 Welcome to everybody joining us this evening. I believe we've got people tuning in from all over the world. So thank you if you've woken up early or you're staying up extra late to tune in to watch this. I hope you enjoy the experience. My name's Rebecca Radil. I'm the director of HIST Fest and we've partnered with the British Library to bring this special event to you this evening. Just a couple of points to note beforehand. I just want to say a big thank you to PLB Limited for supporting the event. And also, if you do have questions during the talk, please feel free to submit them. There'll be an opportunity to have a short Q&A following the talk. So our speaker this evening is an extraordinary woman in her own right. She is a BBC broadcaster. She is an academic, a medievalist, and she's the author of some beautiful histories of the medieval period from the private lives of the saints to a lovely biography of Julian of Norwich. And I will leave you in the safe and capable hands of Dr. Yenina Ramirez. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for that lovely introduction. It's a pleasure to be with you finally for HIST Fest. I was so looking forward to seeing you all in the spring and then the remarkable events of 2020 seem to have taken over and changed so much for us. And I, for one, have never felt it's more important to be connected with the past, to be connected with history and understand the past than it seems to have been in the last year. I'm going to be talking today about a topic I've been working away on for a number of years now, but it's coming to fruition in two major projects that I'm working on simultaneously. And that is this idea of writing medieval women back into history. Now, this is me, Yenina Ramirez, and when I began my work as a historian, I was really not aware of the many disadvantages that I was starting off life as an academic with being a lower class background, being a woman, being off a different ethnic background as well. And in all these respects, I just wanted to achieve because of them and I felt I was lucky with the universities I managed to go to when I was going through higher education in the 90s. There was a sense in which, I think in certain universities, people were being lifted up. So there was grants, not fees. There was all sorts of different things that helped me get the education I had today. I've been so moved watching the events of the last few months and seeing how particularly the Black Lives Matter movement has really brought to our attention how we live on a precipice in terms of engaging our students, our young people with the past in meaningful ways, ways that really matter to them. And what I'm gonna talk to you about today is the work I'm doing, trying to find people who have been essentially written out of history and writing them back in. And I think this is important work. Now I'm looking at it from the point of view of women, but as I'll go through this session with you, I'll talk to you about the idea that really, this is an inclusive way of rewriting history. This is writing back lots of people from different backgrounds, maybe who aren't all white well-off men and finding a way of doing history that brings the narrative closer to us. But I've shown you here some images of the many extensive and crazy things I have done so far throughout my career. You can see I am indeed summoning a rainbow there as the first ever television program I made was over 10 years ago now and it was called Treasures of the Anglo-Saxons. And when the newspapers started to run reviews of it, they went in with goth historian Yanina Ramirez and that label seems to have stuck ever since, but indeed I do think as a medievalist, I am not afraid of a bit of memento mori. I'm not afraid of embracing, as you could see, my dark side there, but I have never been afraid really of looking for heroes, heroines, people from the past that can inspire me. So I actually wrote my own character, Alva, in my children's books as a young Viking girl who solves mysteries in the Viking world. And again, that for me was an important move. I wanted to make a protagonist that other people could identify with. And I've been lucky across my career to meet absolutely fascinating people and people from all different backgrounds, but you can see me there. This was in the bottom right-hand corner, a program I made on Julian of Norwich and I'm meeting these incredible nuns who were part of a legacy of sisters from this convent in Yorkshire who had moved over to France, taken with them their text of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love and through the French Revolution, through all the events of the last 100 years had kept this text safe. And it's these sorts of people I'm looking for in my research, these guardians of lost voices and they are there. The thing I wanted to really reinforce for you as we go into this HIST Fest talk today is the past was as diverse, as exciting, as interesting, as fascinating and as complex as it is now. And the variety of people we see around us today, they were there too. It's just about how they've been preserved in the historic records and how we go about finding them. So two parts of my research are intersecting at the moment. One is what I'm gonna be talking to you about today, finding medieval women from the past. The other is interestingly about goddesses, goddesses of the world. And I'm showing you here just some celebrities dressed in the guise of different goddesses from across the world, Katy Perry there sporting a sort of an ISIS, I think there. But in all these examples I'm showing you, what you've got our people today, women today empowered and wealthy and influential women who are looking to the past for inspiration and certainly looking to art history for ways of manifesting that. So you can see this was from the Met Gala Ball where all of the outfits were inspired by religious imagery. And many of them were taking inspiration from medieval icons. So a little range of medieval icons there to show you how Lana Del Rey's outfit there was inspired. And what I've discovered, the more I read about goddesses is how, again, this seems to be a part of my education that really wasn't enhanced. I loved ancient myths. I loved ancient tales and stories. And I used to gobble up anthologies of them. Enid Blyton's Tales Long ago was one of my favorite books. But again, I always felt that the women were helpless. They were victims. There wasn't really a foregrounding of female characters. It was usually the antics of heroes with big swords going around defeating monsters, which is also great. But what I've discovered in really deeply researching these women from across the world, these goddesses, is they act as lenses through which to see how women have been perceived across time in different cultures. And the thing that really surprises me is how venerated and celebrated women were. And this is something that's gonna come through in this talk. A lot of the repercussions that we live with today, and I'll show you some statistics of how imbalanced things still are, a lot of them are an invention of the last couple of hundred years and do not reflect the rights of women going further back in time. And that's something I think we need to reclaim going forward. I think it's something empowering if we can look back a couple of hundred years and see people that inspire us. That should help us go into the future feeling inspired too. And the very earliest representations of any human form were those of women. I've had the pleasure, I'm gonna show you him in a bit. He always pops up in my talks now, but the lion man, I'm going to talk about him as the earliest conceptual artwork combining the figure of a man with the head of a lion. But here you could see two different venuses, two of many. And for any kind of modern art enthusiasts out there, anyone that likes a little bit of sort of contoured pottery, going back to some of these 10,000 year old sculptures, you are absolutely will be blown away by the shape, the sophistication, the abstraction of some of these, but underlying them all is this idea of celebrating the female form. So you've got the very famous villain author. These up until recently were referred to as venuses. This has been academically criticised that they have no connection whatsoever with the goddess Venus, but are in fact, should be referred to as figurines, female figurines. So this female figurine is from Villendorf, and the other one is from Holofels. And I've had the honour of being up close and personal with the Holofels one. That's actually the older of the two. And it goes back as much as 15,000 years BC. And what you can see here on the Holofels one in particular, she hasn't got a head. It's an amulet. There's a hook there by which you can hang the female form as a pendant. But in both cases, they're shown as fertile. They're shown as reproductive vessels, but they're clearly being adored. And this is something that goes right the way through world religions. And the reason I'm starting with goddesses to get us into medieval women is because I think we take a very short term view historically a lot of the time. We tend to think that maybe 300 years, 400 years, 500 years, a lot of the evolution for the representation of women, for attitudes towards women go back thousands of years. And they manifest differently in different cultures. So I'm going to talk a bit about women who fight, warrior women, why we get excited about this today, why this is an interesting aspect of medieval culture. But you only need look to goddesses of the past. So here we're looking at Kali standing on top of Shiva there. And the story of Kali is fascinating. She is manifest out of the forehead of Durga during a battle brought into existence in order to fight. And everything about her is emphasizing this great physical strength, but also celebrating Shakta, this idea of sort of female force, female empowerment. Now she might look scary with her necklace of skulls, but actually I think she's a hugely inspiring role model for balancing out the male and the female, the active and the passive. And I find her fascinating. And then there are goddesses from other parts of the world that I'm starting to discover that again, equally just really resonate to me as royal models, as people that are inspirational to their culture. So this is the Inuit goddess Sedna who is the mistress of the sea, very important for Inuit people in a very tragic story and myth associated with her. She is kidnapped if you like into marriage by a bird spirit. She tries to escape from this bird spirit with her father, but as they're escaping in a canoe, the father realizes that the bird spirit is pursuing them, the winds are to the water's attorney against them. So he throws her out of the canoe to lighten the weight. And as she grips on begging to her father to save her, first of all, he cuts off her fingertips, they fall into the water and become seals. Then he cuts off the bottom of her fingers, those fall into the water and become walruses. And finally he cuts her hands off at the wrist and the hands become the whales of the sea. She drops to the bottom of the sea and she becomes the goddess of a kingdom down there. We can read so much of cultural importance into this story. But again, it's this idea of connecting women with creation, with creativity, with the role in life-making. And it gives us another glimpse on worldviews. And this is something I think that is changing in education, changing in academia, we are more interested in world history, world issues. And as a result, I think when we go back to our specialisms, when I return to medieval England and I look at my women, I want to bring these insights with me and I want to see if I can apply anything new that I've learned from those to studying these women that I feel I know very well. And one of the linking points is Bridget. Now, at the beginning I showed you some of the books I've written, one of them is called The Private Lives of Saints. And in that I was delighted to find that two of the main figures that featured were women. There was St. Hilda of Whitby and there is St. Bridget. Now, St. Bridget, one of the patron saints of Ireland, absolutely fascinating because she seems to take us from the world of the mythical, the world of the goddesses, the world of the tales of long ago, into a real place, a real person, a historic person with documentation that we know existed in Kildare in Ireland. And that's why I'm using her as a bridge. So on the left, you can see an image there of Bridget's three forms. She's often shown in a tripartite state, which is common for goddesses. They can sometimes be as mother, maiden, crone or they are three aspects of the same goddess. So you think of Hecate. Hecate has her different faces going in different directions. In the case of Bridget, she is sacred to water, to hills, to fire. She's a fertility goddess too. She brings the harvests, she enriches nature. So she really covers all bases, this Celtic goddess, Bridget. We can trace her historically too by looking at the movement of the Brigantes tribe, this Celtic tribe that move over from Northern England. Indeed, not far from where Rebecca is in Chester. That sort of area, Northern England, Scottish borders over into Ireland. And it's when the Brigantes settle in Ireland that they bring their goddess, Bridget, with them. And then there is this transition, this gradual Christianization that takes place in Ireland going through the fifth and sixth century. The people we might know from this period say Patrick, St. David, those early saints. But in the conversion of the Irish, we have to remember the Romans never got there. And so a lot of the Roman institutions didn't reach there either. There wasn't this idea of bishoprics, of parish churches and a very devolved church or hierarchy. Instead, you have tribes, you have different gods and goddesses that were sacred to particular regions and areas. Their wells, their shrines, and those are adapted, they're transferred over to the Christian faith. So Bridget, the goddess, becomes St. Bridget of Kilda. And this is where we enter the historical record because there is a saints life about St. Bridget. She, what's so fascinating is many of the attributes of the goddess seem to pass over to the saints. So her hagiography, her saints life is really unlike any others because she could do strange things. She can hang her cloak on a sunbeam. And this might come back to an idea of Bridget being associated with fire, with light. There's other things that maybe mean she's connecting back to the sort of wisdom and witchcraft elements of Bridget. So in her saints life, in her Christian saints life, there's an account of how she brings about the loss of a baby, an abortion, technically, in a young girl. And that is very unique. And again, what is this? Is this some echo from a pre-Christian past, a pre-Christian tradition that's coming through to Bridget? But even weirder still is what takes place at her shrine. So her shrine at Kilda becomes very, very important. At its center is a sacred tree, probably a sacred oak. And a later account says how visitors to Kilda, to Bridget's shrine, would see 12 nuns in a circle. And there's a hedgerow that runs around the outside of the sanctuary. And if any man crossed over that hedgerow, they would spontaneously combust. So there is something proto-feminist going on in the cult of Bridget. But what's fascinating too, is the real living, say Bridget of Kilda, assumed such great power. We tend to think of the Christian church as a patriarchy, which of course it is, and oppressive and restrictive for women. But Bridget managed to achieve the rights really of a bishop. She had incredible regional command and was highly venerated and respected within the church. So Bridget for me becomes a sort of meeting ground of ideals really, of what we imagine women could be, how we can imagine how strong they could be, and then this sort of historical character that seems to exemplify that and somehow manifest it against the odds. And I'll be talking a lot about against the odds. We go through this because of course, it is not fair for me to give you the impression that women had equal rights to men. There are certain societies I'll show you when we talk about Viking culture, when we talk about some of the Northern Germanic areas, where certainly women's rights were excellent. They were really quite, not dissimilar to rights we have today. But in terms of equality, that is not the case. Indeed, there's only one culture I've experienced recently where I would say women had a degree of autonomy and that was the ancient city of Knossos, the Minoan people in Crete. There seems to suggest a prevalence of women in higher positions of command, religious positions, positions of education and authority. But otherwise, we are talking about women often almost exclusively as being lesser in most positions of power than men. So I don't wanna kind of make it seem too, idealistic. This is, so moving from the goddesses, moving from this mythical three-bridgeet, I wanna start talking about women in history and how we deal with our representation in the past. Now, I was at school in the 80s and I loved history. I loved history from a very experiential way. My mum used to take me to galleries, used to take me to visit museums, stately homes, castles, and that idea of encounter was hugely important to me. That's where I fell in love with the past. Once I actually started to sit in a classroom and have to learn dates and battles and individuals and biographies, I found it harder to stay in love with the subject. And I think it's largely because I couldn't really find things that felt relevant to me. I wanted to know very different things and that's why I drifted towards the humanities more generally, I just drifted towards literature and art because what I find when I read a piece of poetry from 1,000 years ago or when I touch an object, a manuscript from 600 years ago, there's this human connection. I'm an individual in the present connecting back with a human from the past. History as a subject for me was stripping some of that human aspect away. And I think that's changing. I think the way that history is being taught in schools now is so much better and really trying to bring that idea of experiencing understanding relating to the past. But there were figures I was fascinated by and I'm sure they're all on your roll call too. Elizabeth I is fascinating, undoubtedly. Her mother, Amberlynn, is the first historical woman I sort of got absolutely obsessed about. Used to visit Hampton Court regularly and imagine I was her. And Queen Victoria, you know, we have these real landmark individuals and we are living in the reign of the longest serving British monarch ever. Who is a woman? When we look back over the 20th century we will be thinking about this time being the time of Elizabeth II. This was when she, her life punctuates so much of what we've all lived through. And Joan of Arc, who I am gonna talk about today because I think she's very odd and very exciting. But on to that as a medievalist, there are some better known women that we can start to find out about. So in the past I've spoken extensively about Athelflad, the Lady of the Mercians. Michael Wood has said there would be no England without Athelflad. And I think that this is a part of our history we don't know. I'm not gonna talk too much about Athelflad. If you want to know more I would be happy to help in the Q and A. But she is a remarkable human being. Emma of Normandy, mother of Edward the Confessor. But indeed those few hundred years between about 600 AD and 1000 AD, my happy space, the early medieval period is a time where truly remarkable women come through who are not just mothers of kings, sisters of kings, wives of kings. They are ruling in their own rights. They are ruling as regents, but they're also ruling as, like Athelflad did, a queen in her own right. And then alongside these secular figures, these figures who are fascinating from the secular world, I do wanna talk about religious women. Because I think we, again, when I showed you at the beginning, me talking to those wonderful nuns about Julian of Norwich, we tend to have a quite fixed view of what a nun is. So I would say, and I do this with monks too, our view now of a nun is someone probably elderly, probably very much has been brought up thinking about the Bible, thinking about religious matters and has chosen a life of seclusion. Maybe they walk around a herb garden with a ginger cat and otherwise they live very quiet lives and they pray all day long and they stay inside their convents. That couldn't be further from a medieval religious woman. A medieval religious woman like Hildegard of Bingham who I've put up here, is your equivalent of Jermaine Greer or Mary Beard? These leading feisty, knowledgeable, intelligent women who are out there having their voices heard, getting their texts written, getting people to listen to them, traveling around, sharing their thoughts. Some of them really break the mold and we have misrepresented them by using modern terms retrospectively saying a nun. They are not simply nuns, they are way more than that. So I will look into that a bit more too. In terms of why this matters still, so many things matter right now. We have to be so aware that history is being made around us, more so than at any other point in my life and our awareness of each other has to be so astute at the moment and we have to care for each other and we have to look out for people because there is a hell of a lot of injustice out there. When I was asked maybe 10 years ago would I count myself as a feminist? I would always say, I'm an agate, well, yeah, kind of, I couldn't be more active in that now than really I feel so strongly about how women's rights need to be addressed now. And this is because not only have we had a president who grabs pussy, we have also used so many things since the Me Too movement that have come to light about quite endemic sexism but there are still some big injustices. There are more CEOs named John than there are women CEOs altogether. That's pretty big, isn't it? It will take 108 years to close the gender gap. Only six countries give women equal legal rights to work as men. For every female film character there are 2.24 men, women earn on average 9% less than men. One in three women are sexually abused at some point in their lifetime. Each minute, 28 girls are married before they're ready. 71% of all trafficking worldwide are women and girls. Now these are modern issues and you are probably all sitting there watching this talk and Nina, you're a historian, get back to the past. Stop making it about the present. Well, I'm afraid that history does intersect with the present and the reason I'm writing about women in the past is to try and give a different view on how we should perceive ourselves going forward. So it's about past, present and future. And again, I said right at the very beginning this is an inclusive feminism that I'm talking about. This is for everyone. And I'm showing you here a 100 year old picture and one that was taken just last year. And the way that I want my work to go forward is to bring in as many excluded voices as possible. Right, off my soapbox. In fact, now I'm climbing back on my soapbox because I'm going to introduce you to the remarkable Christine de Pizanne. Now, if you haven't met Christine before, please bring her into your life. She is incredible. She was such a influential French woman in the early 15th century because she had the ear of the court. She was in Paris running her own publishing house. She was writing the books herself, but then she had members of her family, friends running a scriptorium behind the house where they would reproduce her works and distribute them widely as possible. And she wrote about the role of women and meant much, she has been called a proto-feminist. I think she definitely was. She was absolutely incredulous about how women were being represented in romances. That most popular book of the time, the Romandula Rose, the Romance of the Rose, was, it was in everybody's house. And she felt it was such an unjust representation of women that women were these victims enclosed in gardens and strong knights had to rescue them. And all of the choices were being made by the men and the women were just either shrews, harlots or victims. So she writes this incredible book called The Book of the City of Ladies. And she writes a number, but this is sort of one of her big hits. She says, so should I also tell you whether a woman's nature is clever and quick enough to learn speculative science as well as to discover them? And likewise, the manual arts. I assure you that women are equally well suited and skilled to carry them out and to put them to sophisticated use once they have learned them. Then my university, Oxford University, is just about to start celebrating a hundred years of allowing women to study there. It is a hundred years ago to me feels like nothing. It feels like, why did it take so long when you have women like Christine writing and thinking for women to be brought into the fold? And I will talk a bit more about that and some of the reasons for it. But certainly she is a woman of learning. She is a woman with education dripping off her fingertips. She has access to literature. She has access to books. There's, the work I'm doing at the moment is by no means new. So in 1955, the wonderful Betty Vandal did it was looking at how women are represented across the medieval period and how their reputation is changed, fiddled with, meddled with across time. And there's a negative trajectory for all these women I've mentioned so far. So she says someone, a really powerful ruler like Athelflad of the Merseans. So her dates are 9-11 to 9-18. In the 10th century, all the people writing about her like, yep, she was as good as Caesar. She was an empress in her own right. She was as strong as any man. As the centuries go on, her reputation was transformed. So in the 12th century texts that talk about Athelflad, she's described as being disturbingly manlike, far too macho, not at all feminine. And then as soon as she goes further on into the 13th, 14th, 15th century, she becomes a troublesome wife and then she becomes written out almost completely to the benefit of her father, Alfred the Great. So Alfred the Great's reputation is raised up and Athelflad is dragged down. And now I think she's being rehabilitated but you'd struggle to find a school child that would instantly be able to tell you the story of Athelflad of the Merseans. We have had our history rewritten for us. And who does this rewriting? I'm afraid a lot of the crime lays at the feet of the 19th century, 18th and 19th century historians. I'm showing you here two pre-Raphaelite paintings. They show medieval women trapped in towers, medieval women occupied in the very ladylike pursuit of embroidery. Now this is not to deny that women weren't amazing embroiderers. The Bayotapestry all made by nuns from Canterbury. It is no mean feat. But there is a sense in both these images of being enclosed, being maidenly retaining their virtue, their virginity by being locked away from men. And this carries right the way through the rewriting of medieval women in art, in literature. There's a sense in which strong women are turned meek, turned into victims, or they are simply written out if they're too troublesome. And this goes through the historical record too, because it's at this point we start to see documents being lost, destroyed, rewritten. We see lines through text, feminine written by a woman, therefore do not copy, do not transcribe. And there is a sense in which Victorian values towards women are being retrospectively reapplied to medieval women, women of the past. So how Victorian society wanted to function is how they make the women of the past function in the way they transcribe the texts and in the way they relate those women down across time. We are going through something of a change again in thinking about women of the past, but I want to caution us now too, because you just have to look at our attitude towards the past here. You've got some images, wonderful Sean Bean, they're looking very moody. I think the title itself, Black Death, gives the way that I think he might be dying yet again in yet another film, but there's so many cliches of medieval culture here. He is the knight, the monk is looking moody and conspiratorial in the background and there is a glorious looking woman over his shoulder with lovely long lush hair. But you've got other representations of women that are trying to embrace what is seemingly a more gender, I suppose less gender specific role of warriors as being men or women. So you have a cartoon character, cartoon, sorry, a computer game simulated character there of a female warrior and of course, Brianne of Tars from Game of Thrones, a number of the characters in that series doing quite a lot to show that women could kill just as well as men. And do we need to know if that's something to celebrate? I don't know, but we're exploring the idea. In some ways, this is a definite step towards equality. It's wonderful and fascinating to see a woman manifesting equal strength because of course that is one of the taboos, isn't it? That women will never be as physically strong as men. I think so many things are proving that's not the case. And certainly historical and archeological evidence proves that's not the case. We only need to look at Berger warrior women, the recent Viking warrior female discoveries that are coming up all the time at the moment that to rethink our attitudes towards women that fight. But I'm nervous about it for two reasons. One, there's a sense of objectification and titillation with these sorts of female warriors, which seems again to have a modicum of suppression about it. And the other one is what is the historical accuracy? Can we point to it with historical accuracy? And that's what I'm interested in at the moment. While it's very exciting to find women that fight and very exciting to find women that seem to be able to break that gender divide, that's also really exciting. It's discovering real women. And this is something I know Histvast is very interested in. And so many of my peers, my colleagues as historians are breaking new ground regularly by opening up this area that's more commonly known as social history. And social history is saying, we don't just want to know about kings, queens, officers, knights. We want to know how people lived. And this is a real area of study that I'm dedicating the majority of the book to because for every queen, king, knight, fascinating individual, there are millions that have gone before who tell equally interesting stories. I've got a few management illuminations here to show you captures, if you like, of some of the activities that women got up to. I mentioned embroidery already, hugely important aspect. And actually cloth, even if we stop thinking about medieval embroidery as simply, oh, ladies are to loom and start thinking about the costs involved in high fashion today, where a beautiful garment could change hands for tens of thousands of pounds. That is the world that women are controlling. They are controlling access to materials. They're controlling the production of bespoke luxury items. And so just to say, oh, they embroidered. Oh, they did a bit of embroidery. Does not give credit to what they were able to achieve through this. And certainly as the centuries go on, it's women involved in the cloth trade in particular who make their mark, who become very wealthy, influential people. But you can see that eventually nothing is beyond the realm of women to undertake. And this is the thing, just because we haven't looked for it doesn't mean it isn't there. The evidence for these people is harder to find, but it is there. And doing the detective work is fascinating. The more I uncover, the more excited I get. And God, I just can't write fast enough. That's the problem. Now I mentioned that the lion man would pop up. He's my exception. And I am using the term exceptionalism here in the way that Olivette Otelli uses it in her amazing new book, Black Europeans. And in that respect, she makes the claim near the top that to find out more about everyone, sometimes it is this exception that becomes the window that opens up the area and opens us up to look for more. So the lion man was made. It was made 15,000 years ago. It is exceptional, extraordinary. And how can we explain the imaginative leap that the human being who sat there and carved this out of mammoth tusk took to put these two disparate things together? A man, a lion, this dream figure. But it cannot have existed in a vacuum. This one has survived, but there must have been many, many, many other carvings of its kind, both before and after that put it into some sort of context. We can look at the lion man and we can say, gosh, can we imagine the time it was made? Can we imagine the person that was made? But we also have to imagine what has been lost. And through this exceptional survival, we can start to build up a picture of a broader society. And that's certainly the case with how I'm having to approach medieval women. I'm finding the exceptionals, the ones who really have left a mark, that I can read their words, I can see their art, I can hear the music that they composed, I can touch the manuscripts that they wrote. Through them, we find these fragmentary references that put them into a broader picture. So for example, I'm working, I'll talk about Hildegard of being a moment, but while Hildegard has left a massive back catalog of work, she was accompanied by other women in her convent. She had an assistant who knew as much, if not more than her, about certain scientific matters in particular. And so Hildegard becomes the point, but around that, there's this sort of expanding understanding of other women that were there too, other people that were there too, because for every woman that Hildegard succeed, they had to have been men that were also supporting her. Really strong-minded men who saw value in what she was writing and promoted her, invited her places, allowed her powers and freedom of movement. So this isn't looking at women to the exclusion of men, but it is trying to find different viewpoints. Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about courtly love because I've mentioned Christine de Pizanne and I've mentioned how in her city of ladies, she is writing centuries of what she sees as wrongs against how women have been represented. Now, courtly love as a notion is one thing, courtly love as a reality is another. As a notion, as an idea, it was an invention of the French court to try and keep a moral control over highly trained, highly macho, mobile, strong knights, the nightly class. Trying to encourage them as they went on various missions to not treat women with disrespect, but to treat them with a sense of adoration. Now, it leans into slightly difficult territory. The, if you like, paragons of courtly love are Gwynevere and Lancelot. And theirs is an illicit love affair because with courtly love, it's not about a happily married couple. It's often about a woman who is an object of desire for a man but can never be attained. And there are so many objects. This is an ivory mirror from 12th century France and it shows you some of the dances, the parts of the game of courtly love. So you can see gift giving, you can see that speeches are being given to one another. There's the odd touch, the odd look, but this is sort of idealized courtly love. Dante, famous for writing in the vernacular in Italy in the 14th century. And he puts that at the very heart of his world of heaven, hell and purgatory Beatrice. Beatrice is his guide. Now, the real story of Dante and Beatrice is quite sad. He met her first when he was nine years old but never spoke to her. And then again, from the age of 18, he would see her but he would only ever exchange a word or a glance with her. And yet he was utterly devoted to her to the extent that Beatrice is the one that leads him through the different stages of hell that she is his shining light, she is his exemplar. And in this respect, I think we're looking at something quite damaging in terms of the relationship between men and women because there is something set up with courtly love that is idealized and unobtainable. And while it is meant to protect both parties, men and female, it is not manifest in real human interactions. This is Christine's complaint against courtly love. So just look at the contradictions in this. This is the definition of it. A love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting human and transcendent. It's unobtainable. And in that respect, I think what you see women dealing with from the 12th century, from the emergence of courtly love right the way through to the sort of 1400s, 1500s is this idea of how can they interact on a level playing field within this very elaborate game of romance. Some manage it and manage it to a point that it leads to their destruction. I want to introduce you, if you don't know already to the wonderful Alice Perez. Now you'll see here I've put Alice Perez slash wife of Bath in the Ellesmere manuscript. Now, many of you will have read the Canterbury Tales. If you haven't, go back, revisit them, they're brilliant. But the wife of Bath is the one that really stands out, isn't she? Everybody loves the tale of the wife of Bath because she is such a strange, strangely modern problem. She's not, indeed your choice ends up having to write a poem of apology for the way that he represents women in a lot of his works. He is accused of misogyny. He is one of the people that Christine takes a pop act for being representing women in the wrong way. But there is a complexity to the wife of Bath that suggests it's being based on a living person. And most people have suggested that is Alice Perez. Now, on the other side, you can see this later version of Alice, how she's represented in the court of Edward III. Edward III, our sixth longest reigning monarch and a very, very important medieval king in as much as it's his lifetime that spans the start of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, the Western Schism, all these major events take place through the very long reign of Edward III. He is married, but he takes Alice as a mistress quite late on in his life. But he raises her up in such a way that this sort of ties back to my goddess worship thing at the beginning because he declares her to be mistress of the sun. And the painting here is a interpretation of what the celebration of the mistress of the sun may have looked like. But it was a huge procession where Alice was dressed as mistress of the sun and courted through the streets to be adored by everyone around her. The reality is that nobody likes someone that climbs too high too quick. Alice is criticised heavily. So this quote is an account from the time of who Alice was and how she was perceived. It says, at that same time, there was a woman in England called Alice Perez. She was a shameless, impudent harlot and of low birth. But she was the daughter of a thatcher from the town of Henney, elevated by fortune. She was not attractive or beautiful, but knew how to compensate for these defects with the seductiveness of her voice. Blind fortune elevated this woman to such heights and promoted her to a greater intimacy with the king than was proper, since she had been the maid servant and mistress of a man of lombardy. And while the queen was still alive, the king loved this woman more than he loved the queen. There's a lot of problematic elements in here. You can read the misogyny coming through in the lines, shameless, impudent harlots. What I think is fascinating though, is when we marry up these sorts of derogatory statements with the cold hard facts of Alice's earnings, her role, we see that this is propaganda. This is a twisted version of who she was and how she was. So by the time Alice died, she had over 50 estates. Now she had been gifted a few of these from the king, but almost all of them, she had managed to develop very early on in her life through extremely careful entrepreneurship. She was a canny investor. She knew where to make money and how to make it, regardless of being with the king. I think as we move on, you can see that this reputation of Alice, if we relate it to the wife of Bath, is also down to marriage, because one of the things that is difficult for women in the medieval period is their ability to keep hold of wealth once they become widows. Marrying and being widowed was a good way to speculate. So this is what Chaucer writes about. This is in the mouth of the wife of Bath. How many could she have in marriage? At this point, I've never in my life heard a designation of the number. Men may divine and interpret up and down, but well, I know surely. God expressly instructed us to increase and multiply. I can well understand that noble text. Likewise, I know well, he said also that my husband should leave father and mother and take me, but he did not mention any number, not bigamy or octagamy. Why should men speak villainously of them? So that you could sense the humor, the sort of ridicule coming through in Chaucer's text here of the wife of Bath, who has of course had many husbands. There is, I suppose, a sense of social commentary coming through here. Chaucer, like others that are being referred to by, by the wife of Bath, seem to think it's not good for women to take on numerous husbands. But as the wife very clearly points out, she has a legal right to do so, and why shouldn't she? So while she is a parody, I think there is always some truth in that too. And maybe this is a reflection that women of the time were not the downtrodden individuals we tend to think of them, locked in towers, but were actively going out, making money, making their way in the world and doing very, very well for themselves. When Edward III finally dies, Alice is one of the richest people in the country under her own, her own efforts. The criticism of course lies, and this is why historical evidence needs to be built up piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle, because we can compare the Thomas Walsingham quote with the Chaucer. But if we also think about what's happening elsewhere in the time of Edward III, there's a number of critical statements being made about the state of the court at the time. Walsingham's just one. But people are talking about money being handed across in sort of stuffed in brown envelopes and nobody has any control over the wealth of the country at this stage, because the statements say the king is mad. Now, when we're talking about madness, of course, this is a real trigger word when it comes to inclusivity. How can we say that he is mad? What is that from a modern viewpoint to look backwards? Instead, we can look at the evidence and this is where it becomes quite revelatory because this is an effigy of Edward III made from a death mask. So what would have happened is when the king died, he had a wax cast made of his face. This was then used as the mould to create this effigy. This isn't the same as his two monuments, which lies in Westminster Abbey. This was something that was going to be paraded. So it's lightweight, it's made from wood. But what we see when we look at this effigy is from the mask it was taken. Edward's face has slipped. The mouth has slipped to one side. The jaw has sunken on this side and one of the eyes has sunk too. Now, what are we looking at here? Well, it's been suggested that Edward had suffered numerous strokes as he was going into his latter years. So while he is with Alice, while he is trying to keep a handle on the court, he is weak and he is therefore being taken advantage of. Now, whether it's Alice that's doing take advantage of, we do not know, but certainly people in his court around him were manipulating him in his weakness. And this is where history, I think, becomes more three-dimensional and more interesting. It's not just everyone was saying horrible things about Alice and she was brilliant. It's much more complex than that. And the Court of Edward III was a fascinating and problematic place for many, many reasons. So I've mentioned that women are given labels, if you like, in a number of texts. They are often harlots. And this is where the criticism lies certainly at the feet of the church, because right from Genesis onwards, there's the idea that Eve is the Temperus, that original sin began with her. And this is something that is certainly endorsed as we look through medieval legal codes, through marriage vows. If there is adultery, there is always a sense in which the woman is somehow to blame as well. And the role of women as temptresses is a very difficult one. This is another reason, I think, why so many women choose the religious life, choose to become nuns. There is a danger in being a woman. I mentioned there, one in three women now will suffer from sexual abuse. In the medieval period, not only was that also likely to happen, but giving birth, falling pregnant and giving birth was so much more high risk than it is now. If you did happen to fall with child, you had a very high chance of dying during birth. And if you managed to survive, you would then be seen as fertile and capable of giving birth and would potentially have to give birth to many, many children. I'm gonna talk about Marjorie Kemp in a bit. She had up to 14 children. So there is a peril in sexuality. It's more than just consenting sex or non-consensual sex. This is actual peril that runs right the way through women's lives. And to be declared harlots is a legal aspect of that that makes it even more complicated. Then this is a horrible text. This is an image from a text about the degrees of punishment a man could put his wife to, where it was okay to beat her, what she could be beaten for. And this reminds us that while I can say the Victorians were terrible for rewriting the stories of women, their rights were not equal at the time either. And while we find exceptions, while we find your Alice Perez's and your Christine de Pizan's, there is a normal restriction on female rights that runs right the way through the legal codes of this time too. But with that cautionary note, let's look again at Christine and let's think again about the wonderful women that she celebrates. Because I think we need to leave on a note of optimism. Don't we need to be more happy and optimistic in finding these women. So Christine managed to get great influence in the court, particularly through her relationship with Queen Isabel. If you know a little bit about your medieval history at this point, the time that Christine is writing is right towards the end of the Hundred Years War. And the Hundred Years War, I've tried to use it as a sort of a bookend for this talk. We've got Edward III who starts it off in the 1340s. And then when we're coming into the 1400s plus, this is where we start to see individuals like Isabel, like Christine and like Joan of Arc coming in. There's certainly a shift towards powerful women at the end of the Hundred Years War. And here she is presenting her book to the Queen. And what is interesting is that the life of two remarkable women coincide in the same place at the same time. So Christine de Pizan is doing her thing with her publishing house, with her books. And at the same time, this young girl is becoming a national figurehead. The story of Joan of Arc is a difficult one to wrap your head around. I still find it fascinating. And no matter how deeply I dig, there is this moment of fortune that just puts her in front of the dofa and allows the young dofa to listen to this 16-year-old girl from the countryside with no education, no training whatsoever, and to elevate her to giving instruction on how to govern the French army. There is something quite astonishing about that entire story. There's only one image that survives from her lifetime. That's this one. This was in her heresy trials written in the margin. And you can see here, she's very much shown as a woman. Her hair loose, she's in female dress. But one of the reasons she actually met her death was not because of her role in the army. It was because of dressing as a man. She was breaking a social norm. So we think that she's burnt as a witch of the stake or something like that. No, much of her heresy trial deals with this idea of transgressing gender norms through her clothing. This is later, this painting, 1485, but it's a very famous one. And it shows a number of the important aspects of her, her banner, showing the saints, and of course, the fact that she is wearing armor. The sword and the banner remain in this image, but otherwise she's shown in her female form. And this is certainly the case of chroniclers of this period as well. And the chroniclers are illuminating their manuscripts. They show this interaction between the Dauphar and Joan. Here she is dressed in virginal white. She wears this to indicate she is a virgin with her hair long and loose and uncovered. So she's an unmarried woman and young and then she is coming in and just the gestures that she's using. This open hand gesture at the front indicates she's speaking. She's speaking in the presence of royalty with complete conviction and confidence. But then the chronicle paintings shift. So while she is advisor to the Dauphar, he commissions her this suit of armor. It's, I mean, it's a beautiful bit of kit. Very, very expensive, but it has a dual function. On the one hand, it designates her as a warrior on the battlefield and it protects her. But there's another element to it, which is that it's designed to protect her chastity. This is where the good old fashioned medieval chastity belt comes in. But there is a sense that this is a young girl, a female going into an almost all male military environment and she has to protect herself, her virtue as much as anything else. But when it comes to her trial, when it comes to her death, she has returned to this vulnerable young woman yet again. So this is the rise and fall of fortune and through the rise and fall of fortune we see this incredible gender fluidity that when she is in power, when she is in authority, she's allowed to dress as a man. But when she is vulnerable, when she is weak, when she is being punished, she is dressed as a woman. Now Joan's story is fascinating in itself and I don't want to spend too long on her because she is the exceptional, she is well known, she is well written about. But there are so many other women undiscovering at the moment who are acting as a starting point for unraveling these incredible strands of stories. So Abelard and Eloise, Eloise from the first letter writers, incredible command of language, beautiful writing style. Higley Emma Bohemia, now this is a fascinating story that some of you may know, some of you may not, but she was the leader of a Christian sect who felt the Holy Spirit was going to return as a woman in female form. So she was raised up as the Pope, the leader of this Christian sect. And it was in, I mean, look at the dates, 1210 to 1281, they were declared heretics, they were of course killed for their heresy, but they gathered great support, a huge amount of followers in a short space of time. So it was this appetite for thinking of the divine in the feminine form. Marjorie Kemp, who I'm gonna talk a bit more about in a moment, but shifting across from France here through Germany, Italy, and up to England. And I mentioned Hildegard of Bingham. Her dates, very interesting, she's born in 1098. So coming out of this period where I think female women were quite fortunate in the early medieval period to have quite a lot of responsibility within the church and within politics, into a period of romance where we start to see the rights of women slipping away increasingly. But Hildegard was, I've meant to say this before, but she was at the JK Rowling of her time in terms of her popularity. She was read everywhere. She did book tours. She would go around to screaming hordes of fans. She was known for her music. She did incredible polyphonic music. Astrology, linguistics. She invented her own language, natural history. She still declared the mother of natural history within Germany. And she writes theology. She writes about medicine. She's just this complete polymer, this complete being who is utterly fascinating. And here you can see she cannot exist in a vacuum like the lion man. She cannot. The reason a woman like this is raised up, elevated, allowed the platform that she has is because others around her are facilitating that too. So you can see here her confidant, Ricardis, some say her lover, and her secretary, Vollmar. These are two very important individuals who helped support and consolidate the work of this hugely busy and hugely influential individual. But there are others too, and these will all get expanded upon as I'm going further on in my research. Marie of Oya and Bridget of Sweden, both very important because they're not nuns, they're actually laywomen. They don't enclose themselves in a convent, but they become celebrities, real true celebrities of their time. People want to know where they are, what they're doing, what are they wearing? So for example, Bridget of Sweden starts wearing these white habits and that becomes the fashion everybody wants to dress like Bridget. They are, we distance ourselves from these people because they have the ST in front of them. They're saints, they're heavenly, they're not earthly, but they were, they were here, they lived, they breathed, they performed acts, and through their actions they have this infamy, this longevity that makes them fascinating, and they really are interesting. Marjorie being particularly so. If you haven't read the book of Marjorie Ken, please do. It's the first autobiography written in English and it's written by a woman and it is amazing. So she actually dictates it, but it's her life and it's her voice that comes through so strongly in the text. She is a complete character. I have told this, made this comparison before, but I was on a, went on a, like a cruise boat thing with my husband and there was a group of tourists and they were obviously on a long cruise, they'd been going around the world different parts and they were, they were very knowledgeable, very outspoken and there was one woman in their midst who was clearly the leader and she was so larger than life. She was this very, she had stories to tell, she had things to say, she had an opinion on everything. And while I was listening to this one I was thinking, you're Marjorie Ken because that's the character that comes through from Marjorie. She goes around the world, she knows her rights and she will not be silenced. She, just some funny things about her. So interestingly she's married and has 14 children but after having these 14 children, she makes her husband agree to a celibate relationship. So I think at that stage he was probably quite willing after 14 children to enter into a celibate relationship but she's struck by visions after birth of her first child. So this is again where we see an interesting interconnect between modern developments in medicine treatment and historical cures. So she would probably now be diagnosed with postnatal depression but what it manifested as for Marjorie Ken was visions. So she became, she was hallucinating, receiving visions and crying uncontrollably. I think we can connect that again to this sort of postnatal depression aspect but it's the uncontrollable tears that sets her apart and she sees these as a gift from God and with this gift of God, she really wants to be seen and heard. Someone who doesn't want to be seen and heard but gives us yet another aspect on Medieval Women is my wonderful Julian of Norwich. I have written a book about her and Julian has got me through the last few years because I think her most famous phrase is this phrase all shall be well, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well and she didn't mean that in a throwaway sense. Julian the woman will have most certainly have seen death and destruction on her doorstep throughout her lifetime. She gets her visions first, probably as a result of contracting plague, one of the phases of plague after the Black Death which was actually much more aggressive towards children. It's possible she lost her own children in that time. There's a real sense that she was a mother when she writes about the love of God, she writes about it as the love of a mother for a child and she talks about it's an in utero experience of love as well. So Julian that we think of as a nun back in the Herb Garden with the ginger cat was not, she was a real woman who'd lived in the world for many, many years and it's only around the age of 30 that she has her visions and in these 16 visions, they are cinematographic. The way she writes about them is like you are on the front seat of the cinema watching the crucifixion and you can literally see the blood dripping down. You can see into the side of Christ. She's writing it from the point of view of if she had a camera in front of her eye and she was capturing it. She's just the most astonishing writer but she doesn't commit herself to writing this until another 10, 15 years later where she becomes an anchoress. She locks herself up in a single room for the rest of her life. We can relate to this because of lockdown I think but she was doing it for a number of reasons to escape plague. Her lifetime coincides with the Black Death and the subsequent plagues but she was also doing it to escape accusations of heresy. Heretics were being burned outside her chamber and also to allow her as a woman the space, the quiet, the opportunity to write and write she did. She wrote this incredible book called The Revelations of Divine Love but it is a strange idea to think of a woman being holed up. When we look to the medieval past we have a notion of it being a nasty brutal short and a little bit like a Monty Python film but it's really this choice of becoming an anchoress wasn't as primitive as we might think it sounds. There was a lot of sense in a 40-something woman putting herself into a safe, secure space where she would be fed and watered where she would have access to the mass, to books and could advise people from in there. Her window, she was a bit of an agony aunt where people would come up from their shoreline in Norwich. Everyone from princes to paupers would get advice from Julian. She was a celebrity. Marjorie Kemp herself visited Julian for a chat and there's this wonderful extract in her autobiography where she recalls the conversation they have and if you compare Marjorie Kemp's book, Marjorie Kemp with The Revelations of Divine Love it's the same voice, Julian's voice comes through. So Marjorie has recalled it absolutely perfectly and these women for me, they are there waiting to be listened to. The evidence is there for them, we know about them and then if we know about them, can we find more? Because they are absolutely fascinating extraordinary people. So just to recap before I finish, I started at the beginning giving us a general insight into how women are treated, women as goddesses, women worshiped and women vilified but the majority of what I talked about spans this timeline through the Hundred Years War and you can see the major events that took place during these women's lives. There's the schism of the church, the Pope's in Avignon and then the splitting in the church with two popes, there's the Black Death, there's the peasants revolt and all this against the backdrop of ongoing war on different fronts. So it's not an easy time to be alive and yet I'm going to leave you with the words of one woman from medieval past who I take great inspiration from, dear Julian. Her life is situated right across this timeline. She lived a long life and all of these events took place in her lifetime and yet she doesn't gossip, she doesn't give us titillating bits of historical information about what's going out on outside her door. Instead she says, all shall be well, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. And as we live through our own historical period and as we look back over the next year in particular but over the timeline that we're living through, I think we all need reminding that all shall be well. Thank you all so much for listening to me and I look forward to talking to you and hearing some of your questions. Hello everybody, welcome to the Q&A session. I really hope you enjoyed the talk. Please feel free to send me extra comments. I've got your questions in front of me here that have been coming through thick and fast but I'm always on Twitter and I'm always happy to answer more questions when I finish today or any time if you watch this talk in the next 48 hours, my handle is Dr. Janina Ramirez and that's Janina with a good old Polish J. So do find me on Twitter, do stay in touch with me there. I really want to fit in as many questions as I can and there are a lot. So I'm gonna fire on. And the first one is from Christy, my dear friend Christy Farrelly. Hi, Doc, mentioning the fees not grants early in the talk with the loss of grants and free education for all. How do we ensure that the voices and experiences of everyday people of today's world aren't written out of the historical studies of the future? Christy, you know, I always love to hear your viewpoints and I think this is such an important question that I know we've discussed in the past as well. I was just on the cusp of fees coming in and grants going out and I really saw firsthand the effect that had quite quickly on how people could get a free education and make their way into university. My parents themselves are products of both the grammar school system and the grants system. And I really do worry. I think over the last 20 years it's becoming even harder, it seems to really find the brightest lights, the best minds, but there are lots of things in place. So my own university, Oxford, we have a load of scholarship systems in place and there are still glimmers of hope. I think it would be wonderful and ideal if we could go back to fees, not grants. It's a real, I think a real millstone for students to carry tens of thousands of pounds of student debt through their life. I only paid mine off very recently and I know how it feels from firsthand experience. So it is something I lament. I think it's a problem that we're going to all be suffering for a while economically after this last year and universities are very much in really going to struggle as well. But who knows? I hope, I have hope. I always have hope. All shall be well and all that. I've got a question here from Steven Lawrence. Hecatee used to be well regarded by the ancients and thought to help people using healing herbs. By Shakespeare's time, she was reviled as pure evil. What happened to change people's point of view? This is an excellent and insightful question because when I was working on Hecatee in particular, there's very few goddesses who get vilified and rewritten quite as actively as Hecatee does. In the earlier sources, in the classical sources, she really doesn't, she has a very positive role to play, a very important role, but she's one of the most important goddesses. And I think there is, I think it's actually coming up to witch trials, witchcraft trials, super real suspicion of wise women that starts to come in in the 14th century where a healing woman, a woman who works with healing herbs who up until that point would have been a valued and important member of a community starts to be declared a witch. And so I think that's where we start to see these increasingly negative associations with Hecatee. But it's great, Stephen, that you brought that up because I think she's a really good example of how an individual woman, in this case, a goddess, but as I pointed out in the talk, this happens to historical women too, can be entirely transformed by the expectations of later generations. So different societies impose backwards their views of how that person should be viewed. So really, really good question. I've got a question here from Joanne Dermikis. Thank you for your question, Joanne. She says, we often have a perception that enhanced women's rights post-date the advent of the pill in the 1960s. Is there any evidence of effective contraception other than abstinence in the medieval age? And if so, what was it and where? Okay, so we are still just pre-worship, but I will give you the honest answer, which is that there were lots of social things put in place. I mentioned courtly love. There was also in the law codes, you see many different things designed to protect women from particularly rape because that is, of course, one of the ways that women could define themselves pregnant. I honestly think I understated perhaps in the talk how the option of becoming a nun or an anchoress could protect a woman physically as well from those sorts of threats. So they could put themselves in a convent, they could put themselves in an anchorite cell and that would give them some degree of protection. Then there's an interesting area that I'm working on and researching at the moment about lesbian relationships, that while it's very clearly specified in law codes, that relationships between two men and how that should take place is prohibited, there's virtually nothing equivalent for women. So recent studies are suggesting that there was perhaps a much higher percentage of female relationships that, again, women would choose to cohabit or to live alongside another woman for her own protection, for her own ways of avoiding having to be put in that situation where she, as I mentioned in the talk, would have to maybe produce upwards of seven, eight, nine, 10 marjorie Kent with her 14 children in her lifetime and each time put their bodies and lives at threat. So yeah, we don't have evidence for contraception as such, those sorts of things seem to come in quite a few centuries later, but there were certainly herbs, there were certainly remedies, spells that we do have evidence for and in the meantime, it was about simply avoiding those sorts of situations. Then I have a question here from Judith. How do you think the predominantly male interpretation of history has skewed our understanding of events and who is responsible for the turning points of history? Goodness me. So as I mentioned in the talk, I think a lot of the harm done to medieval women's reputations was done in the last few hundred years, particularly I would say under the impact of the very strict Victorian social and moral codes that come in and also the romantic tradition which goes back through art, through literature and recasts women in a guise that's seen as more acceptable. But as I also mentioned in the talk, this sort of rewriting, this sort of misogynistic treatment of women's reputations occurs right the way through the medieval period. I gave you that quote about what happens to Athelflad, how from the eighth to the 10th century her reputation changes. And then again, from the 10th to the 12th century, how she is subtly changed in each retelling of her story. I think with the increase of printed books, you start to see the major distribution of stories about women. So whatever state their story is in by the time they're being printed tends to be one that then goes out and is disseminated most widely. So again, any of these accounts that are being printed up in the 17th, 18th century, they'll end up having a big impact on how women are then be written into the historical record. But of course, the second part of that question was who's responsible for the turning points of history? Well, we're living through one of those at the moment, aren't we? We have a big election coming up tomorrow and the people in power do tend to be the ones that have control of long-term records. That might be in the case of the earlier medieval period, it tends to be monasteries because that's where the scribes tend to be. But as the medieval period progresses, it moves into the court, into parliament, into these sorts of systems of government. And in that transformation from religious figures into historical figures, national figures, there's again another shift in how some of these people are reinterpreted within each different generation. But on the whole, who's responsible for the turning points in history? As I mentioned again in the talk, most of the real movers, shakers and decision makers are of course men. They are of course predominantly in Europe, white men and they are predominantly wealthy white men. But that is not to say that all of them were doing that and that is not to say that it was a one-way street because those same people were also the patrons, the supporters, the endorsers of brilliant women like I mentioned Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pizan. So it is not a cut and dry analogy between the two. It's not just one simple answer, I'm afraid. I've got a question here from Katie Beaumont. What do you think led to a lot of women's history being neglected, forgotten or even erased? Was it a patriarchal society that was strengthened by the Industrial Revolution? So similar sort of question and I would say the Industrial Revolution has a big role to play in it because it is with, and actually I was in the first episode of Black and British with David Olashoga talking about medieval attitudes to race. And we could see a similar pattern with attitudes to race, to gender and to class because with all of those, it tends to be a greater division that we see arising in the 18th and 19th century between those that are in power, those that are influential and in control and those who are not. And the narratives get written in increasingly divisive ways. And there is this parallel between between these three areas of study. So hopefully my last answer gave you a little bit more there as well. Philippa, I'm writing a dissertation on Medieval's Queen's Letters, focusing on Matilda of Scotland and Eleanor of Provence. I was wondering what your thoughts would be on medieval queenship and the exercising of soft and hard power through a gendered perspective. This is a great question. And yes, we can gender it, we can totally gender it. And on the whole, I suppose, when you look across the successful female rulers of the medieval period, I suppose most control was done through soft leadership. So we do see hugely influential mothers, wives, acting regents. And in many of those cases, they're propping up a younger male relative or they are holding a place for them. But that is not by no means the complete story because there are also very overbearing powerful controlling women who are positively Machiavellian in their approach to leadership. And similarly, when we look at medieval kings, it's often a pendulum swing between, you say, if we look at the Hundred Years War, you've got someone like Edward III who is this military king, very much in control and then swinging over to someone like Richard II who is all about majestas about divine rights of kings and not interested in war. So I think it's partly a gendered question, but it's more a case of changing styles of leadership and also changing individuals. That's the beauty of studying history, isn't it? That you're looking back at individuals across the past and no two individuals are the same and that's true of the past too. So no two rulers will rule the same way. So yes, it's gendered, but only up to a point, I would say. I've got Philip Arkansas. What would you say was the most common means of revenue for medieval women? What an excellent question. I found accounts of women who were able to work alongside their husbands, mostly in the brewing industry. Was this a common feature of life for married working class women? Would you say, absolutely, great question, Philip. So in terms of across the medieval period, I would say the most common means of additional income for women would be things that they could do around their families. So it would tend to be things like they could glean, they could go out and glean the fields to take the leftover corn. They could grow their own little plots of vegetables, which they could take to weekly markets. They could make a little bit of additional income that way. But you're absolutely right that increasingly you start to see women being included as joint business owners, joint runners of the business and brewing was one of those things because again, nothing really changes in that when a woman is having to run the household, look after the kids, the jobs that they're able to fit in tend to be around those. And in the case of brewing, that could be done alongside having a family. You could brew in the evening, you could allow the brew, you could then monitor it, sell it, trade it around your own responsibilities within the household. And they were renowned for being excellent within the brewing industry, really good entrepreneurs. So brewing, but also textiles, of course, textiles is a, has always really, as far as our records, both archeological and historical go back, textiles weaving, wool production, dying, all these things tended to be done by women. And as a result, they end up with a monopoly on the businesses. So we do see women entering into the trading of textiles quite early on as well. Really good question. Okay, this is a good question. Abby Pym, how would you compare the situation of rights for women in the medieval period to the last 50 years? Are we fighting to regain certain rights that medieval women once possessed? This is why I'm writing this book. I'm writing it because, yes, I think you're right. I started off the lecture talking about suffrage and the idea that we're celebrating at my own university a hundred years of women being allowed in. And yet, if we actually cast the record back earlier and we look at the truly interesting version of history that has been adapted, rewritten, edited, then we see women that we can, I think in modern terms, connect with. Now that is not to say it's the majority of women and I said that in the talk, but I would say that's the case now. I would say that in terms of our time, our earning potential in the West at this moment, yes, things are good. When I put my wash in the washing machine and I think, God, I could have spent an hour and a half down at the stream scrubbing those. I know that I've earned my time back and now I have more leisure, for example. But in terms of the pressures that are on us now in addition, trying to juggle roles within relationships, work and life commitments, it's a tricky balancing act. So the reason I wanted to write about this subject is to really give modern women a different reference point, a reference point that's perhaps more authentic, perhaps one that we can find hoping and maybe find some sense of solidarity across the centuries. So we're not all Victorian housewives. We go back to fierce and fabulous women of the past. Thank you, really good question. Yeah, excellent one again. This is Katie Beaumont again. How do we avoid unconsciously interpreting medieval times through a modern lens? It is the quintessential historian's problem. How do we not impose our modern views backwards? And we can't. We will always bring ourselves to the study of our subject. I think the scholarly developments of the 1960s in particular with new voices, new approaches, new theoretical insights showed us that the true way to be a scholar going forward is not necessarily to peddle empirical truths to say, I know a fact, I have the answer, I know best. But to bring our own personalities to bear, to be very open about the sorts of people we are as historians and to be very open about our genders as we're going into our research. But on top of that, it's important to be, I think, truly investigative, to really scrutinize your evidence, to go to all sorts of unexpected sources. So I'm interdisciplinary. I constantly cross disciplinary boundaries because I find you get different insights from looking through a different lens. So I think it's about transparency. I think it's about honesty, authenticity, and also about really striving to be as critical as you can be of the evidence as it remains. Great question, though. Ah, I'm running out of time. Okay, I'm gonna go for one here from Amy Neal. Do you think fiction can be used to write marginalized groups back into the narrative? I absolutely do. So this is where I, well, one of many points, I think, at which I diverge from the historian David Starkey's approach, which is that he was quoted as saying historical fiction is nonsense. It's over-emotional. It has no place within historical study. I disagree. I grew up on historical fiction. And part of the way I think about the past is to imagine it not as some quote or date in a book, but as something real happening to real people. We are living through historical times at the moment. And every one of us, if you asked us what we're going through, we'll be going through something slightly different. And that is the situation with reading historical extracts, reading historical accounts. Just because one newspaper says an account one way doesn't mean there aren't other ways to view that account and that event and what happened. So I think we, as historical fiction writers, myself included, have a role to play in bringing a period to life. So when I was writing Alva, when I was writing my Viking Mysteries books, I wrote them from my own imagination, but I founded them on the world that I'd spent 20 years researching. So I could fill it with facts. I could fill it with artifacts, with information, with real landscapes, real accounts of people. And in that respect, I think absolutely this is how we start writing people who have been excluded back in, because it's in those narratives that we find ourselves again. We find people like us who maybe didn't survive through more refined records, but we're there and we still matter and we still can be represented. So yeah, I really agree strongly. There's still so many questions coming through. I'm really sorry if I don't have a chance to answer them all, but please, please tweet me at Dr. Yanina Ramirez and I'll try and reply to you there. I'm really trying my hardest. I've got, oh, what a great question. A question here from Adele Puntney. Did the events of 1066 improve the life of women in England? Are there any records of life for Jewish women in England at this point? Two questions in one, both excellent. 1066 absolutely did change the situation for women. It did not improve them. It made it worse. The situation for women within Anglo-Saxon England, they're very clear laws, they're very clear rights that they had, but with the Normans, they became pawns in diplomatic marriages. So often what you would get is a Norman lord marrying an Anglo-Saxon lady in order to secure her estates, in order to secure some sort of legitimate rights to her lands. So we see a diminishing in women's rights, but that really doesn't gather as much steam until we get into the 12th, 13th century, where we see even more restrictions on women's rights. So, and as far as records of life for Jewish women in England, some not nearly enough, I'm still searching. And what we have is very confused by the later anti-Semitism that comes through in particularly the 13th century, there's a horrible treatment of the Jews. Indeed, the Jews in New York are massacred and a lot of texts that would have given us insights into their lives have been lost or destroyed. So leave it with me, I'm on the mission, I'm still playing detective. Oh, gosh, okay, last, I think it's gonna have to be the last one. Oh, wow, okay, Vanessa Peregrine. Hi, Dr. Ramirez. Thank you so much for such an interesting talk. Well, thank you. That's very kind of you to say so. What do you think might have contributed to the greater equality between Minoan men and women in that society? So I've been filming today, it's part of a new series. Perhaps one hasn't come out yet, but yes, it's a big news BBC series. And one of the programs I made was on Minoan Crete. And I think the Minoan society is an extraordinary one. It's always going to appear to us a bit through a glass darkly, but the art, the imagery that we see, the symbolism and the representation of women in that art, is one that's virtually unrivaled across the historical record. They do appear in genuine positions of authority. They do seem to be the decision makers. And whenever men are shown, it's usually in a position of servitude to women. So whether that is something that was born off of the fact that they are an island people, that they trace one of the earliest religious symbols that seems to survive from there is the snake goddess, the Minoan snake goddess. So you might have seen the beautiful sculptures of women priestesses. They seem to be covered in snakes. So this idea of renewal, new life through shedding of the skin, the goddess is this source of life. And so possibly it goes back to religious beliefs, tying back to an earlier appreciation for the mother goddess, which we know did exist across European civilizations. But I think also the fact that Minoan culture was cut short so abruptly by the impacts, both of natural disaster, but also of invasion from Crete, which came in with a very different military society, which essentially replaced what had gone before. So acts as a time capsule. It acts as this mini version of the culture that existed and then was lost. Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't take any more questions. They've been incredible, but I was told finish at nine. And so I must finish at nine, but I will try and reply to any messages you might send me. Thank you all so much for watching. I hope there's some food for thought in the talk. I think you have access to it for still for 47 hours. And please do stay in touch with me via Twitter as well. Thank you all so much. And just a final thank you from HIST Fest and the British Library for tuning in tonight. If that has wet your appetite for looking into women's history a little bit more, then there's a fantastic exhibition currently running at the British Library called Unfinished Business, which you can see and go and view right up until February next year. Thank you.