‘What I’m going to tell you now,’ he said, ‘may sound incredible. But then, when you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.’
(The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in ‘Brave New World’, chapter 3)

In the memory of women alive today, ‘history’ was defined as the deeds of men, recorded by men, described in histories written by men, and taught by men. My mother remembers sitting through history lessons about the Crusades and the Second World War, both of which passed without mention of a single woman taking part.

When it comes to the Middle Ages, a handful of queens (Matilda and Eleanor), the egregious Joan of Arc, a handful of authors (Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan) and the composer Hildegaard of Bingen, have been known about, written about and studied for centuries, but that has tended to be your lot. The role of women in the broader life of medieval society – as not only rulers but aristocratic wives, as authors and intellectuals, as saints and visionaries, abbesses and anchorites, as merchants in towns and peasants in the fields – has been much less described and explored.

‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ is a big, informative and artfully designed exhibition, full of priceless treasures, which is firmly rooted in the modern movement of women speaking up, speaking out, and reclaiming the stories of their past.

The Book of the City of Ladies in a manuscript made under the personal supervision of Christine de Pizan, the first professional women author in Europe. This illustration unexpectedly shows elegant ladies bricklaying © British Library

This is a very polemically feminist exhibition. The aim of reclaiming women’s stories and voices is front and centre of the curators’ stated aims, of the press promotion of the show, of all the wall labels and object captions. Here’s the opening of the British Library web page about it.

Narratives about the Middle Ages are dominated by men. Male authors recorded history and wrote great works of literature, male rulers commanded kingdoms and fought wars, male authorities controlled religion. In traditional histories, medieval women’s roles have often been side-lined and limited to a few stereotypes and generalisations.

This exhibition counters this narrative by revealing women’s contributions right across medieval society, in public, private and spiritual life, taking visitors on a journey through women’s healthcare, households, work, creativity and political and religious involvement.

It’s in this spirit that ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ brings together 140 or so objects in order, as far as possible, to quote women’s own words about themselves and their lives and experiences, sourced from authentic medieval letters, books, histories, works of devotion, poems, prayers and edicts written by women.

Signed letter from Joan of Arc to the citizens of Riom, requesting gunpowder and military equipment for a coming siege, 9 November 1429, from the Municipal Archives in Riom © Town of Riom, Municipal Archives

So all the manuscripts, books and other objects on display here have been chosen to give – wherever possible – first-hand testimony of medieval women authors and their range of writings, to shed light on women’s contributions to medieval social and economic life, culture and politics, their political, dynastic and diplomatic achievements as queens and empresses, their management of sometimes very large households and religious institutions, their work as doctors and midwives, and their roles as saints and visionaries, revered in the Catholic tradition.

It certainly achieves its aims, opening doors and shedding light on all aspects of women’s experiences, right across western Europe spanning a very large time period – roughly 1100 to 1500. The exhibition is divided into three main zones. These are:

1. Private Lives

This opening section tries to give a range of insights into the everyday lives and personal worlds of medieval women, covering subjects like family and domestic life, friendship and motherhood, love and sex. There are sections about medicine and herbal remedies, good luck charms to wear during childbirth – notably a birthing girdle from the early 15th century, inscribed with prayers and charms that promised a quick and painless delivery.

Birthing girdle, England, early 15th century, an amulet for protection during childbirth © British Library

There’s an edition of the letters between the ill-fated lovers of Heloïse and Abelard, and a copy of ‘the Passion of St Margaret’, the patron saint of childbirth, which has been smudged by devotional kissing. There are love letters written by women, including – as the curators repeatedly point out – the oldest surviving Valentine’s Day letter in the English language, written by Margery Brews to her fiancé John Paston in February 1477.

Actually there’s quite a lot from the Paston letters, at least 7 letters and a will. This makes sense to anyone familiar with Middle Ages as the Paston Letters are well known and have been available in a numerous printed editions for ages. To quote the curators:

The Pastons were a Norfolk family who climbed the social ladder from peasantry to landed gentry during the 15th century. The extraordinary survival of a cache of around a thousand personal letters sent to and from the family gives unparalleled insight into their everyday lives. Some of the most prolific correspondents were the women of the family, recording joys, sorrows, loves, rivalries, friendships and arguments that span several generations. Yet most of the Paston women could not write, and relied on scribes to write down their messages for them.

This section also includes the first known book in Europe printed by a woman under her own name. This was Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi author of ‘Behinat ha-‘Olam’ (The Contemplation of the World) printed in Mantua (Italy), around 1476. Its printer, Estellina Conat, is also the first known female printer of Hebrew texts. She worked in a family workshop in Mantua (northern Italy). The book contains a philosophical poem written after the expulsion of Jews from France in 1306.

It’s worth pointing out that the exhibition includes half a dozen objects relating to Jewish women, and overview panels explaining the role and significance and distinctive culture of Jews in medieval Europe.

An illustration of Margaret of York kneeling before the Resurrected Christ in the Dialogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ © British Library Board

There’s a copy of a unique treatise on women’s medicine actually written by a woman. Trota of Salerno was a physician who practised at the medical school of Salerno, southern Italy, in the 12th century. She gave her name to a widely consulted collection of texts on women’s health, the Trotula. Her medical works are notable for being less theoretical and more practical than those of her male contemporaries. Since male practitioners were not permitted to conduct intimate examinations, she was able to practise women’s medicine in a more hands-on way than they could.

Toxic men and the Patriarchy are represented by John Mirfield’s ‘Breviarium Bartholomei’, a medical compendium which includes procedures for testing virginity, making a woman appear to be a virgin, and even a section on contraception, partly written in ciphers to limit access.

2. Public Lives

The second section, ‘Public Lives’, tells the stories of a host of women who shaped medieval society through their work in areas as varied as agriculture, textiles, sex work, finance, writing and printing, politics and warfare. It’s subdivided into two specific areas: ‘Work and creativity’ and ‘Power and politics’.

The seal of Empress Matilda (Add Ch 75724) Foundation charter of Bordesley Abbey by Empress Matilda © British Library Board

Specific named women of power include:

• Shajar al-Durr (d. 1257) a female ruler of Egypt who defeated Louis IX of France in the Seventh Crusade
• Isabella of France (1295 to 1358) who, together with her lover, Roger Mortimer, led a successful rebellion against her husband, King Edward II of England
• Margaret of Anjou (1430 to 1482) who is represented by the largest hoard of gold coins ever discovered in Britain, believed to have been part of her fundraising efforts on behalf of her husband, King Henry VI of England
• Anne of France (1461 to 1522) Duchess of Bourbon, known to her contemporaries as Madame la Grande (‘the Great Lady’) one of the most powerful women in late 15th-century Europe as well as the author of ‘Lessons For My Daughter’) France
• a tough-minded letter from Margaret Paston to her husband John, away on business in London, requesting a detailed list of military supplies to defend their manor which was under siege from jealous local magnates (!)

Women used letters not just for personal family correspondence but for more official purposes. This section includes letters and petitions to advocate for freedoms and equality. You can see a petition written by Maria Moriana to the Mayor of London, when her master, Philip Syne, tried to sell her as a slave and then imprisoned her when she refused.

There is a copy of what is thought to be the first public defence of women in Italy, written by Nicolosa Sanuti in 1453. When the Church in Bologna imposed laws restricting what women (but not men) could wear, noblewoman Sanuti wrote this treatise in protest. She argues that through their many contributions to society, women have earned the right to wear what they want. Although unsuccessful at getting the law repealed, Nicolosa’s book won respect in intellectual circles.

A page from the Luttrell Psalter with an illustration of three women bringing in the harvest © British Library Board

3. Spiritual Lives

Religion was an integral part of medieval life and this third and final section gives you a feeling for the many roles played by women in medieval Christianity, from managers and administrators of large religious houses, to visionary writers and poets, to revered saints.

Surviving accounts show that religion could be a significant source of power for medieval women. Some women dedicated their lives to God by joining a convent and becoming nuns, while others led a religious life within society. The show includes works by the notable English women visionaries:

• Julian of Norwich (around 1343 to after 1416) represented by the only complete surviving copy of her masterwork ‘The Revelations of Divine Love’ (mid-15th century) – the first work in English known to be authored by a woman
• The Book of Margery Kempe, written around 1438, the earliest known autobiography in English which chronicles her life as a female mystic, in the only surviving manuscript copy from 1445 to 1450

For women who felt a religious calling, nunneries provided them with opportunities for education, creativity and community. Some of the many works produced by these communities include:

• works by Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) a Benedictine abbess in the 12th century, who is famous as being the first woman composer in the western tradition – including a copy of the proto-opera, Ordo virtutum (Play of the Virtues), which she composed around 1150 to be sung at her convent
• a copy of The Rule of St Clare, the first set of monastic guidelines known to have been authored by a woman
• an exquisite series of painted scenes from the life of St John the Baptist created between 1175 and 1200, thought to be the only surviving creation from the renowned workshop of Herrad of Landsberg (1130 to 1195) at Hohenburg Abbey in Alsace

Miniature showing nuns processing to mass, from La sainte abbaye (The Holy Abbey), France (1290s) © British Library Board

Medieval stats

I was intrigued by the way the exhibition curators have created special panels, separate from the object labels, devoted solely to statistics. Some of these are feminist in intention but others were just stats for the joy of stats – odd, thought-provoking numbers, which are enjoyable in the way that random stats often are. Here’s a selection:

• In medieval France, roughly 1.5% of medical practitioners whose names survive were women.
• Of these, around 36% were midwives, the rest included barbers, surgeons, trained physicians and untrained healers.
• 48% of aristocratic women from England between 1350 and 1500 made bequests of books in their wills, compared with 18% of noblemen.
• 44% of daughters mentioned in male Londoners’ wills from 1309 to 1468 received some form of real estate, compared with 60% of sons
• 18% of legal cases in 14th-century York dealt with the dissolution of marriages.
• 26% of women employees in Paris around 1300 worked in the production of silk.
• 82% of slave contracts drawn up in Venice between 1360 and 1499 were for women, whose average age was 22.5.
• About 10% of apprentices in medieval London were girls.

You get the picture. However, as with all blizzards of statistics they start out being fascinating, then become a bit of a chore, and at some point stop registering altogether.

Marriage chest or cassoni belonging to Elizabetta Gonzaga Mantua of Urbino, Italy (around 1488) Victoria and Albert Museum (photo by the author)

Medieval smells

And there are medieval smells! The Library has commissioned scent designer Tasha Marks to develop four ‘immersive fragrance installations’ (basically boxes or pots) – lift the lids and get a whiff of scents used (in probably wealthy) medieval households. The smells come in two of the zones: in the ‘Private Lives’ section there are two fragrances based on recipes from the 13th century text ‘De Ornatu Mulierum’ (On Women’s Cosmetics) for a hair perfume and a breath freshener.

The opening page of ‘De Ornatu Mulierum’ (On Women’s Cosmetics) © British Library Board

While in the ‘Spiritual Lives’ section there are two more scents, chosen for their associations with medieval understandings of the heavenly and demonic.

Are you a witch?

There are a couple of interactive screens scattered about the show and one of them is a brilliant interactive tool where you can find out whether you’re a witch! I immediately thought this should be a game show along the lines of Love Island or I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. The show would start with half a dozen women in a mocked-up medieval village (the kind used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) who have to undergo a series of tests and trials to establish whether they’re a witch or not (seeing if they have a third nipple or whether they float in the village pond or have a black cat).

Obviously I took the quiz – I needed to know. The first question was ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ I clicked ‘Man’ and burst out laughing when the next screen told me I was off to ‘a promising start’. I know what they mean, the obvious intent – as is the intent of most of the show – is to ram home the point that men generally had a better time of it in the Middle Ages than women.

The interactive ‘Are you a witch tool’ in ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ at the British Library (photo by the author)

A few caveats

This is an excellent exhibition. All the exhibits are fascinating, well chosen, carefully explained, and there is lots of information and context. There are some unexpected and even bizarre objects, plus the funky elements I’ve just described, the scents and the interactive screens. But I have a few caveats. More accurately, maybe, trains of thought triggered by the exhibition.

Getting inside medieval Christianity

The most obvious challenger to our modern secular values is religion. In this exhibition religion is treated from a mostly secular perspective, as an area where women were allowed to exercise a surprising amount of agency and freedom. The decision to become a nun was respected, and Christianity allowed women to become visionaries and saints, to be venerated and worshipped. This was more than was available to medieval Islam, India or China.

But my issue is that the curators – obviously modern secular feminists – treat medieval Christianity as if it was a job opportunity scheme for women seeking to escape patriarchal medieval society rather than the worldview which dominated every aspect of medieval life.

What the exhibition can’t really take on board is the big question: What if Christianity is right? What if being a woman isn’t entirely about being a strong independent woman flexing her agency and kicking sand in the face of the Patriarchy? What if the world was made by God, and Jesus was the Son He sent to redeem humanity from the Fall, and those who believe in Jesus’s resurrection and atonement will go to heaven and everyone who doesn’t believe, and wilfully sins against the laws of God, will go to hell?

What if that is the only important question in any human’s life, because it affects the fate of their immortal soul? In which case the medieval pay gap and the injustice of making women stay at home to raise children and be deprived of education or access to any profession – all issues which the exhibition raises and illustrates – become secondary, modern and secular concerns; in fact compared to the life of the spirit, barely issues at all.

I’m not saying Christianity with its patriarchal ideology is ‘true’. I’m a fairly militant atheist and a strong believer in Darwinian materialism. I’m just pointing out that a sympathetic reading of medieval history is an opportunity to enter into a world of values completely unlike ours – and explore what it would be like to believe medieval Christianity with all your heart and soul.

How would the world look then – if you knew your place in society, knew your role in life, and your main concern (apart from the basics of food and health) was being pious, attending church and avoiding temptations, physical or spiritual? If you knew that God was your Creator, that Jesus died to save you from sin, that we live in a terrible world exposed to all kinds of fragility, plague, war, early death, that only our faith can make sense of anything in life, and only faith can help us endure the terrible, arbitrary contingencies of life?

Just for an hour imagine being alive in those terrible times, without any of the conveniences of modern life, with no modern medicines or understanding of how the body works, with a life expectancy of 30, at the mercy of any number of random disasters. Wouldn’t you throw yourself on the mercy of an all-powerful God?

An illustration of St Francis and St Clare in The Rule of the Minorite Order of Sisters of St Clare, painted by the German artist Sibylla von Bondorff © British Library Board

Also, stripped of it supernatural trappings, Christianity contains many moral or ethical truths: for example, it’s not all about you. That happiness and fulfilment might not come from focusing just on your needs and problems, but by helping others. Focusing inwards, in the self, concentrates our unhappiness. Focusing outwards, on others, makes us forget ourselves in helping others. It is better to give than to receive. Charity is defined by the Etymological Dictionary as ‘Christian love in its highest manifestation.’

The beauty of the medieval worldview

I studied medieval history and literature at university. What is vital to medieval studies – and not so obvious in this exhibition – is the absolute centrality of hierarchy, pattern and order.

In the medieval worldview God was in his heaven and a complicated hierarchy of archangels and angels cascaded down from him. He controlled the universe at the centre of which was the solar system, at the centre of which was the world around which the moon, the sun and the five plants orbited, each embedded in an invisible crystal sphere, hence the music of the spheres.

The world was governed by the passage of the seasons created by the changing angle of the sun moving across a sky which, at night, was filled with the signs of the Zodiac, which had a strong influence on the world and its inhabitants, for good or evil. These complex movements and their influence on human life could be studied through the science of astrology.

Within the world of living beings there was a strong hierarchy, with man at the top and then hierarchies of animals in each of the kingdoms of the air and earth and sea. Everyone could see how larger animals preyed on smaller ones according to the hierarchies created by God.

Within human society there were distinct and fixed hierarchies, the sacred and the secular. The key institution was the Church, with the Pope as God’s representative on earth and the Church hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and so on spreading its tentacles down to every parish in Christendom. Holiness entailed following all the edicts of the Church, attending Mass, keeping the fasts and feasts and countless saints’ days, worshipping and praying in the correct manner, and avoiding all temptations to sin, either physical or spiritual.

Paralleling this was the secular hierarchy which began with the king or emperor at the top of each realm, then his assembly of nobles, barons and so on, extending down through a complex hierarchy of social ranks and functions, eventually ending with the serfs or peasants in the field.

More germane to this exhibition, there were very fixed views about the hierarchy of the family, with the father as the head of the household exercising complete control over his wife, who had her role to play in controlling their children and the sometimes numerous servants. People talk about the patriarchy nowadays, but this really was a patriarchal society.

It followed from the obsession with hierarchy that the good society was one in which everyone knew their place in society, accepted this place and contributed to their community according to their place and role, respecting their superiors, acting appropriately to their inferiors, ensuring stability and prosperity.

Down below the human level, at a basic physical level, everything in the world was made up of a mix of the four elements: fire, air, earth and water. These corresponded to the four life-giving fluids in the human body, namely:

• • Blood: associated with air
  • Yellow bile: associated with fire
  • Phlegm: associated with water
  • Black bile: associated with earth

In the medieval worldview everything was linked by connections between all these hierarchies and many more I haven’t mentioned (for example, the vast world of medieval theology with its seven sacraments, seven deadly sins, seven cardinal virtues and so on and so on).

The world was thus a vastly complicated place made up of overlapping matrices of hierarchies, structures and values, traditions, beliefs and practices. It was the complex correspondences between all these sets of values that enabled the characteristic medieval literary form of allegory where animated figures – humans or animals – stand for the abstract values within the complex value system, allowing for the creation of complex and sophisticated works of literature and visual art (such as Hildegard of Bingen’s work, Play of the Virtues, mentioned above, where a  female voice plays the role of the human soul and meets 17 virtues).

These complex correspondences also, of course, allow for magic, where objects – such as someone’s hair or clothes – stand in for people themselves or their qualities or powers. Magic is just a way of tapping into the immense system of correspondences between all aspects of the material world and the spiritual world which everyone knew lay all around them, a way of deploying occult forces to influence the visible world.

Put simply, my suggestion is that, in order to really understand and enjoy all this, you have to submit to it, swim in it, forget our modern world of subatomic particles and antibiotics, technology and individualism, modern secular liberal values, and imagine a world made up of four elements where the only medicine comes from plants with magical properties which must be taken at a full moon along with the right prayers or spells. Where the only thing which can save you from life’s endless tribulations is deep faith, faith in God, His Son and the Holy Blessed Virgin Mary. Where the way to be happy was to know your place in the world and behave accordingly.

To enter this world is, I suggest, fascinating and imagination-expanding. If you really go for it, immersing yourself in Chaucer or Langland, medieval saints’ legends or the Arthurian romances, you can recapture a real sense of magic and marvels, and what it could mean to be human in a larger, stranger, more mystical sense than the modern world of TikTok and Instagram allows, entering a world of hidden powers and spirits.

My reservation about this exhibition is that it sometimes felt as if the Middle Ages were being named and shamed for not being a woke 21st century university campus; that medieval people were being ticked off for allowing a medieval gender pay gap (as one of the exhibits is titled), for forcing women to be homemakers or be married off at 13; for the failure of people living in 1200 to understand the workings of the human body as we do in 2024; for a litany of our contemporary concerns which the curators use to judge and find wanting people who lived 800 years ago.

Maybe that’s the root of my objection. What medieval people believed was strange and wonderful and inspiring, and horrible and violent and terrifying, but seeking to explore and understand such a different worldview can be immensely liberating. All of it may have been, in a scientifically literal sense wrong, and wildly contrary to our modern sense of liberal freedoms, but that is like saying ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is ‘wrong’.

History is an imaginative artefact and can, on a personal level, be made to mean whatever we want it to. Sure, public historians have a duty to research and report the facts accurately, but most of us ordinary citizens have favourite periods or characters from history and enjoy fantasising and romanticising about them. Look at the evergreen popularity of historical novels and TV series. Every year there’s another series about the bloody Tudors which usually bears only the flimsiest relation to academic history. Or consider the way hordes of medieval trappings are imported into popular culture, in a twee way in Harry Potter, in a grim way in Game of Thrones.

I love lots of medieval art and literature, sculpture, tapestries and music, for its magic, its lightness, its symbolic way of thinking, its vision of the deep interpenetration of the natural and supernatural worlds; above all for the beauty and sweetness of its literature, from the full-bodied roistering of Geoffrey Chaucer to the sweet poignancy of medieval poetry. I don’t ‘believe’ any of the ideology underpinning it, but that doesn’t stop me immersing myself in it whole-heartedly for the duration of the reading.

Sorry to be so long-winded but I’m trying to identify why I reacted a little negatively to some aspects of this exhibition, admirable though it is in intent and execution. I recoiled a bit from the way the vast 400-year period it covers – of events, people, culture and meanings, hundreds of millions of human lives and stories and works and days, festivals, celebrations, communities, wars, pogroms, atrocities and carnivals – sometimes felt like it was being reduced to an all-too-familiar and modern shopping list of injustices and grievances, in which the weirdness, wonderfulness and otherness of medieval culture which I love so much sometimes felt like it had been lost.

Installation view of ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ @ the British Library

Explicitus est liber

Maybe you’ll have a completely different take on it. It really is a lovely exhibition and it really does open your eyes to the whole world of medieval women which has been so neglected for so long. Go and make your own mind up. And, of course, to find out whether you’re a witch. You never know…

Related links

• Medieval Women: In Their Own Words continues at the British Library until 2 March 2025
• Exhibition guide
• Christine de Pizan on the Medieval Woman’s Companion website

Related reviews

• More medieval reviews
• British Library reviews