Review of “Femina” by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

The full title, which wouldn’t fit my blog’s template, is “Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through The Women Written Out Of It”. But long as this is, there are still two words missing: unsurprisingly it should really read “A New History of the Middle Ages In Europe” etc, for the other continents known to Europeans at the time, Asia and Africa, get only passing mention. It begins with a worthwhile point, namely the fact that our interest in history, and our way of interpreting it, stems from the concerns of our own time – quoting V A Kolve, “we have little choice but to acknowledge our modernity, admit that our interest in the past is always (and by no means illegitimately) born of present concerns”. This was certainly true of the twentieth-century scholar of mediaeval literature Emily Wilding Davison, she whose protest at the 1913 Derby ended in her death under the hooves of the King’s horse. Davison researched and published widely on mediaeval history and had achieved the equivalent of first-class honours at Oxford, but could not graduate, as Oxford degrees would not admit women. Understandably, and not entirely wrongly, she saw the Middle Ages as a period in which women had in some ways had more agency and possibilities than they did in the 19th century and took inspiration from it.

While it is true that until fairly recently, mediaeval women like Aethelflaed of Mercia and Jadwiga of Poland were not given the importance they deserved by (mainly male) historians, it is far less true now and I’m not sure it was ever true of Hild of Whitby, whose importance could scarcely be denied by any ecclesiastical historian. And if the Oseberg ship burial were uncovered today, nobody would claim, as they did in 1904, that such an elaborate burial could not possibly be in honour of the two women whose bodies were found in it, and that there must have been a third, male, body who was its real focus. Archaeology, like other disciplines, has moved on since then. So I wouldn’t call this book’s approach groundbreaking. But it has some fascinating sketches of mediaeval women and the places where they lived and exercised influence and power.  Cathar women like Arnaude de Lamothe, noblewomen like Cynethryth and Eadburh of Mercia, and the nameless plague victim in the East Smithfield burial pit who died in London around 1340 but whose bones and teeth show she was born in Africa. They also show that she had a healthier childhood diet than those who had grown up in Britain, but her rotator cuff disease and spinal degeneration speak of hard and repetitive work – it really is remarkable what an informative picture techniques like isotope analysis can provide these days. And the two twentieth-century women, Margarete Kuhn and Caroline Walsh, who smuggled the Riesenkodex of Hildegard of Bingen out of occupied east Germany, are as fascinating in their motives and character as any of the mediaeval subjects.

The style is generally pleasing, though sometimes I think she gets a bit carried away, for instance when describing Hild’s childhood in King Edwin’s court at Yeavering (then pagan): “she would have been brought up listening to the boasts of warriors, the tales of heroes and the myths of Woden, Freyja and Thor. She was a warrior princess.”  Well, no; she was a girl who (possibly) heard a lot of stories about warriors.  And I had a dreadful sense of déjà vu on reading, in an account of the Battle of Hastings, “Harold met a grizzly death”. This is the second time in as many months I’ve seen this howler in a history book by an author who lectures at Oxford University; it leaves one wondering for how long the OED will preserve the difference between “grisly” and “grizzly”. There were no bears roaming that battlefield.

This chapter, which mainly concerns the craftswomen who made the great embroidery, has some interesting and, I would think, little-known details, like the tiny needle-holes and anachronistic wool that betray nineteenth-century tampering with the original. And it would be easy to assume that when, at the end of the nineteenth century, some women in Leeds produced a copy, they added tiny underpants to naked figures and reduced the size of horses’ penises out of Victorian prudery. This did indeed play a part, but it was not the women who were censoring. It was the staff at the V & A who produced, and altered, photographic images for the embroiderers to use as templates, and who clearly couldn’t take the explicitly bawdy humour of the nuns who stitched the original.  This harks back to the point made in the Introduction, namely how in some ways the position of women had gone backwards since the Middle Ages.

The other immense help in having agency, apart from being the right gender, was of course wealth, and the education to which this gave access, and this could sometimes be more important. An educated noblewoman like Hildegard of Bingen might sometimes encounter misogyny (though one pities whoever tried it on), but she certainly had more power and influence in the world than an unlettered ploughman. Maybe this is partly why Margery Kempe stands out. Not a noblewoman, solid tradesman class and proud of it; reasonably well off rather than rich, no formal education that we know of (and we would have, for she made sure we knew everything there was to know of her), but determined to leave her testimony, and preserving her own individual voice even when dictating her memoirs. She would have been a truly infuriating person to know, and one can sympathise with the fellow-travellers who so often lost their temper with her, especially the priest who, when Margery made a scene in church, sobbing loudly at an account of the crucifixion, remarked calmly, “Damsel, Jesus is long dead”.  But one still cannot help being grateful for a record of how many women of the time must have lived, which must have taken both considerable determination and considerable ego to produce.