Review: Medieval Women: In Their Own Words at the British Library

A magnificent new exhibition in London packed with both ordinary and extraordinary life

Three women are toiling in the field, gathering in the harvest barley. Or rather, two are bent double, scything through the stalks with short-handled sickles while behind a third pauses to stretch her back. It looks excruciating work. No doubt it was. England in the first half of the 14th century was in large part a subsistence economy and here in Lincolnshire, where this image was drawn at the foot of a page of what’s now known as the Luttrell Psalter, women worked the land alongside the men come harvest-time.

It’s tempting to use this literal moment of marginality to talk about medieval women’s marginality in the wider political sense, too, but as Medieval Women: In Their Own Words, the British Library’s ambitious new exhibition demonstrates, that would be a mistake. There is much here that is unique to women’s experience: among the many items exploring pregnancy and childbirth the most breathtaking is surely the early 15th-century parchment girdle that protected women from the terrors of labour by literally wrapping them in prayer. But women are active here, negotiating their way through many walks of life: in the fields, in the silk industry, in money lending, in manuscript manufacture and later print shops, in writing itself. One exquisite illuminated manuscript was gifted to the queen of France by Christine de Pizan, Europe’s earliest known professional woman writer. High-status women are driving more literal negotiations, too: Margaret III, Countess of Flanders, issues detailed instructions on an English trade deal; Isabella of France, queen to Edward II, betrothes her son to the daughter of the Count of Hainault, an alliance that gives her money and men to invade England and put her son, the future Edward III, on the throne.

The exhibition’s title invites us to think about the idea of women’s voices in both the literal and more figurative political sense. Contemporary usage usually relates to individuals or groups whose experiences and opinions are drowned out or shouted down in the democratic public square. But the exhibition made me think more of the tension between voice and text, between the written and spoken word, in the medieval period. ‘Away with the learning of the clerks,’ an old Cambridge woman named Margaret Starre cried during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 as she scattered the ashes of burnt university manuscripts in the town marketplace. Literacy was a form of control; it was mostly a male preserve.

You can see the tension in action in the exhibition with, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, which the illiterate Kempe largely dictated to a reluctant priest, or the Paston family letters, a number of which are displayed here, which were dictated to scribes. Literacy was controlling, but it was only one form of power, and the authority here is with the women. As such it’s a useful reminder that for all women’s agency in the period might be invisible to us, because it typically operated in domestic, familial and other undocumented arenas, it was real nonetheless. ‘Send me crossbows, arrows, poleaxes and armour for the servants,’ Margaret Paston writes to her husband in London in 1448 after the family’s enemies had seized their manor house in Norfolk. That she goes on to also ask for a pound each of almonds and sugar, and cloth to make gowns for their children shows not mundanity but the breadth of demands on her skills and intelligence. An exhibition based around the book and the written word thus contrives also to show, eloquently and often movingly, the extraordinary richness and variety of women’s lives in pre-Reformation Europe, almost all of which happened beyond the margins of the page. Patronage was a kind of eloquence, too, as evidenced here by, among other items, a copy of an astronomical almanac commissioned by Joan of Kent, the Princess of Wales in the late 14th century.

There are evocative vignettes of life everywhere: Joan of Arc’s halting signature, for example, the earliest surviving of three extant examples, on a 1429 request for more gunpowder – the first time the document has ever left France. Or the earliest known Valentine’s letter in English, dating to 1477. Or a 1424 petition from Joan Astley, Henry VI’s wet nurse, for a salary rise, which saw her pay double to £40 a year. (Equivalent to £35,000, the label says, but that doesn’t quite capture its relative value: a century later, Henry VIII was paying Hans Holbein £10 less.) Contrastingly, manor accounts rolls for Stebbing in Essex for 1483–4 show men being paid 4d for a day’s harvest work while the women were paid 3d. Of the 16 identifiable women, nearly a third were recorded as simply adjuncts of their husbands: ‘John Rede ys wyfe’, and so on.

Some of these vignettes are strikingly poignant. Take the letter dated 7 October 1290 regarding Margaret, a seven-year-old Norwegian princess who had become the rightful queen of Scotland. She had been offered in marriage to Prince Edward of England, but she never got that far, dying en route in Orkney. Then there is a bookmark-cum-Latin crib made by a nun named Mary Nevel for the martyrology of Syon Abbey, which recorded the names of those souls whom the nuns of Syon commemorated in prayer. Nevel died in the late 1550s so she must have been in the house at its dissolution in 1539, which makes the bookmark with its soon-to-be redundant notes of grammar particularly affecting.

If the exhibition is explicitly an exploration of women’s lives it inevitably also becomes a place of deep encounter with the medieval world; its reach encompasses Jewish communities in England and Muslim communities in southern Europe. That is nowhere more true than in Christian spiritual life, which typically allowed women greater autonomy and authority than Christian secular society. It is no coincidence that more than twice as many women chose the life of an anchoress – women who chose to be immured alone for life in order to give themselves to God – than men chose to be an anchorite, the male equivalent.

Texts such as those by Julian of Norwich, herself an anchorite, and Margery Kempe are testament to the rich and profound inner lives that religious devotion offered, while on the continent the works of Hildegard of Bingen, St Catherine of Siena, St Clare of Assisi, and St Bridget of Sweden – the latter two of whom both founded religious orders – show how women’s spiritual politics had the capacity to reshape the world around them. All of them are well represented here, but perhaps the most tantalisingly powerful objects are the only surviving copy of Kempe’s book, discovered in a country house in 1934, and the only surviving manuscript of the first, shorter version of Julian of Norwich’s The Revelations of Divine Love. The tenacious survival of these objects seems of a piece with the intensity of the experiences they embody.

One of the last items in the exhibition is a beautiful retable, which would have sat behind an altar in the great Dominican nunnery at Dartford. It shows St Dominic standing with six women venerated by the medieval church and medieval society: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, St Agatha, St Catherine of Alexandria, St Margaret of Antioch, and St Catherine of Siena. All their faces have been scratched out in a vicious, visceral demonstration of Protestant disgust. Yes, it is iconoclasm; but, in context, the misogyny is unmistakable. Yet these six faceless, mouthless women have endured, and gathered here among countless other women their resolute presence articulates its own meaning. Which is to say, there are ways other than words to give voice to identity and experience, and this extraordinary exhibition finds room for many kinds of articulacy, on the page and elsewhere. It offers a great unruly chorus of medieval women’s voices a precious, vital stage. If you possibly can, come and listen.

This review first appeared on Engelsberg Ideas.