Medieval women: voices & visions

Abstract

"This sumptuous book, like the exhibition it accompanies, upends conventional assumptions, and offers a deeper appreciation of medieval women across all levels of society. Meticulous research into contemporary documents and artefacts reveals extraordinary glimpses of a world that is so often veiled from view in traditional histories. Here we encounter women of medicine and finance, political and military leaders, and cultural patrons, as well as scribes and illuminators, poets and printers, silkwomen and embroiderers, protesters, visionaries and heretics. We learn how women navigated the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth through treatises such as the Trotula and sacred talismans such as the birth girdle. We discover stories of love in the earliest known Valentine's letter, and the realities of running a household in intimate correspondence from a wife to her husband. Women who chose a religious calling are found to have enjoyed remarkable agency. Within abbey walls, creativity flourished with women producing religious art, music and literature. The British Library's collections of precious manuscripts, combined with a selection of important and beautiful objects from other institutions, provide intriguing insights into the lives of medieval women. Through wardrobe accounts and land grants, testimonies and petitions, Books of Hours and Graduals, a chorus of women's voices rises from the pages and illuminates the valuable contributions women made to medieval society"-- Provided by publisher.