Gone Medieval - Medieval Writers, Extraordinary Women

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

**This episode contains some strong language**Few women had the luxury of writing down their thoughts and feelings during medieval times. But remarkably, there are at least four extraordinary women who did. Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic; Christine de Pizan, a widow; and Margery Kempe, a "no-good wife". What was life really like for them? Could they live independent lives? And how can we hear their stories?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Hetta Howes to talk about her new book Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women and what it reveals to u about how medieval women thought about things like sex, death and God.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. The producers are Joseph Knight and Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots,

and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. One of the reasons that myths about the medieval era can propagate is that it was so long ago that we lose a lot of sources. When we think and talk about medieval women, myths are maybe even more prevalent because women were more likely to be illiterate, or too busy working and being mothers to write. And even when men did write about them, it's usually as an afterthought. How are we supposed to know about medieval women's lives if we don't get to hear from or about them? Luckily for all of us, Hedahouse has a new book out, Poet Mystic Widow Wife, The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women, which looks at the literary output of medieval women to help us tell about all of their complex and interesting lives.

I'm so excited to have you're here today to talk to us about how women traveled, worked, engaged in self-branding, and made friends. all while juggling with families and lives and social expectations. Sound familiar? I bet it does. And I am absolutely delighted to speak with Heda today to highlight how complex these women were. Hada, thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval. Thank you so much for having me. I am absolutely delighted that you are here because I'm delighted that there is another book about medieval women out. Yes. Fantastic. There simply cannot be enough. But also, I was really excited because I like the way that in your book, you've highlighted these four different

women who are really disparate, which kind of highlights the various ways that one can be a woman in the middle ages. And I wondered if you could just introduce us to the ladies in question. I would love to introduce you to them. I feel like I've spent so much time with them in recent years. So yeah, we have four women that the book focuses on. So it's called Poet Mystic Widow Wife, although some of those do overlap. So we start off with the earliest woman, the poet, is Marie de France. She is the person we know least about, actually, and was probably the most challenging for this book. She wrote some incredible, she wrote fables, but I think most famously she wrote what we call

Lays, which are kind of short, almost like fairy tales or Arthurian legends. And what's interesting about them is they often tend to give a lot more attention than her male contemporaries to women's experience. So she writes this collection books, one of which she dedicated to the king of her time. So she was aiming high in her readership. And we know she must have done pretty well because she talks about getting a lot of envy from her colleagues and how difficult it can be when, you know, you're kind of trying to operate in quite a male-dominated field. So she's the earliest woman. She's called Maria de France.

So we know that she originally was from France, but we have a pretty good idea that she was in England for a good stretch of time as well. The speculation that she might have been a noble woman seems very likely based on the level of her education and perhaps even that she became a nun. And if we look at her works, there does seem to be a bit of a narrative where she gets more and more interested in religious material. But again, we do not know. We know her name is Marie. We know she was from France. We know she wrote. And that is about what we know.

The second woman, the mystic, Julian of Norwich, is probably becoming one of my favorites, actually. She thought of one of the quieter ones, but she wrote an incredibly beautiful and still very popular account of visions that she had from God. So she was very, very sick, and she had these wonderful visions where God told her all kinds of important things. And she then decided to become what we call an anchoress, which meant that she enclosed herself away. She was, to all intents and purposes, dead to the world. She was enclosed in a cell, which she wouldn't come out of until she passed away. She dedicated herself to God, and in that time, she kind of worked on this account of her visions, which we have now, and which is still read by lots of people today. The widow, Christine de Pazan, possibly the most famous name, I think, of the four women, although she's also a poet, as arguably as Julian.

She wrote an astonishing amount of works. I mean, she really was pretty much the first medieval woman in Europe to make a living. a profession out of writing. When her husband died, she was from a very well-to-do family. Her family was well-known at court. When her husband passed away, she found herself in difficulty financially. I mean, she wasn't on the breadline mind, but she wanted to keep up what she was doing for her family. So she decided to, rather than remarried, she decided to write. And she started off writing love poetry, but increasingly kind of moved into more, I guess we'd say male dominant arena is like political writing and commentary, historical writing. And then we have Marjorie, who I like to think of as the Marmite of medieval women. That is so true. That is so true.

I mean, I personally adore Marjorie. She is a woman who was a wife and a mother. We know she had at least 14 pregnancies. Well, births. She might have had multiple more pregnancies that we don't know about. She was married. She was sort of living a fairly normal life. She was really sort of well-to-do. She wasn't a noble woman, but she had a bit of money. Her dad was an MP. And then she, after the birth of her first child, had a bout of something that sounds as like madness. It might have been potentially postnatal depression or psychosis even. She saw demons. She did self-harm. She was having a terrible time. And this concluded with a vision from God, which marked the beginning of her sort of mystical career, because Marjorie Kemp is the wife or the no-good wife,

as I call her in my book. But she's also a mystic. She also had vision. So she's, she dedicated her life to God, but what she refused to do is enter a nunnery or an anklehold. So Julian of Norwich has sort of then closed herself away. Marjorie is doing all the things she wants to do very out in the open. She's traveling the world without her husband. She's negotiating about chastity with her husband. She's talking about God wherever she goes. So she got herself in a bit of trouble.

And as we couldn't probably will talk about more. Some readers love her. Some readers find her incredibly irritating. and people that she encounters in her book, because she wrote what we tend to think of now as one of the sort of first autobiography by a woman in English, she encounters a lot of women. A lot of people that found her quite irritating in her own time as well. Yeah, I got to say, okay, so let me preface this by saying this is not to say that she isn't important. She's incredibly important. She tells us a lot about what it's like to be a woman, and I find her so bloody irritating. I just, okay, rich, Like, yeah, you're the first one. Whoever had a vision.

Mm-hmm. And also, like, being personally irritating as a way to become a saint is a funny gambit. Let's just say that. Yeah, it's a strange way to do it, isn't it? It's like having that person at the party who keeps telling you off everything you're talking about or for having too much fun. And you're just like, I'm just trying to have a good time. Leave me alone.

I don't need to be rebuked right this second. But what I really love about all of the women that you've chosen as well in the first place, I was so excited to see Julian of Norwich there because she's a personal favor of mine. But as you've already mentioned, they all make different pairs, which I think is really interesting. I mean, some of them, there's more overlap than that. But there's always kind of a then diagram going on in terms of what these women's decisions are. So you've got, you know, I would say that both Marjorie and Julian, you know, they have these visionary moments. Both Marie and Christine are writing these really wonderful pieces of literature.

They all kind of match up in various ways, have varying experiences of marriage that we can find or, you know, religious interests. So I really love how, even though they're quite different women, it does show us that there are these kind of through narratives that we can find from women. Yeah, I'm really glad he said that because they are very different. I mean, the organizing principle ultimately, which I should have probably mentioned when I was introducing them, the kind of idea that I had for the book, was that. was that they all write. So it's, you know, rarer than we would like to find texts written by women in middle ages, although of course there are many. There's not as many by women as there are by men. And I wanted to pick writers for two reasons, partly because my background is in literature, and secondly, because then I thought I could give more space to their actual words. You know,

I mean, I have a lot to say as well, obviously, but I was trying to give a platform to the things that they were saying. So they're all right. I mean, that is one thing they all have in common. But as you say, there's other moments of overlap that I found exciting when I was writing the book. Some of them I was sort of aware of. And then others are all like, oh, actually, yeah, these two experiences are kind of similar. And, you know, although they all have a degree of privilege in the sense that you couldn't write anything in the Middle Ages, unless you had a bit of material backing, let's say. Oh, absolutely. Yep. There's different levels to that. So Christine de Pazan is a much more wealthy woman than, say, Marjorie Kemp, for example.

So they all, I think, yeah, I guess it's important for me to say that they're all operating from a position of privilege, but that differs depending on the individual as well. So you start your book out, I think, very cleverly with a chapter which you've called Knocked Up, which I love. But it's about, you know, one of the major expectations of women in the Middle Ages, I would argue and have argued, you know, is this idea that you are going to be a mother. You know, the primary thing that one expects from medieval women is that they will get married and they will have children, you know, and this reproductive capacity is often considered to be the only thing about women. But what I like about your book is you've been able to highlight how whilst, you know, that is a problematic, at the best, a way to think about women.

It's still a really important experience for a lot of women as well. Yeah. And sort of personally speaking, I discovered whilst I was writing, this chapter that I was pregnant. That gave me a whole different perspective. I bet it was. It was a funny, serendipitous thing that I discovered that in the middle. I actually had to park that chapter for a little bit and come back to it because some of the

actual birth stuff I was not ready to deal with. But yes, I mean, I think it's that thing about kind of timeline in history. When we first were sort of thinking and writing about women in the middle ages, it was really important to really emphasize the issues with women and the choices they made and how awful it is that women were expected at this time to just have children and how difficult it was for people who couldn't but also who didn't want to. But then there is, of course, as you say, a flip side to that. And I'm hoping, I'm hoping, like you said, there's much, there are many more books written about medieval women now than there were prior. And we can kind of do a slightly more nuanced vision now.

there are lots of women who are really pleased to be parents or really devastated to have lost children as well. I think another thing we assume is that because women were having lots of children, there was no contraception. If a child was lost, it wasn't a big deal. But we see from sort of piecing together the evidence that that wasn't the case at all, you know, it was still a significant thing to not be able to have a child or to lose a child. So hopefully I've tried to give a balanced view. But the thing that struck me about writing that chapter is how there are still, you know, so many men that have opinions on breastfeeding or what kind of birth you should have or how to

be a good mother. In that sense, maybe less has changed and we'd like to think. I think that it's a really important thing to talk about because I think that there are sort of two things that go on in a modern perspective when we think about medieval birth. You hit the nail on the head here. I run into a lot of lay people who believe this thing that medieval people just didn't care about their children, which is wild to me. but it's a really pervasive myth, so I'm super glad that you address that. But also, I think it is really important to talk about how difficult, you know, the process of having children is and was. There's still kind of a conspiracy of silence about the way that we talk about labor.

And I think that kind of talking about historical women's experiences with it is really important. Talking about Marjorie Kemp's problems with, you know, what she sees as a form of madness, you know, not her term, ours, you know, after giving birth, is important to see that here are these historical antecedents to things that we're still dealing with. Yeah, absolutely. And that account of hers sort of is one of the first things we get in her book of childbirth is one of the earliest accounts we get from a woman of what childbirth might be like and the sort of horrors of her experience. It's really harrowing to read. And like you say, it's her term. She says she feels like she was out of her mind. Now, whether she was or not, that was what it felt like to her. Although even then,

there's still so much more emphasis I've been placed in her account on what happened afterwards than the birth itself. And it is something that, you know, like you say, there's still a taboo around it today that people don't necessarily talk that openly about their experience. And there are so many frustrating sort of emissions or religions. Are you like, but what was it actually like in the room? You know, you get so much about the lead-up, you know, what the confinement was like and then what happens afterwards. But yeah, it's interesting that we're so often so reluctant to talk about it or maybe people are reluctant to hear about it and that has dictated it. And of course, in the Middle Ages, it was such a woman-centric activity anyway. Men weren't allowed in the room and, you know, probably had no real interest in being, at least not in any accounts I've read about.

Whereas, of course, now you would expect maybe to have, you know, a male birth partner there if you've got one to want to be involved in that way is a change. But yeah, I still think, you know, one thing I've tried to do in the book is reflect on those moments where actually the thinking is more similar than we might imagine. I think it's so easy to think, like everything in the Middle Ages was awful and backward and blah, blah, blah, so bored of hearing it. Actually, we're not always, it's not a straight linear narrative. we're not always as enlightened as we like to think we might be. And sometimes the medieval people can surprise us in return. I want to skip forward to my very favorite chapter, which is what I keep banging on to all my friends about

when I tell them about your book. I love your chapter on wanderlust and travel because... Oh, I'm glad. I'm obsessed with medieval travel like all medieval historians are, I think. But I think it's so important because, again, there's this pervasive myth that nobody traveled in the Middle Ages, that you were just born into a tiny village and you never went anywhere and no one did anything. And medieval people travel all the time. But then even then, when we acknowledge that,

we miss out on all the women who are traveling. And it's because, as you highlight very well, there are more difficulties to women traveling and certainly on their own, but that doesn't mean they didn't do it. So I was just so, so delighted by this chapter. I think it was one of the more fun chapters to write. And I will say as well, one of the ones where I learned the most. You know, obviously, as you know, I do tons of research for everything. And I think this was, I knew a lot about Marjorie Kemp and travelling, but I learned a lot in the process of researching that I hadn't previously been aware of. It's so funny because it's normally men writing about the travel. And when they do write about women, it often tends to be because

they're either these paragons of virtue or they're really annoying. But sometimes you just get these little mentions that are almost like a size and you're like, oh, there were tons of women there. You're not necessarily talking about it that much and that could be for all kinds of different reasons but yes they were very present or you know you find their presence in sort of almost news accounts or when there's been accidents at shrines or stamped or things because people are so excited and some of it have been injured. You're like oh no they they absolutely were there. It's just they're not necessarily the ones doing the writing about it and then the men might not be so interested in talking about them being there unless they happen to have attracted a ton of attention and either

a very positive or a very negative way. Yeah, I mean, what I always say about this is when we see documents like this, it's almost just that women aren't quite people, their features. I love the way you put that. Yes, completely agree. They're just kind of in the background and you're like, oh, I don't know. And then there are a bunch of women here. And you're like, wait, what? Can I hear about them? No. Like, okay, great.

It's so frustrating when you're like, just tell me a bit more. And they're like, absolutely not. You know, and obviously then I ignored them. Duh. And I'm like, cool. Thanks. Thank you for that. But I also like one of the things that this allows us to do is kind of have a slight imaginary space here because, you know, what we know about travel or what we know about pilgrimage. If I think about, for example, the late medieval lowlands pilgrim badges of, you know, penises or vulvas wearing crowns and all the stuff, there's also, we think a bit of a space there where, you know, we see a lot of religious travel in particular. But it's also kind of like a way, hey, hey, girls on tour kind of a situation as well, which I really.

love and we have to kind of guess because of the spaces there. But we do know that it's also quite fun, it seems, to be traveling. Yeah. And if it wasn't fun, then the more serious people would be telling them not to do it. You know, you read stories of be warned in Condoberg's that your wife doesn't try to engineer a pilgrimage so she can get away with doing the things she wouldn't normally be able to do. And, you know, Christine de Pizan's pretty down on within traveling, which is interesting because she didn't travel as much as you'd expect herself. She seem to be pretty comfortable once she'd moved from Italy to France, staying where she was and sort of batted away invitations to travel more. But yeah, you know, she's like, oh, you know, women

should really stay at home. And it's like, yeah, because they're having a great time. You should try it, Christine. You should go on pilgrimage and have fun. Yeah, I mean, and absolutely, like, you know, we see Marjorie sort of doing the same thing where she's like, oh, and then everyone else was having fun on pilgrimage, but not me, because I'm very holy. And you're like, okay, all right, like, that's one thing to brag about, I guess. But I just find it so funny how, again, when we have these common misconceptions about the medieval period and, oh, it's incredibly religious, so that means everyone's kind of dower. And it's like, no, people are people. They will just ignore religious things if they feel like it.

Yeah, and this belief that I always think to my students and what surprises them the most. And two things, firstly, that they had a sense of humor. This seems wild to a lot of people that are new to medieval history or literature. And it's like, of course, because they were people just like us, and we have a sense of humour. So why wouldn't they, if we're scribbling, you know, if boys today are scribbling penises on the walls of toilet cubicles, why wouldn't they be doing it with pilgrim badges or whatever? And I guess it's kind of related in a way that they wouldn't be humorous about sex, that, you know, of course they were having sex, but they would never joke about it or do it too often.

And it's like, no, no, they actually had religious talismans that you could get as merchandise with Jenna Taylor on. Like, that's how funny. Oh, you know, the penis tree, the famous penis tree. which I did manage to just about work into my book, which is a sort of illustration in the side of Roman Dilla Rose, which is a very serious poem that has got penises instead of branches and a nun collecting them. I mean, they had a very childish and fun sense of humor

of one of these people. Yeah, absolutely. I love how, you know, they're just like me for real. Exactly. And I think that's great. But, okay, another of your chapters that I really loved is your chapter on hustling. So in the first place, I would argue that all four

of your subjects here. They are on their grind, they're out here hustling, they're making their names in various ways. And I think it's so important not just to highlight all the work that women do in the middle ages, but also that they're super aware of what the social expectations for women are and are able to gamify them. You know, I think you've made a really compelling argument in here that Christine DePaisan is one of the first people who's ever really understood branding. as a huge exercise. And, you know, Marie de France, she's at court. She's hustling. She's out here playing him. Like, she's up against these other men in order for Julian of Norwich to make a name for herself, you know, as an anchorist, what oftentimes gets you allowed to be walled into

a cell, you know, like you want to be, is the fact that everyone understands your name. And Marjorie Kemp is making an attempt to get her name out there, which fails spectacular until the 20th century. But hey, ho. Oh, Marjorie. She tries so hard and no one remembers her for ages. But yes, I mean, and I think you raise a really important point there, which is the navigation of a system can be as important as a dismantlement of a system. And I think when you're working with medieval women in particular, the society they're living in is so enmeshed in patriarchal structure. It's incredibly difficult to just try and smash that down. But what all these women do are really interesting ways

is navigate within it and find a way to achieve within it and to make a name for themselves like you say and whether it's earning money or making a name or kind of gaining validation in some sense, which they all in different ways I think suggest they would like. You know, even Julian of Norwich, she's not interested in people necessarily remembering her name or fame in any sense like some of the others might want

like Marie de France or Christina Pizanne, but she's really interested in people. people reading her because she wants to share this message that she's been given and she feels like it's her vocation, her mission to do that. And in order to do that, she needs to have respect authority. I mean, the fact that Marjorie Kemp went to visit her to say, do you think I'm legit, shows that Julian had a sense of real social capital and religious capital. So yeah, I think they all are very savvy in working within the system. that they're in to push back in a way.

And I think, you know, when we talk, you know, feminism didn't exist as a term then. It would be far too much to expect the things of them that we would expect of women or hope for women today. But I think within the parameters they're working within, they achieve extraordinary things. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, fundamentally, we are still talking about them hundreds of years later. And, you know, I think in particular, Christina Pazahn, because she's so great at marketing herself, you know, she, as you quite rightly point out, oversees the manufacturer of her

own manuscripts, makes sure that they're up to her standards. She understands what all the illustrations are that are happening in these things. She's overseeing a workshop. And as a result, I use Christine DePesson's images so much. She is just such an incredible boom to medievalists because when we need, you know, if you need a picture of a medieval woman, it's like, oh, there's Christine. Yeah, great. Thanks. Thanks, honey. You know, like, she was able to market herself to a point that 800 years later, it's like, oh, well, thank God. You know, there's something from Christine. Yeah, and the fact that we recognize her is massive. And, you know, I think, you know, if you know a bit about medieval kind of manuscripts and authors, I mean, for the majority of the time,

people weren't putting their name to things that they wrote to start with, let alone an image. And she is making sure that in different versions of her manuscripts, a very recognizable image of herself, usually in blue, usually with the hair that she has. I mean, just, you know, just Google her quickly, if you're listening, and you'll find all of you. images very fast, that you can instantly recognize her. I mean, that's really significant as she realized that might be an important thing to do. And it obviously worked because, I mean, you know, it's not every day that a woman at her time got asked to write a biography of a king or was kind of presenting manuscripts to the queen. And yes, she had the networking down. She had the sort of nepotism

down in the sense that her family was well known. But there were lots of other women like that who didn't create such a huge marketing machine for themselves. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, obviously probably the fact that she is of the nobility allowed her to understand how to market herself to the nobility. But also, as you get to in the book, most women, if they're incredibly wealthy and well-connected husband dies, which Christine's did, it's just sort of like, oops, well, you can remarry or not.

And she doesn't. She's got the imagination to say, no, I think that I've got this other way of, coming at things. Yeah, and I think it also, and this is something that I sort of felt a lot of people would be able to relate to through her writing and she processes a lot of her grief through the writing. So not only is she making money for herself and, you know, making sure a family's provided for, there's sort of a number of poems where she is always talking about her husband and how much she misses him and how much loss she feels. And in loads of her autobiographical and semi-autobiographical for words she comes back to that theme. And I think it must have helped her to write

about that. You know, even now in sort of therapy, people say, or write, write down what you're feeling. She talks about being very much a mum and her husband. She clearly felt the loss. And the writing helps her to sort of move through that in a really human way that I think, you know, just reaches across time. I found that really moving when I was doing that bit of the book actually to be like, yeah, you know, it doesn't really matter when you're living. if you're feeling something really significant, writing, literature, reading, creating is something that can really help. So she's, you know, on the one hand, this really fascinating, ordinary human person, but on the other hand, just so unbelievably savvy and prolific. I mean, it took me ages to write this book. She was writing all the time.

I don't even understand how anyone has the energy, let alone the ideas to do what she did. I don't know. I think about doing it all with a quill. No, thank you. It just seems awful. It seems awful. Another one of the chapters that I thought was really important is your chapter on making friends that discusses the relationships of women. Because if we don't get to hear from women in the middle ages very often, which we certainly don't. One of the last things we get to hear about is when women are chatting to other women, right? Because we're often relying on some man mentioning that he saw a woman, right? You're saying there's a group of women on pilgrimage. What are they saying to each other? Like, who are their friends? And being able to hone in on women's relationships is such an interesting and fruitful line of inquiry. And it tells us so much about what half of society was doing. Yeah.

And what half the society was worried the other half was doing? Because as you say, like, I think I loved writing the Making Friends chapter. But, you know, I think in terms of imaginative space, like you mentioned with Wondola, so there was a lot of imaginative space to do there as well because the accounts that we have often. are not recording female friendship. We know it existed. We have tons of really tantalizing glimpses of it, but we never quite get the accounts we want.

I mean, Marjorie talks quite a lot about failed friendship quite openly. I think she is someone, she's that friend who is just massively overestimated what your relationship is. You're like, oh, this is someone I kind of know from work. And they're like, come to all of my birthday parties forever and let's hang out on every weekend. and it's just like a horrible mismatch of expectation.

There is a lot of gaps to fill. But when we do find those moments, they tell us so much. When we find men panicking about what those moments might entail, it also tells us so much. They're sort of just, I mean, I can't think of any word other than the sort of fear of anxiety of what on earth are these women doing and talking about when they get together? And we shouldn't really let them because what if they're just sort of bad-mouthing us and saying terrible things about making fun of us, you know,

and this sort of fear of women working together. And that's so telling, because if in any society we are uncomfortable with certain groups being together too often, it suggests that we are in a very central sense trying to repress that crick pride. So if you want any kind of firmer proof that there was some real challenges for women in the middle ages,

reflect on the fact that men were really worried about them having a chat over a glass of wine. Oh, completely. I mean, we have so much literature. on this as well, right, from negative sources. So there's a really famous account of laundry houses, where, because women would get together to do laundry, because it's an incredibly involved process in the Middle Ages to do your whites, you know? So all of the women of the village will generally get together and do it together to lighten the load. And men are terrified of this. They

apparently refer to the wash house as the woman's court. They say, oh, well, they're just in there and they're going through everything. And now everybody knows everything about everything. It's like, well, don't be a jerk. And then the women aren't going to talk about you. Or even within that, too, I also find it incredibly funny how worried they are because you got to Alewife stories in this as well. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, oh, yeah, well, you know how the alewives get together. Our friend and colleague, Carissa Harris, she has this great quote where there's an alewife story and they are sitting there spinning. And one of them holds up a pintel that you use for spinning and says, here is a pintel of far length. And the pintel is slang for penis. And they're like,

well, you know how women are. They're just sitting around talking about our penises. And it's like, bro, like, that is absolutely not what's going on. But they cannot even imagine a world in which women might have something to talk about other than men's junk. And I think that's so important. And I think so surprising to lots of readers, I mean, these ale house poems that you're referring to, of which Carissa is Queen of. I mean, she is the absolute experts.

You know, they are super explicit, right? They, you know, written by men usually we think, although often very anonymous, but in terms of the time we often have seen them to be by men. And yeah, the topics of conversation is just like, it's just sex, men's genitalia, saying they're not good enough in bed, making fun of whether they're big enough or not. I mean, they're just... So first of all, I'm sure women were talking about many other things, guys, come on. But also, I do think it is surprising how explicit they are, you know,

this kind of correction to this idea that everyone in medieval Europe was super prudish because they were all very Christian. I mean, clearly not. I'm sure some of these poets have made my students blush away when we look at them. And it always is, you know, wine is usually involved and some sort of private space is usually involved. And it's a man eavesdropping and sort of discovering, oh, God, there's any terrible things about me. Whereas actually, I'm sure they were just talking about lots of other things. I find that genre of literature particularly fascinating and just really funny.

Well, your book ends with a chapter on death, you know, not to bring the mood down. But I think that you've also done a great job here of treating the way that even everyone's spectacular career comes to an end. We're all going to hit this particular point. And there is a definitive experience for women in the middle ages around that. Yes, you make such a good point because I think, first of all, the idea of women having what we would call a career is unusual. They were working all the time. And I try and make that point in the book that it's not just. just like, you know, we tend to think women didn't work. They often were helping out in tons of

different ways with lots of different sort of apprenticeships, jobs, things like that, you know, chipping in with the family trades and all that sort of thing. But for, I think, you know, something like Christine DePizan in particular, who made such a career out of rising, I do wonder what it must have felt like when she stopped. And then if we think about Marjorie Kemp as a sort of vocational mystic or kind of career, say, trying desperately to get, you know, she never says that herself, I should be clear, but now it feels like she's trying to get her way into sainthood. There's such a sense when she talks about the end in terms of heaven of what she hopes to find there. And it's really poignant. She wants to find belonging, fellowship,

I think status as well, for sure. She's up there with all the saints and, you know, all the sort of host of biblical figures and she can count herself amongst that number. And we don't know the ins and outs of how any of these women died. But I think their writing tells us enough that we can piece a bit together what they might have felt like about death. So that's what I tried to do in that chapter is to reflect on how they might have wanted their death to be because people in the Middle Ages thought a lot about having, you know, what they would have called a good death, you know, making sure that their consciences were clean and that they had had a good life and that they were prepared for the next life,

which would have been for most people at the time and then you were at the Christian afterlife. And sort of getting to that point. You know, Christine DePazan talks about heaven and one of her poems. And heaven is really intellectual and, you know, the space for her to be a scholar. And that seems absolutely as it should be

based on what I've read of her work. You know, Marjorie sees fellowship. I think Julian is just such an accessible writer. She just so badly wants for everyone to feel like they have hope and comfort and reassurance. So her kind of imagining of the afterlife feels tinged with those kinds of feelings. So I think all of them, you know, Marie, we have to do a little bit. Like with everything with Marie, you have to kind of do a little bit more imaginative

leaping them with the other ones. But, you know, she talks loads about purgatory and what that might be like and sort of the proper things that a soul needs to do in order to get to heaven. So yeah, I think there's a lot that we can glean from how they, felt about their lies, but also their deaths. And hopefully there's kind of an uplifting end to the chapter in that sense. Because it was a gloomy one to write that one, I must say. Well, I mean, I think, though, that it is such an important thing to talk about, you know, much in the way that we don't talk about things like childbirth or the awful grief that

medieval mothers went through when their children died. You know, we don't, we don't talk about death because we're uncomfortable with it. And so just bringing in these subjects that, that really are what makes a life, really. It's not just the high highs, it's the lows that tell us about how a society is functioning. And you've done that really well here, I think. Thank you. Yeah, all you're saying, it's always a sort of natural end point in a way. But it's also, I think, cheering to see how hopeful of their writing is when they must have been seeing death so constantly. I mean, there's been lots of speculation on Julianne of Norwich in particular. She was living in an incredibly plague-ridden town. Did she lose members of her family,

possibly, probably, almost certainly. Some people suggested she might have had a family of her own, husband and children, that she lost to the plague. We don't know. But she certainly will have seen a lot of death around her. The plague was hideous and just very visibly hideous. But also, just, you know, it's a time when there wasn't as much medical treatment around as I was. And it was a higher mortality rate for women having children and infant mortality was higher. So death is something that they would have been more visibly acquainted with. And I've wondered a lot myself recently if that's why the writing is a little bit more hopeful because it's not alien and frightening and new and it's not this thing they've shoved away in a corner never to think about. But they are actively thinking

about it, reflecting on it, seeing it, and that maybe allows them to take some of the fear out of it. I think, you know, you're bang on here. It's easier perhaps to meditate on whether or not all shall be well if you are grappling with the big questions, which certainly these women all did. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think that lovely phrase, All Shall Be Well, from Julian, which still is so popular today, I got it, my granny got me that on a bracelet when I was graduating from university. I've still got it. It still speaks to so many people because this is ultimately, and again, you know, what I wanted to try and think about the most, in the book is, yes, these women were living hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And yes, the lives looked very different to ours and society looked very different. Challenges are different. But ultimately, these kind of through lines of what will happen when I die? Should I have a family? Should I try and have a career? Can I have both? How will people react if I'd try and have it all?

is really similar to the kinds of things I think women are facing today. You know, I've just gone back to work after maternity leave. I'm sort of trying to grapple between wanting to be with my daughter all the time, but also wanting to be back at work and, like, do creative things and they also get a coffee off my own. You know what I mean? You know, I'm wanting to kind of try and balance all of this and then, you know, have a relationship even though we're now parents.

It's all these things that I'm like, oh, you were also in a different context in a different world, having all these very, resident thought, so it brings them a lot closer. These women, then we often tend to think they are. Well, I absolutely agree that it does. And I want to thank you one more time for writing what I think is just a really wonderful book. And thank you so much for coming to talk to us about it. Oh, no, it's been an absolute honor and delight to talk to you. Thank you so much. Big fan of the podcast, so very pleased to be on it. Thanks to Hedda for gossiping about dead women with me. And thanks to you for listening to Gone Medieval

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