‘Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women’
By Hetta Howes
University of California Press, 256 Pages

Medieval women were not supposed to be high achievers — at least not in the male arena of fame and fortune. Women, in whatever guise, rarely won recognition, but the four exceptional women in Hetta Howes’s book excelled in public roles that called into question what was supposed to be the nature of women.

Women suffered from excess moisture and needed hot and dry men to wipe them up, so to speak. Ms. Howes quotes a medieval text, “Women’s Secrets.” They were damp, wept more than men, and bled more often (menstruation), and in general were “deficient half-formed creatures,” unfortunately necessary, as Aristotle acknowledged, for the “continuation of humanity.”

Before you laugh, or cry, at such misogyny, recall the presidential candidate annoyed with a certain female television journalist, who attributed her hostility to those excessive fluids: “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Every schoolboy of my generation (the same as President Trump’s) thought they knew why their teacher or girlfriend was giving them such a hard time: They were “on the rag.”

In “Conclusion: Afterlife,” Ms. Howes mentions Mr. Trump and wonders just how much progress women have actually made. I’m a little surprised that she didn’t actually say that Mr. Trump went “medieval” on Megyn Kelly.  

Margery Kempe dominates Ms. Howes’s book just as she did wherever she went — including all the way to the holy land. Kempe is the wife who enjoyed but eschewed sex after she had borne her husband several children. She would just not stay put and aroused public ire because of her incessant outcries to Christ, her personal savior. Many deemed her the devil’s agent. She even alienated her authorized biographer. 

The relentless Kempe at one point visited the anchoress Julian of Norwich, famous in her time as a mystic. Kempe hoped she would honor and support her religious quest, which Julian did, even though she was the opposite of Kempe. Julian never left the precincts of her religious redoubt. Unlike Kempe, who wanted her story told, Julian “did not care whether her name was remembered; in fact, she preferred it to be forgotten,” yet her words have become the refrain and solace of the religious and the secular: “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

As Ms. Howes observes, Julian was offering a version of “things will generally turn out for the best,” which is what Margery Kempe wanted to believe, notwithstanding how much rejection she had suffered as she howled about salvation and damnation. Kempe was a cagey operator, for all her religious devotion, reaching compromises with her husband — for example, drawing the line at sex but consenting to his importunate desire that she sup with him once a week. 

Marie de France, like Margery Kempe, wanted to engage directly with the world. As Ms Howes depicts her, she was worldly, on the go in her desire to win friends and influence people. She “penned stories about powerful women and signed her name to them, at a time when it was very unusual to do so.” Julian, for example, cared only about the spiritual nature of the life that she had consecrated herself to and that she wanted to prevail. 

Christine de Pizen, unlike the other three women, was born into wealth, enjoyed a happy marriage, and then was devastated by the loss of her husband. She turned to writing to rebound from her sorrow, becoming in Ms. Howes’s words, a “hustler … one of the most prolific and respected writers of her lifetime, with a career that spanned almost four decades and included 30 major works, as well as an array of shorter poems.”

Christine, as Ms Howes describes her, would have acclimated to our world. She was a “veritable entrepreneur,” an “expert in book production … taking charge of the manufacture of many of her own manuscripts.” She attracted patrons and knew how to promote her work, the most famous of which was “The Book of the City of Ladies,” which Ms. Howes calls “the first proto-feminist tract to come out of Europe.”

These four women: What can I say? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”