Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women, Hetta Howes, Bloomsbury, £22

The canonical writers of the Middle Ages are almost invariably men. Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Giovanni Boccaccio are a handful of many well-known male authors and it is through their gaze that the medieval world is so often depicted, including the women who inhabited it. Literary historian Hetta Howes seeks to shift this perspective by offering an account of women’s lives through the voices of women, through women writers.

Four medieval women are the lead subjects of her analysis. Marie de France, a French poet, most likely working out of the English court under Henry II, composed romance literature including tales of King Arthur, his knights and mystical female figures such as the Lady of the Lake in Lanval. Julian of Norwich was a famous mystic and anchoress – a woman who voluntarily enclosed herself inside a cell attached to a church in order to spend her life in communion with God after experiencing a series of intense visions of Christ. There she penned the Revelations of Divine Love, which includes the oft-quoted line, ‘all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’.

Christine de Pizan is the author of one of the most well known and revered books produced in France during the early 15th century, The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she imagines a world run by women. A widow and single mother, Christine wrote for money, gaining prestige in the French court and eventually the patronage of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria as well as that of powerful men. Margery Kempe is the fourth titular female figure in Howes’ book, known for her autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe, which was not written by Margery but probably dictated to a cleric who inked down the story of her vibrant life; her relationship with God, her marriage, her various pilgrimages and her explosive encounters with others.

Through these women, Howes explores a wider experience of womanhood covering themes of pregnancy and childbirth, travel, sex, work, marriage and death. This is not, however, a series of potted biographies. Alongside the more well-known histories of Howes’s titular four women, she adopts a multiplicity of other sources to reveal often wild stories about how multiple medieval women moved through the world.

The late medieval period was both a man’s world and couched in religious rhetoric: the male view of a woman’s body was the dominant one. One of the books that explored women’s health, and was considered an informative text, was written by a German friar called Albertus. Titled Women’s Secrets, like most texts written about women by clerical men, it is steeped in misogyny and fear, considering a woman’s menstrual cycle to be ‘a necessary evil required for a woman to purge her excess moisture’. Christine de Pizan later claimed this particular book (among others) spread libel about women, that ‘it states that the female body is inherently flawed and defective in many of its functions’.

Due to scripture and the sinfulness of Eve, a woman’s body was suspect, considered to be at its most stable and trustworthy when weighed down by pregnancy. Procreation was the primary objective for women (though as Howes points out, not all women) and many spent most of their adult lives pregnant, facing the very real possibility of death every time she entered the birthing chamber. The pain and fear of childbearing was ‘considered well deserved, something she should submit to as a justified punishment from God’. Margery Kempe’s account of childbirth is one of the few surviving testimonies and the pain was, according to Margery, so extreme it drove her ‘out of her mind’. The only mother not to suffer pain was the Virgin Mary and Howes offers a fascinating insight into what she describes as ‘an explosion of Marian devotion’ in the 15^th century. According to the Roman0-Greek scholar Galen, in order to conceive a woman had to orgasm and it was believed, in the late Middle Ages, that the Virgin was no exception. According to Howes, ‘in pageant plays… the Virgin mother experiences what sounds suspiciously like orgasmic ecstasy during the Annunciation, “I cannot tell what joy, what bliss/Now I feel in my body”’. It was pleasure literally ‘heaven sent’.

The Virgin Mary was the paragon of female virtue and many women devoted themselves to their faith and to her, choosing a life outside of the duties of marriage and child rearing. Yet these women could never wholly free themselves from the shackles of responsibility. As an anchoress, Julian of Norwich was enclosed in a cell but permitted three windows; two were practical – for prayer and receiving sustenance – and the third to ‘host a parade of visitors who had come from far and wide to seek her advice and guidance’, as was her duty. Howes reimagines Julian finding her escape in her writing; after closing the curtain to her little window and the outside world she was able to return to the memories of her visions that took her to her cell, ‘finally alone… Julian could reflect on what she had seen and write it down’. Julian of Norwich found freedom in her confinement in that it enabled her to write and commune with God, the channel of thought unbroken by the noise of life. Yet in a bustling court, both Christine de Pizan and Marie de France also found freedom in their pen. Christine imagined women unrestrained by masculinity, able to carry themselves through life as warriors, inventors and saints. Marie constructed a mystical realm in which her female characters often hold power: ‘her tales are full of influential women… such heroines may have been a form of wish fulfilment, a fantasy that could never be realised outside of fiction’.

Immensely readable and jam-packed full of amusing, sometimes salacious and certainly surprising anecdotes about medieval lives, Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife, is a thrilling read. The volume of literary and archival material Howes untangles and presents to the reader is impressive, clearly presenting the evidence that medieval women had both agency and ambition – they may have lived in a man’s world, but they were evidently successful in navigating it.

Some readers may find the modern comparisons in this book jarring, such as Christine de Pizan being described as a ‘hustler’. These can in places feel awkward, not only taking the attention away from the wonderful detail about these women, but denying them to define themselves by their actions in their own period of history. Yet, the intention is no doubt to offer a way in for the reader, drawing parallels to relate to the complexity of life as a medieval woman, with all its familiar themes. As a debut, Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife is a bold and entertaining leap into the colourful and deeply nuanced world of medieval women.