Medieval women – they were ‘just like us’. Except that they weren’t. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife is the first popular book by the academic and New Generation thinker Hetta Howes. It is a history of medieval women in relation to four celebrated figures – Marie de France (poet), Julian of Norwich (mystic), Christine de Pizan (widow) and Margery Kempe (wife) – whose lives have been retold recently in excellent studies by Anthony Bale, Marion Turner and Janina Ramirez. Howes’s book is highly readable and informative, placing the works of this quartet within a broad range of cultural documents – treatises, guidebooks, wills, court records and folklore. There are some great details, such as the theological debate about the Virgin Mary’s orgasm.
Howes limits her scope, however, by looking too narrowly for ‘relatability’ in the medieval lives she surveys, where this is determined by the boundaries of her own experience. In her introduction, she claims that over the past two years she has ‘felt closer to these women than ever’. I was curious: did she have a vision of the universe appearing like a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, like Julian? Did she renounce sex and take to the public square weeping, like Margery? Did she write an allegorical takedown of her detractors, like Christine? Or did she compose a ground-breaking translation of Aesop’s Fables, like Marie? No: she planned a wedding and became pregnant.
I congratulate Howes on these life events, but I struggle to see how such experiences shed any light on medieval lives, given that the paraphernalia of contemporary marriage – from the white dress to canapés to the typically non-Latinate service – would have been entirely alien to medieval people.
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