TaitMail Retelling history - with women
When would you date the establishment of women’s equal importance in our culture? Gloria Steinem and Women’s Liberation in the 1960s? Mrs Pankhurst and the Suffragettes (1900s)? Mary Shelley (1820s) or her mother Mary Wolstencraft (1790s)?
Wrong every time, because the truth is that it’s always been there, it’s just that the history we’re taught hasn’t recorded it. Because until quite recently history has been written by men.
In the Middle Ages, though, women have had formative influences at every level of society, it just wasn’t celebrated, and we have been content to consign half of the population to childbirth, cooking, housekeeping and creating exquisite embroidery, while male scribes and musicians created meticulous exaltations of gods, battle victories and romantic conquests – by men over women, of course.
There is a curious modern parallel in the restoration of the 12h-13th century Notre-Dame, Paris’s magisterial cathedral that was badly damage by fire in 2019 and reopened in November. Though we know the master stonemasons, no women were credited with having a hand in its building eight centuries ago, but 51% of the workforce that has restored it in the 21stcentury have been recorded as women.
The new British Library exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words (which is until March 2) is like an ancient oaken door creaking open. The general assumption has been that art – literature, music-making, painting (particularly in the illumination of manuscripts and books) was done by men, that rulers were male, that doctors were male, that farmers and craftsmen were always male. Men did the talking in history, and not a moment too soon the British Library exhibition starts to set the record straight thorough its collections, connections and its matchless scholarship and retell that story, through the female written word.
“God has given women such beautiful minds to apply themselves, if they want to, in any of the glorious fields where glorious and excellent men are active”, a sentence that could have been written today, though maybe without God’s input. It’s actual author was an Italian-born poet, novelist, biographer and writer of love ballads called Christine de Pizan, often credited as the first professional female author. She was a robust defender of female qualities and virtues against the prevailing misogynistic fashion in writing (for a predominantly male market), but she only embarked on what became a renowned career after the death of her husband and her father within a year of each other, forcing her to face penury or somehow earn her own income to support her three children.
The quote comes from her extraordinary book, City of Ladies, written in about 1405, in French vernacular prose in which, because she "could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn't devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex”, she builds a metaphorical city out of women’s achievements. She recruits a regiment of “valiant ladies of great renown” such as Mary Magdalene, the Queen of Sheba, Empress Theodora, Casssandra and Sappho – and of course the Virgin Mary - to her cause in a book that became the 15th century equivalent of a best seller. Presumably some men were reading it (she was the official writer to the French court after all) but mostly it was women.
A very detailed illustration from her book (seen here) in this exhibition shows de Pizan’s city of ladies, in which crowned dames are seen not only reading, next to a pile of expensive books yet to be devoured, but apparently decorating ceramics, wielding what seems to be a ruler and even building a wall with bricks and mortar. Who would have painted this page – a man?
But there were female physicians because often women did not want to have their gynaecological issues dealt with by someone who didn’t have personal knowledge of the symptoms, women clinicians who were versed in Greek and Roman medical practice, later in the period welcoming new techniques being introduced from the Arabic world, and most of them performed surgery too.
Women were often obliged to step up to run farms and businesses when the men were away at war, or had died – there was no life insurance to come to the rescue of bereaved women.
Women of all classes cared about their appearance and corresponded avidly, swapping dressmaking tips, perfume recipes and gossip. A French/German book of instruction from 1495, illustrated by wood cuts, warns girls against spending too much time in front of a mirror and not to be obsessed by their appearance, in case the devil should appear in the mirror standing behind her. But this is a mother’s admonition, not a monk-scribe’s.
And they mixed their own make-up from recipes which give detailed instructions on enhancing their skin, hair, face, lips, teeth and even genitalia. The curators have delved into the recipes of herbs and spices to re-create some of the scent popular in the period, to perfume their hair (rose, clove, nutmeg, musk, watercress and galangal) and sweeten their breath (laurel leaves and musk).
And leading women could achieve superstar status in medieval society. A 15th century illustration shows Margaret of York, the sister of Richard III and Edward IV (and herself the Duchess of Burgundy), not only in devotional prayer but apparently in direct conversation with Christ. You can’t get nearer the top of the tree than that.
Women like the 13th century Lucia, Countess of Tripoli, could wield their own power. Out of the chaos in the city state following the death of her brother the count, Lucia seized control herself, made treaties and political liaisons and in 1289 she faced a siege by Italian forces. Despite eventual defeat, Lucia emerged as the hero, and in an extraordinarily detailed exposition of the battle shows the countess sitting calmly in her castle in the centre of the painting, hand-in-hand with a bishop. From the 1420s comes a testament to another extraordinary woman operating in a medieval man’s world, Joan of Arc, who may not have been entirely literate but was able to sign a demand for gunpowder, and here is her signature, the signature of a general.
If monks have been picked out by historians for their illuminations of books, the evidence here is that nuns could be just as adept with a sable whisker and pen. Towards the end of the exhibition we meet Lucy, the first prioress of Castle Hedingham Priory in Essex. When she died in 1225 the Benedictine nuns created a roll in her honour, beginning with illustrations from her life and her ascent into heaven, but which then went on the road and was added to by messages in her honour from over 120 religious houses, most if not all of them convents, nunneries and nuns’ abbeys, all written in sublime script. However secluded, however fraught travel was in the early 13th century, they all knew Lucy.