Femina

December 5, 2022
Historian Ramirez (Julian of Norwich) spotlights in this vibrant and accessible account remarkable medieval women including polymath Hildegard of Bingen and Margery Kempe, author of the first autobiography written in English. Diligently sifting through monastic, legal, and diplomatic materials, Ramirez unearths intriguing clues about the power medieval women held and the way they lived, despite contemporaneous efforts to remove them from the historical record. In 10th-century England, for example, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, ruled the kingdom of Mercia after her husband’s death and excelled as a military strategist against the Vikings, but is not remembered as well as her male relatives, largely because her brother “suppressed her reputation in order to bolster his position as king of Wessex.” The chapter beginnings, which recount relevant archaeological discoveries or scholarly reexaminations of primary sources, often link modern women with their medieval predecessors; in one noteworthy instance, Ramirez details how medieval scholar Margarete Kühn, with the help of Caroline Walsh, the wife of a high-ranking U.S. military official, spirited the famed Reisencodex containing the collected writing of 12th-century nun Hildegard of Bingen out of Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1948. Throughout, Ramirez’s adept scene-setting segues gracefully into deeper considerations of these women’s lives and work. This feminist history fascinates.