Eleanor Myerson

The forgotten heroines of the Middle Ages

Ranging from the 7th to 15th centuries and crossing from East Anglia to the Rhineland, the women written out of history

The 12th-century composer, writer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard of Bingen receives a vision. [Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty]

Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives.

Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical visions, travels and tribulations. For centuries, while her book hibernated in the Butler-Bowden estate, Kempe was completely unknown.

Janina Ramirez tells two significant stories here: the forgotten lives of medieval women and the scholars’ rediscovery of their records. She isn’t the first to describe the reappearance of Kempe’s extraordinary book, but she tells the story well, among many other catchy and varied examples. You might remember the Birka ‘warrior woman’ who went viral in 2017 after new DNA analysis revealed XX chromosomes in a Viking skeleton. But you might not be familiar with Margerete Kühn, who in 1948 crossed from recently partitioned East to West Berlin secretly carrying a priceless volume of the mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s writings.

Ramirez takes a broad scope both in time and geography, ranging from the 7th to the 15th centuries and crossing from East Anglia to the Rhineland to Krakow. Throughout, her history is led by new protagonists, from the Mercian Queen Aethelflaed (the daughter of Alfred the Great) to the anonymous embroiderers of the Bayeux Tapestry.

She emphasises the fragility of these histories, which – besides the general inclination of the past towards disintegration – have been subject to deliberate erasure.

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