Dan Snow's History Hit - Medieval Leaders and Queens: Aethelfled, Hildegard & Jadwiga.

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Aethelfled, a warrior queen who crushed the Vikings, Jadwiga, the first Queen Regent of Poland and Hildegard of Bingen, an 11th-century polymath abbess who became a 20th-century feminist icon and saint. Art and cultural historian Dr Janina Ramirez joins Dan on today's episode to tell the stories of three incredible medieval women. They all ruled, influenced and changed history but are often left out of the narrative of the Middle Ages.Janina's new best-selling book 'Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It' is out now.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about medieval queens and leaders. Athelflad, Hildegard, Jadwiga, some of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. A couple of you might not have heard of, but you need to. You need to hear about them. And talking about these remarkable women, what they tell us about us, what they tell us about medieval history, is the one and only Dr. Yanina Ramirez. She's been on the podcast lots before. She's a well-known broadcaster. She's a best-selling author. She's a fantastic presenter in all shapes and forms. She is Research Fellow in the History of Art at the University of Oxford.

And she has written an astonishing book called Femina, which is a new look at these women that have been written out of our history. We're going to start by talking about, she's not quite a warrior queen, but she sort of is, she's a warrior ruler. My favourite warrior ruler from Britain's history, Athelflad, Lady of Mercia, Scourge of the Vikings. And then we're going to go from there to some really extraordinary continental thinkers and rulers as well. All of this, I hope, will make you think quite differently about medieval history.

Enjoy. Subtle has cleared the tower. Yanina Ramirez, welcome back to the podcast. Welcome back. It feels like a long time. I know. But it's a joy to be back talking to you, Dan. You were on like episode three back in 2015. Oh, I was so back in the dark ages, yeah.

Of the pod. Speaking of the early medieval, like the dark ages, you naughty girl. I linked it together beautifully. Let's pick out some of these extraordinary women, because I am a huge fan. I want to learn more about them. Can we start with Alfred's daughter, Aethelflaed? How are we pronouncing her?

Aethelflaed. Aethelflaed, good. And, you know, already you've got my heckles up, Dan, because you described her as Alfred's daughter. As I was doing that, I thought, this is not the right way to describe her. I should have called her the Lady of Mercia, the ruler of Mercia. Lady of the Mercians. Yeah, one of the most significant British rulers. That's all good too. I mean, what a woman, what a woman. The terror of the heathens. Nina, let's just start. What did Britain

look like in her childhood? There was not an England really, was there? No, I think that's a really good place to start because she is very much the product of her time. She is a child growing up on the run during extreme warfare. So the Vikings have been assaulting the major kingdoms of England for a number of years, overwintering as well, which is a terrifying prospect because they don't go away, they just stay. as well, which is a terrifying prospect because, you know, they don't go away, they just stay. And the territories are slowly falling to either puppet kings who have been put in place by the Viking rulers to sort of run in their stead or actually directly being ruled by Vikings. And it is simply this tiny little corner of the kingdom of Wessex that is standing firm. And,

you know, the way I think about what was happening with Alfred at that time, we're seeing terrible images of warfare on the news at the moment, what's happening in Ukraine. And this idea of being terrified of not knowing where the next attack's coming from, they hold in on the island and they don't know if they're going to succeed. And so the tactics that they're using are very much guerrilla warfare tactics. They're turning the Vikings techniques on themselves as well. So attacking their camps and using some of their military techniques against them. So Althoflad is this young girl. Alfred himself wasn't supposed to be king, was he Dan? I mean, he was, every brother had to die before he was the last man standing. And I think she would have just seen this idea that a nation can

rise out of nothing. And what does it take to be successful after that sort of total obliteration? And she sees her father investing in things like education, culture, art, and in town planning, in infrastructure. And that is very much what she goes on to do. And she carries on his legacy in a way I don't think anyone could have imagined. She is so successful. And she would have been a child when Alfred is driven out of his capital, his major cities, towns, driven into the marshes, the Somerset levels. This is an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the last kingdom clinging on by its fingernails. Do we know if that affected her? Would she have witnessed that? As you say, she was living on the run. Is there any record in her biographies about how that might have, well, changed the course of

her life and attitudes? We don't have direct references to how it affected her, but we know she was between about five and ten during this period of being displaced. And there's no doubt a child of that age would be absorbing the impact of that sort of existence. She's not growing up in the initial years in the comforts of a grand court. The education she later goes on to get is a result of her father being victorious. But actually, her early years, I think, would have been really disruptive and really uncomfortable. So when we hear about her in later life, making really quite clever strategic choices, even down to her choice of marriage, you know, when she chooses to marry Athelred of the Mercians, he's so much older than her, decades older than her. I remember when I first started reading about her, it was like,

how could this young, important, significant princess of Wessex be happy with this marriage to this elderly man in his autumn years? He goes on to die shortly after they marry. Well, because she gets all the power, all the influence, and is then elected Lady of the Mercians in her own stead. And I think that was strategic. I think everything she did was strategic. I mean, she's a real power player. And I love that about her. So Ethel read her husband, who was not unready, he was perfectly ready. Yes, well. The namesake, but he predates Æthelred the Unready by a couple of centuries.

Æthelred dies. As you say, she wields power in Mercia, which is the sort of Midlands and at the time was in the process of being reconquered or conquered from the Northmen, the Vikings, places like Tamworth and places like where they found the Mercian Horde, that people may remember, that wonderful bit of archaeology. That is slowly, slowly grinding down Viking power and reconquering that kingdom of Mercian. Is it unusual that that would have been a woman doing that in this period? It is. So what's going on there? How did she convince people to follow her?

How did she establish herself in that role? When I was trying to tell the story of Athelflaed, I wanted to get to her. But the only way I could get to a real true understanding of her, where she comes from, the context, and how she managed to wield that amount of power, was to set her in relation to the other Queens of Mercia that had gone before her. And that's actually where it became far more interesting. There's these tantalizing accounts in Asa's life of Alfred that talk about how he doesn't even name his wife in the book. So Alfred's wife, she's not actually named officially in his life. And when there's talk about her involvement at court, she is made to sit below him. She is not involved in signing charters. She has no presence on the world stage as a queen of Wessex. And that is, we learn from Asser, because she is a Mercian. She is of the

Mercian house. And what these Wessex kings have learned is that the women of Mercia overreach themselves. They have traditionally, over the course of centuries had extraordinary power. I begin telling the story of Kinothrith, the wife of Offa. And we know Offa because of his dyke. Well done, Offa. He's seared himself on the landscape and on people's imaginations. But what we don't know is he was a co-ruler. He was ruling alongside Kinothrith and she had coinage minted in her own right. And she had vast areas of land. And after he dies, she becomes

a powerful abbess. Her daughters and her ancestors, the female line, we have this record of women holding land, signing charters, signing legal documents. And I mean, in the case of Kenneth having her own coinage minted, that's extraordinary, not just for England at this time, with having her own coinage minted. That's extraordinary, not just for England at this time, but for Europe at this time. This is a truly unusual circumstance that's emerging in Mercia. So when we fast forward 100, 150 years and we get to Aethelflaed, there is a context there. She knows her history and she knows if she marries Aethelred of Mercia and becomes Lady of the Mercians, she can wield power in the same way as her brother is as King of Wessex. So that's interesting.

So she's not so out of that Mercian tradition. She has a powerful ally, which is her brother, Edward the Elder, and he's busy kind of conquering East Anglia. Is she leading armies? Is she leading these military campaigns? Is she fighting herself? She certainly is behaving as a military strategist. I think that is without a doubt. It's one of those instances of women actually deliberately being written out of the record.

When I've been doing research on medieval women, some are just forgotten about, some their texts just aren't copied and handed down. But there are some that are deliberately written out. but there are some that are deliberately written out and Athelflaed is one of the ones that's deliberately written out because Edward encourages the canonical version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to play down her achievements in order to bolster his own right to rule Mercia and to rule a sort of united England but there's one surviving version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from Mercia which is known as the Athelflaed Chronicle and that one retains the most information we have about what she achieved. And it's staggering. Oh gosh, you'll love this, Dan. So having been reading history books my whole life, what is so brilliant about the Athelflaed Chronicle is in every other text, you get men

and all their achievements are being listed, the battles they've won, the law codes they've signed. And occasionally, the names of their wife might be mentioned, and it might be mentioned in relation to their children. Now, in Athelflaed's chronicle, it's just back to back her achievements, all the things she's doing. Her husband gets mentioned once, and that's in relation to her children. So the tables turn completely in this text. And I just think that's amazing. But what's also staggering is her reputation was secured in old Irish texts and in Norse texts. So the idea that she was defeating Viking troops, they then say there's this incredible woman, this ruler in England, and she beat us at this battle and she's doing this. And the Irish texts are particularly flattering about her. They declare her greater than Caesar, talk about her being this great military leader. So

can we say she walked onto battle wielding a sword? I don't think we can, but we can certainly say that she was heavily involved in the great military victories that her and her troops managed to secure. Which, by the way, could be the case with her dad, brothers and descendants, because it's not clear to me that some of these great Anglo-Saxon kings were absolutely fighting in the front line as well, right? So we shouldn't judge her for that. She advances north. Chester feels important,

capturing the old Roman, sort of the hinge of the Northwest. Chester's so important. I love Chester as a story because in relation to Chester, she shows serious foresight, a bit like her father, you know, planning for the future, not just always sort of surviving in the moment. So with Chester, she shows serious foresight, a bit like her father, you know, planning for the future, not just always sort of surviving in the moment. So with Chester,

she knew there was this great Roman fort and that there was a group of Vikings who had been kicked out of Ireland and were sort of at a loss to find land. So she offers them land in the Wirral and they settle in the Wirral. They're all behaving very nicely, very grateful to Athelflaed, so they will do anything for her, fight for her, give her taxes, all the rest of it. In the meantime, she is fortifying the city. She's rebuilding the walls. She is making sure there's a standing army there. She's making sure it's got all the infrastructure it needs to survive a siege. And it's only years later that another group of Vikings start to attack the city. And they rally the Wirral Vikings to their side. So the Wirral Vikings combine with

this Viking troop, and they launch an assault on Chester. And the accounts of the battle are brilliant. I think your listeners will love this. They threw everything out of the walls of Chester, listeners will love this. They threw everything out of the walls of Chester, including the beehives. We're throwing big kind of clumps of bees onto these Vikings. And very quickly what happens is Aethelflaed manages to negotiate. She's obviously a good diplomat because she persuades the Wirral Vikings to get back on side. And together, the combined forces managed to push the forces away and we still have people who claim to be descendants of we're all vikings today so i think i'm actually yeah well i was up in the world recently it's amazing how many people go oh yeah well i'm a viking oh yeah okay my wife is a proud Chester slash Wirral native.

There you go. So it's all thanks to Athelflaed. She could have been a proud Norse otherwise. So she dies before she can conquer York, but it's just a steady progress. And so the reason that England looks the way it does today and is shaped like it is today is in large part down to Aethelflaed. Yeah, Michael Wood said in his very important book on this period that England wouldn't look

the way it would without Aethelflaed. She is single-handedly responsible, if you like, for clawing back what her nephew, of course, will go on to secure. But it happens so fast. I mean, if we think her father is confined to this tiny little area of the marshes, and in her lifetime, she has pushed as far north as York. And if she had secured that victory, she would be the one that we declare the unifier of England, because she was so close. And it's a real mystery.

I've written a couple of children's novels. And in the second one... I've read them to my daughter, as you well know. As you well know. I do know! She likes them. Yeah, and in the second one, as you know, then, there's all this speculation. Why does Athelflaed die? Nobody knows. There's no account. We don't know. Was it something natural? Was she poorly or was she killed? We don't know. But she was on the brink

of the most extraordinary victory outside York. And she had it too. She had it in her grasp because the nobles of York had already agreed to support her. So it was a foregone. It was going to happen that she was going to take the city and then she dies. So it is one of those weird twists of history.

And her pretty boy nephew Athelstan gets all the glory for that. Absolutely, yeah. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We've got Yanina Ramirez on talking about some of the remarkable women of medieval history more coming up I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month on not just the Tudors from History Hit

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By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I'm a big Aethelflaed fan, but I know very little about Hildegard, who's the next remarkable woman we're going to talk to. She was born in 1098. Tell me all about Hildegard of Bingen. This is something that I feel I am on a mission to do, to right this wrong. Everybody should know the name of Hildegard of Bingen in the same breath as the name Leonardo da Vinci, because she was Leonardo da Vinci hundreds of years before Leonardo da Vinci, and better than Leonardo da Vinci because she finished things. She completed projects. She's a polymath. She's the most extraordinary mind. I feel I've got really close to her over the last few years. I went to Dissi-Bodenberg and I did Hildegard Way

around Germany by myself, which was just this incredible adventure, kind of traveling around the wilds of the Rhineland. And I had her monastic site at Dissipodenburg all to myself. I mean, it feels timeless. I was walking around there and I was just thinking, this woman would be remarkable in any age. If she lived today, I can't think of a modern intellectual who has the breadth of Hildegard and the reach of Hildegard. I'd be racking my brains. I'm like, who's the equivalent? Who's closest to her? So she is a mystic primarily, which means that she experienced visions. I could give you a bit of an insight into the sort of vision she had when she was little. She was obviously an unusual child because she was out walking with her nanny and they went past a field of cows and she pointed into the field and she went, that cow pointed to a pregnant cow. Nanny, do you see things that aren't there? Okay, alarm bell number one. And the

nanny said, no, darling, what do you mean? And she said, I can see the calf that's inside that cow. It's got like a ginger spot here and a brown spot here. You can't see that, no. And she's like, no, I can't. She went straight back, told Hildegard's mum. Hildegard's mum went back to the field later on to see after the calf had been born. And it was exactly as Hildegard had described it. So this is probably hagiography. This is probably legend. But it establishes that from a very early age, she was clearly considered not to be suited to the traditional pathway of marriage and kids and that sort of environment. not to be suited to the traditional pathway of marriage and kids and that sort of environment. And very young, she was put into the care of another precocious young noble woman who'd chosen the life of an anchoress. Well, it's sort of monastic enclosure within a male monastery with

a small female community attached to it. And so she goes there. And within that time, she's constantly having visions, but she's not really talking about them. And then something happens around 38, 39 years of age, where she suddenly says the visions are changing in their complexion. And I'm being really given this sense, I have to talk about them. I have to tell people about them. And whether this is the menopause, which is one thing I've argued in the book that her migraines are maybe changing in their complexion, but I actually think it's a self-empowerment. She's spent nearly four decades quietly honing her craft. And at this point, she's ready to be heard. And so she has a female companion, Ricardus, who works with her, and a male scribe, Volmar, who writes everything down.

And together, this sort of publishing trio create this extraordinary work called Skivias. And it's philosophical. It's theological. It's problematic. If you look on the cover of my book, Feminar, that's the cosmic egg. She describes it as the cosmic egg. And if you are seeing something else in that, you're absolutely right to be. Because what she's describing is the universe. Vagina shaped. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And that's exactly what she is alluding to, that this is sort of the heart of creation, that the female is essential within the sacred. And even today, that is radical. But she's arguing for sort of a female-centric idea of creation. And all the way through these texts, she's pushing against traditional theology. But this text gets picked up by Bernard de Clairvaux and the Pope and all the major bishops and archbishops of the time. And they all say, this woman is a genius. This woman is a mystic. This woman is incredible. She becomes an international bestseller. She goes on book selling tours. And then on top of that, she's not just writing these philosophical texts. She writes science, natural history. So she's still known

as the mother of natural history in Germany. Incredibly useful texts on plants and stones. Then she writes music. Oh, her music. If you do one thing after listening to this podcast, go on YouTube and type in Hildegard of Bingen music, your brain will explode. It's so unlike anything else. It soars across the octaves. It's just this incredible sound. She invents the language. She writes the first ever morality play i mean the woman is extraordinary and alongside all of that we have her correspondence so we can see what she was like as a person how she wrote letters to people and how she commanded the good and the great of europe she had them eating out of her hands she was known as the sybil of the rhine they'd go to her for

all their advice so what a woman can you think of anyone that's like that now? I can't. Well, Janina, I think you're just being falsely modest there. Haven't written any science terms. And fascinatingly, I learned from your work that everyone canonised her, but Pope John Paul II didn't want to, possibly because she was a sort of dangerously feminist icon. And in fact, it was old conservative Benedict

who actually made her a saint in 2012. Fascinating. Isn't that weird? I know. Because he was like the serial canoniser. He canonised anyone. But I mean, with Hildegard, she really had to wait her turn. But I could see why, because one of the things I think is the real beating hearts behind why I do what I do is there's a real misunderstanding that women have

just slowly been building back their rights across millennia. And just as we start to get to the suffragettes and we get to the last century, those rights are becoming within our reach. What I argue is actually that's not the case at all. The subjugation of women in real practical terms, like a woman's place is in their home. Those phrases were the result of the Reformation. That is a phrase by Martin Luther. So what I think is interesting is to look to the medieval past and actually see agency for women and pathways for women that were closed to them after that. When the Reformation happened, the monasteries were closed. Male religious went into the priesthood. Female religious were just told, get back in the household. That's all you've got now.

You've got to be wives and mothers. So reassessing what these women could achieve within the medieval period is my passion. But I think when we look at what's happened in subsequent centuries, yeah, Hildegard is Bavaric. Hildegard, she gives a recipe for abortion, how a woman can abort a fetus. Now in the US, we have issues over women being able to have that right to themselves. Hildegard gave it nearly a thousand years ago. She creates this spiritual realm where women are the equal of men. There's this wonderful quote, it's all men are born of a woman. So this idea

that actually there are no men without women. And she also gives the first ever description of a female orgasm, which is amazing, heady stuff. What, the description or the orgasm? Well, I think I find the description. Should I read it? Please do.

I think many of my listeners need to learn this. It's a public service. This is written in 1150 and it is the first recorded account of it so this is um when a woman is making love with a man a sense of heat in her brain which brings with its sensual delight communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man's seeds so obviously she's talking about it in the context of a sort of male female husband wife partnership When the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it.

And soon the women's sexual organs contract and all the parts that are ready to open during the time of menstruation now close in the same way as a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist. I mean, Hil the God! She is so amazing! And the fact that it was written over 900 years ago, you just think, have we gone backwards in terms of our understanding of these issues? Well, in my case, certainly. But isn't that even more impressive, given that she was writing that as a celibate. Yeah, well, again, I like to challenge these notions. I think one of the things I'm really concerned about is how, in our modern view,

we can retrospectively think we understand something from the past. So an example would be the words monk and nun. We have a modern conception of what that is. And it tends to be that if you think of a nun, I went to a convent school, so this is like perfectly true as far as my experience is concerned. It's a woman in her late 70s, white hair, probably strolling around a herb garden with a ginger cat by her side, very peaceful, very pious, shut off from the world, no interest in worldly affairs, certainly no interest in sex

or going outside of the convent in that respect. And that is our understanding of a nun. Go back in the seventh century, and even at that point, that's about the early emerging females of the church, to be a nun, to enter either a double monastery, which was men and women together, or a single-sex convent, was empowering. Firstly, it was taking you away from being the pawn of your family, being married off to whoever they said you would be, potentially dying in childbirth, which is extraordinarily dangerous, and being the property of the men around you. It gave you the access to education. It gave you luxurious environments. When we think about Hilda's Monastery in Whitby, I mean, that was palatial. And it gave you the opportunity to, within a safe

environment where you were protected from rape, you were protected from all these issues of being fought over by different parties, you could develop a sense of female community that was expansive, that was outward looking, that was rich. I mean, what Hildegard comes up with was so rich. And so I think we have to reassess this word and see it as an empowering one. And do we take sex out of the equation there? Well, I don't think we do because both monks and nuns, we know when we get to the Reformation, were certainly involved in sexual relationships. And we're also excluding same-sex relationships. When we talk about Hildegard,

the way she writes about her companion Ricardus is passionate. I mean, she's clearly deeply, deeply in love with this woman. And whether that crosses over into the sexual, we will never know. And that would be pure speculation on my part. But I don't think we can exclude the intensity of these community relationships either. So it's the third in our triptych of remarkable medieval women. Is it, you're the pollster, you tell me, but is it Jadwiga? Very good, Dan. Absolutely. Jadwiga. Jadwiga, king of Poland.

I had to fight hard to get her included because I think there's still such an assumption. I know certainly this is the case from my upbringing. I'm Polish and I wasn't taught about Polish medieval history. In Poland, there's a real sense that history, it's quite tragic because Poland was basically partitioned off the map for over a hundred years. They've had a tough 300 years, the Poles, let's be honest. And there's a degree of kind of grief and pain that they're still coming to terms with. So to look back at their medieval history, they are now, but they weren't doing a lot of that. And also, we have a real arrogance in the West of treating that part of the world as Eastern Europe, the Soviet bloc, the kind of concrete jungle of where Russia expanded out to, and not seeing it as what

it actually was in the high medieval period, which was the heart, the literal beating heart of an empire that was rivaling the Roman Empire in size and power. And that is something that you could ask a thousand schoolchildren in England if they know that, and I doubt you'll find one that does. Listen, my seven-year-old is all about the Polish-Lithuanian comrath. Let me tell you something. She's the one in a thousand then. All right. Fair enough. It's mandatory lessons. Mandatory. Okay. So tell me about her. I mean, first of all, crowned king. What's going on there? Yeah. So a lot of people are like, are you sure? Do you mean king? I do. I absolutely mean king. Jadwiga and her sister Marie were the

two women in European history to have had the title of king. And we're talking Rex, not Regina. So in Polish, it's Krul, not Krulowa, which is queen. So absolutely the male term. And the reason for that lies in the political game playing, if you like, of her father. So you mentioned the Polish-Lithuanian Empire. We're going back one step from that, which is the Polish-Hungarian Empire, which was one step before. Huge, vast geographical region. If you think about how big Hungary is still, it was enormous, covered a huge region of Europe. And lots of effort had gone into securing

this territory. And it was at a real crisis point, because there was just daughters to succeed. One of the daughters dies, and that leaves just Jadwiga and Mary. And so their father tries to set up treaties and agreements with the different rulers of Poland and Hungary to ensure that this empire will stay unified. And it's all quite complicated, but the long and short of it is, in Poland, they only would recognize a king. Now, this is the loophole. Because they will only recognize a king, they don't specify what sex that king needs to be. So it can be a female king, but they will only crown her as king. And that is where this term king comes through. But I mean, her story is so tragic. She is sent off to

Austria at about five years old into court of William of Austria, who is going to be her betrothed. He's a couple of years older. They have this huge ceremony in front of the good and the great of Europe, where they are essentially married to each other. And what needs to happen is at the age of 12, they consummate the marriage and therefore they are legally married. So they are legally bound to each other in the eyes of all the good and great. She grows up in the court there. She becomes incredibly intelligent. She masters, some say five languages, some say seven languages, but she's educated to the highest level. She learns about theology. She learns about science. And when we see her remaining documents, there's a Psalter that survives, St. Florian's Psalter, which shows that she was this intellectually curious and quite funny, humorous person. sort of decorations in the margin that look like Yoda and Gandalf. And it's kind of foxed medieval as you go, what are Yoda and Gandalf doing in a 600 year old manuscript? But it's

part of this curious and quite, I think, fun woman. Things go wrong when her dad dies. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a nightmare. She's just, it's Game of Thrones stuff all over. I mean, she is pulling all the strings on the world stage. And she's investing all her energy into Mary, the older daughter, trying to get her declared king in Hungary, marry her off to France, marry her off to Luxembourg. Who's she going to marry her to? Jadwiga, in the meantime, is quietly shifted off to Poland because what the Poles have said is they will take her as king if they have the right to choose her husband and basically control her. And her mum says, sure. So this young girl, not even 11, she is sent out to alone, without family, without friends, without supporters, to Poland, which she has a distant connection to, but has

not been there, and is put into the hands of the nobles of Kraków. And that's the start of her story, which is actually quite sad to think how much she had to have done by the hands of the nobles of Krakow. And that's the start of her story, which is actually quite sad to think how much she had to have done by the age of 10. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details

and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's wild. And in fact, her life is is cut short but she lived more than many of us who've lived several times the length of her life she frustrated those nobles by becoming her own

ruler i guess her own person in a sense but actually one of the things i'm keen to explore is the way that when we mention someone like King Jadwiga, give her dates, whatever, say she was King of Poland, that she marries into the Lithuanian royal family. That's data. That's information. I'm interested in the person, the woman. And the way I try to get to her is through the place she lived. So going and exploring 14th century Kraków, looking at what she would have seen with her eyes, but also read the texts that relate to her. But for me, it's the objects. We know she owned these specific objects that have survived down through the centuries. And they are so revealing about her. And what they reveal is,

she was known as Yad Vigav Anju. The Anju beans, of course, they get everywhere. But she was part of this Anju bean lineage. But she was part of this Anjuvine lineage. And she was part of the romantic tradition. She was part of courtly love and chivalry. And, you know, her objects show this sort of idealized romance, which contrasts with the kind of brute essence of medieval existence and warfare. We know she, again, a bit like Athelflaed was a military strategist, that she was involved in taking troops to the front line. She's an incredible diplomat. The stuff she does with the Knights Templar is extraordinary as a whole extra episode by itself. But she basically waylays the destruction of that region by a decade

and a bit, which allows ultimately the complete defeat of the Knights Templar by her husband, Jagiello. So documents show us that she's Templar by her husband, Jagiello. So documents show us that she's extraordinary, but her objects, her personal objects, show us that she is so much more than that. She's someone you could fall in love with. She's so romantic and so fun and so clever and interesting. And I just think, yeah, that's what I want to get to as well, her as this three-dimensional, fascinating Polish woman. She dies at age 25, postpartum, along with her little daughter. It's just tragic. It's awful. And if ever there is a lesson of the threats that medieval women had to their ambition, to their agency, childbirth was absolutely one of them. She dies when she's at almost the sort of pinnacle of what she could

have gone on to achieve. At this stage, she's at almost the sort of pinnacle of what she could have gone on to achieve. At this stage, she's setting up the first university in Poland. She has, as I say, created this fantastic diplomatic arrangement to subdue the threat to the north of Poland. She's made this incredible alliance with Lithuania, which is now being Christianized. She's enriching. You mentioned, you know, was she being a sort of a puppet to the nobles? She had them under her thumb. They loved her. You know, when you read what they wrote about her, what they had made for her, they loved her and respected her. So she had everything in her reach. And actually her relationship with her husband, who was much older, pagan, they didn't speak the same language to begin with, you know, how was that relationship

going to play out? She'd had to give up her original love William her original fiance to marry this man against her will and yet by the time she's 25 we can see they're working as a partnership this is interesting they both carry the title king quite an unusual situation but they're working in harmony and what could she have gone on to do what else did she have there but yeah she dies in childbirth. It's so sad. And the idea that she's laid in the grave with this baby of six days old, it's so, yeah, I think it's really sad. And actually, what's interesting is her tomb has been moved and opened up at various times. But right the way through Polish partition through those years where

Poland was absorbed by the surrounding countries, Her tomb in Wawel Cathedral became a rallying point for Poles. It was sort of a safe space where they could get together. And that's where solidarity and revolution came from. And I think that's so fitting. And the other thing I found recently, Dan, is in Jagiellonian University, which is Poland's equivalent of Oxford, the oldest university in the country, one of the oldest in the world, in the main chamber where the awards are given of the oldest in the world. In the main chamber where the awards are given out, where all the degrees are conferred, you have, we've mentioned him, Pope John Paul II, big Polish success story. And then you have two male rulers. And at the very

pinnacle in this room, above the chair of the vice-chancellor, is a huge portrait of Jadwiga. of the chair of the vice chancellor, is a huge portrait of Jadwiga. And I think that feminine touch, that matriarchy that runs through from her, through the Polish line, through her tomb, through that sort of national pride in her, I think it's really powerful and important. Well, amazing. You've totally convinced me and I'm sure all the listeners. Thank you very much. All of these examples are drawn from your fantastic new book, which is called? Femina, a new history of the Middle Ages through the women written out of it. And the book will be available in the US from the 28th of February. And I hope you'll love the book.

Fantastic. Well, brilliant. Well, good work, Nina. It's such a great book and you're a star as ever. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Dan. you