By Meilan Solly
24 October 2024
During an impromptu game of table tennis in September 1934, a player accidentally stepped on the ball.
The host’s father decided to look for a replacement in a cupboard at their English country house.
Instead of table tennis balls, the family patriarch stumbled onto an “entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather books,” including one whose cover “had been eaten away, presumably by a mouse,” as his son later recalled.
That unassuming manuscript turned out to be the only surviving copy of The Book of Margery Kempe, a medieval text chronicling the adventures of a female Christian mystic.
Previously known only through 16th-century excerpts that painted Kempe as an anchoress who walled herself up in a cell to devote her life to private prayer and reflection, the manuscript reframed its namesake as a colorful figure who’d traveled abroad on religious pilgrimages, claimed she’d experienced visions of herself participating in such biblical events as the birth and crucifixion of Jesus, and endured multiple arrests on charges of heresy.
“You lose all sense of her story and her personality when only reading the excerpts," says Eleanor Jackson, a curator at the British Library in London.
“She’s a very larger-than-life character … who was not an anchoress but [rather] incredibly mobile. She’s been to the Holy Land, she’s been to Rome, she’s been to Santiago de Compostela.”
The chance discovery of Kempe’s autobiography speaks to the rich trove of writing about medieval women that survives to this day, as well as the countless works that have been lost over the centuries, Jackson says.
“Women in the Middle Ages were seen as less important than men, and they were excluded from a lot of areas of power,” the curator adds.
“Their stories were less often recorded, and because women often weren’t given the same level of education as men, [many] couldn’t write themselves.
Women’s histories are much harder to find, but they are there when you look for them.”
A new exhibition at the British Library tells some of these long-overlooked tales through a selection of more than 140 documents and artifacts spanning roughly 1100 to 1500.
Co-curated by Jackson and Julian Harrison, “Medieval Women: In Their Own Words” spotlights queens, nuns, authors, warriors, physicians, and artisans alike.
As the name suggests, the show emphasizes women’s personal testimony, “telling their stories as much as possible through their own words, whether preserved in their writings or dictated to scribes, as was the case with Kempe," Jackson says.
The individuals featured in the exhibition run the gamut from famous figures like Joan of Arc and Italian French writer Christine de Pizan to the lesser known, including Estellina Conat, the first recorded female printer of Hebrew texts; Shajar al-Durr, the first female sultan of Egypt and Syria; and Alice Claver, a silkwoman who crafted ornate clothing for England’s Edward IV.
By highlighting such a diverse group, lead curator Jackson and co-curator Harrison hope to move past widely held conceptions of medieval women’s existences being centered around domesticity and oppression by men.
“Their lives were a lot more vibrant than people expect,” Jackson says, “and [visitors] will be surprised by the sheer variety of roles that they occupied in the fields of politics, religion and the arts."
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“Medieval Women: In Their Own Words” is on view at the British Library in London from 25 October 2024 to 2 March 2025.