Vikings was a way of life that fed into, and was fed by, their spiritual practices.

Today we still speak of ‘tradesmen’ and assume the travel, negotiation and labour involved in moving goods is a largely male sphere. However, in Birka the weights and scales usually associated with traders are found in 32 per cent of female graves, compared with only 28 per cent of male burials.