Joan of Arc's Signature & Other Medieval Marvels
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Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

If I'm about to sound a little overexcited right now, it's probably because I just saw, with my very own eyes, Joan of Arc's signature. And the Book of Margery camp. And the Letters of the Pastons. Oh, and all of Christine de Pazin's major works. It's just, it's a lot to get your head around, viewing what is essentially a treasure trove of documents all about medieval women.

I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonica, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm interviewing Dr. Eleanor Jackson, one of the curators of the amazing new Medieval Women exhibition at the British Library. We talked about the reasons it's easy to overlook medieval women if you don't know where to look, what we can learn from documents ranging from personal to medical and legal, how women were always advocating for themselves and participating in the world around them, even if it isn't always easy to find them.

and how a lot of medieval documents are just actually really, really beautiful. Eleanor, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. I am incredibly excited about this new exhibition because it basically takes every document I've ever been passionate about and puts it on display. It's just an incredible triumph. So first of all, congratulations.

But I wanted to start off this conversation in an incredibly nerdy way, because one of the things that you do a really good job of talking about in the exhibition is the concept of literacy. And one of the reasons we don't get to hear very much from women in the medieval period is a lack of literary ability. But that doesn't mean that they aren't thinking or engaging with literacy. And you've shown that really well. So I was wondering if you could just talk about the

trouble with hearing from women. Historically, women's voices have been hidden in the records and they're often harder to find. And part of that is because women were often excluded from literate culture because women often weren't given the same level of education as men were. But there are different kinds of literacy. So women from middle classes up would be taught often to read but not to write.

So they were still engaging with books and with literary culture, but just not in the same way as maybe men were. You also have all these great documents on display that show how

And sometimes if you're incredibly wealthy, you do know how to read and write. And there are all of these wonderful little books that show how the education of young girls happens. Yeah. So we have a case which is all to do with kind of women's books and women's literacy. And we have a lovely example of women.

a primer that belonged to a girl. So this would be a girl's first book and it has an ABC alphabet in it for her to learn her letters. And it has a beautiful little picture of a classroom with a female teacher teaching a group of girls. And this is from what's now Belgium, which was an area of Europe where girls did have a slightly more formal education than elsewhere.

I think that's really important sometimes just to see the images because we have a hard time imagining these things. And to see that they have an artistic representation of this shows us that it's common enough that you need to be able to recognize

read it as an image as well. Yeah. And the fact that these girls' books are being produced and are being illustrated as well shows us that their education is being taken really seriously and that finances are being spent to kind of help with this.

Speaking of book production, you've led us right into it. I was so excited about the huge section that shows the books that were quite literally made by women, because I think that this is one of the areas of public life, because you are engaging with the public when you are creating books, when you are creating literature, that women are really well represented in.

In the medieval period. And we get to see so much, not just from women who produce books like Christine de Pizan, which you've got lots of wonderful examples of, but also just women who are working in book workshops and they're making beautiful things as well, or printresses as well.

So, you know, there's all these women who are just sitting around hanging out with books all day. Yeah. So among the examples of women who were physically making books, we've got a manuscript that was made by the female book illuminator, Jean Montbaston. To anyone who follows medieval accounts on Twitter is known as the illuminator who produced the famous non-picking penises from a tree image. Yeah.

And yeah, she was this remarkable woman who she initially worked with her husband at a professional manuscript making workshop in Paris. And her husband died and she took on the business on her own. So she was running the business and she was also illuminating the book.

And what's interesting is we would not know that she even existed had her husband not died because she does not appear in the records until after his death, which is quite typical for a lot of these women who worked in family workshops. They're completely invisible in the historical record while there's a man there to represent.

do the paperwork and to put his name on the documents. Yeah, absolutely. And this is a phenomenon, just throwing out a technical term here called coverture, right? So when you become somebody's wife, you essentially disappear and are amalgamated into their name. So

Oftentimes, you know, when we see really successful business women, it'll just say, oh, here's a guy and also his wife. If it says his wife at all, because the idea here is that you are your husband. Yeah. And so we lose so many women who are doing incredible work because it's not even worth talking about because everybody knows that.

that women are doing these jobs. So it's like, well, there's no point mentioning it. Why would that be important or interesting? Yeah, exactly. It's one of the biases of the written record that so much that was going on is actually invisible to us because it wasn't important to record it at the time, even though it's so important to us now. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's interesting because it shows kind of what our own biases are about women and history. You know, we often...

I don't know, like to blame medieval people and say, oh, well, here's all the reasons we don't get to hear from women. And it's because medieval people are bad. And it's also partly our own fault for just kind of not understanding what the context is. Because if you don't understand that there are women in these workshops and we just don't have their names, then you can write your own world where it's just a bunch of men. And that's on us.

I mean, yeah, the medieval people, when they were doing their financial documents and stuff, they weren't thinking this is a historical record that has to be representative for the ages. They were just thinking, you know, I need to record these expenses.

Well, OK, but what you have a lot of are real records for the ages and just things that anyone would get incredibly excited about. One for me that I thought was really incredible is you have Joan of Arc's signature album.

on something and I just freaked out immediately. I can't handle this. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the real kind of standout things in the exhibition, I think. So we're very, very lucky to have on loan to the exhibition a letter of Joan of Arc, which is on loan from the city archives of Rion in France. It's the first time it's ever left France and indeed the first time it's ever left Rion. And people are like,

This letter was sent by Joan to the city of Rion in the 15th century, and she's asking for military supplies. It's when she's still campaigning as a military leader, and she's about to besiege a town, and she's saying, can you send me gunpowder and other supplies?

And Joan was illiterate. She was a peasant woman, so she couldn't write, but she did learn to write her own signature. So she dictated the letter, but she signed it herself. And it's just this incredibly poignant, direct connection to her. And I find that so important because one of the things that gets overlooked in terms of the legend of Joan of Arc, which is what this kind of all is to a certain extent, is how prolific she was in terms of sending letters. She

didn't actually physically write them out, but she was writing to people all of the time. You know, she had a lively correspondence with various towns. And my favorite letter of Joan of Arc's of all time is she writes to the Hussites in Prague and says, you better knock it off because once I'm done defeating the English, I'm coming over there. And he does say she's got plans for the future ahead of

What ends up happening to her. So it really shows us how women have a political interest in the world and how even if you have these obstacles because you're a peasant woman and you don't know how to read and write, there are ways around that that people find. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, with Joan of Arc, the emphasis is often on her trial, which is, of course, such an interesting document. And we have a copy of that in the exhibition as well. And she comes across really clearly in that as being this incredible, defiant, astute person. But I think people often forget that we also have earlier records from before she was captured and when she was still at the height of her influence, these amazing letters and stories.

And you can really get a sense of her from those as well. You also have a great document right next to it, which I thought was incredibly interesting because it's from later after John is dead. And when the French are very interested in beginning to create the mythology of Joan of Arc,

And it shows her originally appearing at court. And she's not dressed as we know her as a peasant girl who dresses like a man. But she's in full, very feminine garb of a member of the nobility. And I found that really interesting because we are beginning to see a way of trying to sanitize.

The legend of Joan? Yeah, so one of the interesting things about Joan is almost as soon as she is dead, then people are trying to kind of take her story and reinvent it in different ways and use it to support all kinds of different narratives. And it continues right up to the present day. But in that immediate aftermath, then Charles VII of France, who really owes his crown to Joan when he wins the war, he kind of adopts her to kind of

bolster his own reputation and he tries to make her into more of a national figure. And this manuscript that you're talking about, it's a French chronicle with illuminations, dates from this period. And it's showing how, yeah, in order to kind of make her into this

sanitized image. They have actually really changed her image. And so they're not showing her the way she comes across in the trial as this peasant woman who wears men's clothing. They are showing her as this kind of almost stereotypical princess in a pink dress.

And it's the sense that Joan was a subversive figure who they need to change to make her more acceptable. I found that incredibly interesting because it's not even necessarily...

military involvement that makes Joan so odd because as the exhibition showed, lots of women are actually involved in military things, but more usually in terms of defense. So for example, you have got one of the very, very famous letters that we get from the very famous Paxton family where there is the husband's away and Margaret is saying, I need pole axes. I need weapons because I'm protecting the house.

You've also got a document looking at one of my favorite people of all time, Black Agnes, who managed to defend Dunbar Castle in Scotland. And I found these so important to say, well, yeah, women aren't just shrinking violets.

Absolutely. You know, warfare was a fact of life in medieval Europe and women had to take part. They had to defend their family interests. They had to defend their property. And if an army came and besieged your home, you absolutely had to defend it. And women were able to take these leadership roles. Black Agnes, the Countess of Dunbar, is particularly fantastic. We have this account of her in

chronicle of Andrew Wintoun where he describes how she mocks the English who are besieging her castle by sending her ladies to go out onto the battlements and sweep the battlements to kind of make fun of them and at one point they capture her brother and they say we're going to kill your brother and she says go ahead if you kill him then I'll be the heir to my father's lands.

It's just, I mean, it's so brilliant, right? Because also one of the things that the exhibition shows really well is that women were heirs. And I think this is something that people forget because there is a tendency to focus again on the royal and especially because of things like the Hundred Years' War where a lot of, let's just say...

bad bookkeeping happens in order to say that women can inherit. It actually includes the fact that as the exhibition shows, about 44% of women are inheriting some form of property at this point in time. Yeah, absolutely. So in medieval inheritance practice, then male heirs were favored over female heirs. But if there was no male heir, then women were, in most parts of Europe, were able to inherit the estate. And

Further down the social scale, you find in wills very often daughters are left property, are left money, all kinds of things. Yeah, absolutely. And that is such an important thing just to kind of show the humanity of

I suppose because it is an incredibly misogynistic society. I mean, surprise. But that doesn't mean that women hold no standing or that people don't love their daughters or want these things to continue. It just means that everybody's working it out the best they can.

Yeah, for sure. And yeah, you see women's agency throughout the exhibition. You see the love that daughters were held in. I think this comes across. For example, we have a chronicle of Matthew Paris, which records the death of Catherine, the daughter of Eleanor of Provence. And it describes her in Latin as mutant useless, which is a very unusual phrasing and phrase.

People have wondered whether it might mean she had some kind of disability. She was only three years old when she died. But then it goes on to say how her mother, Eleanor, was so devastated at her death and how she was inconsolable. And you get this strong sense that even though people at that time had

many children and many of them died, they still loved them. And there was still that very strong parental bond. Yeah, it's really touching that. And quite interesting because it's a sort of emotion that we wouldn't usually expect to see in a chronicle because chronicles are often just this battle happened, that battle happened, you know, this person came to visit.

And it shows how important this is to court life, this real emotive and terrible thing that's happened. Yes, absolutely. And how in, as you say, a chronicle which is male authored and most of the events it records are very much male centered, you can find these little snippets of women's history and these little emotional events kind of buried in there. ♪

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry VIII, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors, murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title, really. So follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

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And one of the things that is really beautiful about the exhibition is it shows how women, and particularly royal women or wealthy women, might not be writing documents themselves, but they show up in documents and they also patronize them.

So we have lots of beautiful volumes because a woman said, I want that. And it's not a book like a beautiful book of ours, but also starting actual universities. So women are really engaged with this life of the mind and wanting to create circumstances where other people can learn.

Yeah, absolutely. There's been a lot of work to show that creativity in the Middle Ages was not just about actually being an artist or an author yourself, but there was also creativity in the act of patronage. So we have a section of women patrons where we have, for example, we have Margaret Blunt,

both at the great matriarch of the Tudor dynasty, founding a university place at Cambridge and also founding her own mortuary chapel. We have other examples of literature that women have patronised. For example, we have the Book of the Queen, which is this

magnificent manuscript of the works of Christine de Pizan, who is the first professional woman author in Europe. The reason why she was able to do that, she was able to make her living through writing, is because she was patronised by the French royal court and specifically Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France. In this manuscript, it has a beautiful frontispiece where it shows

Christine presenting the book to Queen Isabeau sat in her chamber surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting and her adorable little dogs. I mean, the Christine de Paysanne manuscripts are...

just absolute jewels in this. And this is something that our listeners might be really familiar with because oftentimes if you see almost any image of a medieval woman, it's come from Christine de Pizan because she, as this professional author, is really putting out a studied idea of herself into the world. She's writing about

Right.

These are so colorful. They are so beautiful. And to know that she was actually thinking about this is so important. So Christine, in addition to being this amazing author and proto-feminist, she was also very much involved in the production of her own manuscripts. She was overseeing their production. She was kind of guiding, saying, this is how I want it to be. And it's even been suggested she was working as a scribe on those manuscripts herself.

So when you see these manuscripts of Christine's works, you can be sure that this is how she wanted to be seen by the world. This is her own self-image as she wanted it. And that's really unusual. Speaking of people who know exactly what they're doing, you've got the book of Marjorie Kemp, which is so exciting, right? You know, I don't even like Marjorie Kemp. Okay, I mean, look.

I think it's important that she wrote a book. I also think she's incredibly annoying. But I also think it's important to let women be annoying. Sure. Here's this exciting manuscript that we didn't even know existed until about, I guess it's 100 years now we've had hold of it.

Yeah, so the book of Marjorie Kemp is incredible. So it survives in only one copy, which is in the British Library. And it was only discovered in the 1930s when a family in an English country house was searching for ping pong balls and they looked in the back of an old cupboard

and they found these old books and they thought, oh, what's this rubbish? Let's throw it on the bonfire. But luckily they didn't. They got it checked out and it turned out that it was the lost book of Marjorie Kemp, which is something that we knew existed because in the 16th century there were a couple of editions printed of a pamphlet of extracts from the book of Marjorie Kemp. So this is just a seven-page long book

booklet, which completely takes out Marjorie's biography and her personality and most of her words. And it says she is an anchoress, so a woman who lives in a cell kind of secluded from the world. And so when the book of Marjorie Kemp was discovered, the complete manuscript, it came to light what Marjorie's life actually was. People were amazed to discover her.

So she was this incredible mystic who came from King's Lynn. Initially, she was kind of from a middle class family. She got married. She had 14 children. And then when she was about 40, she decided to devote her life to religion.

And she spent the rest of her life traveling around, going on pilgrimages. She was famous for having these quite extreme emotional responses. She would start crying in public places. She was very outspoken and she managed to make enemies with a lot of people. And she decided to write down her life in poetry.

a book. She was determined to author her autobiography and she went quite far lengths to actually get this written down. She tells how the initial scribe, she tells how it was very difficult to get anyone to agree to write this book down for her because she couldn't do it herself. She couldn't write. So she needed to find a scribe who was willing to do it. I find that really interesting and important, this

jump from the idea into actually getting something out there into the world that Marjorie, congratulations to her and good for all of us, manages to do. But you also have a really special connection

in my opinion, manuscript, which is You've Got the Mirror of Simple Souls. And this is such an incredible book because it's actually written by a heretic and it survives to us, which is incredible. And The Mirror of Simple Souls is one of these things where if you're me,

And you like heresy. And this is one of our foundational texts. And it kind of straddles Marjorie, who is attempting to do big religious things. And now she gets in trouble religiously a couple of times, but she manages to skate through. But then there's also this thing that can happen to you if you're a woman, if you're making big decisions.

spiritual changes. If you are being a mystic, a lot of the time the church can say, okay, that is enough of that. And I think maybe the difference between Marjorie and her unsuccessful bid to be a saint and also what happens with the Mirror of Simple Souls is that, well, somebody got a little bit more attention and a little bit more of a following than poor Marjorie ever did.

Yeah, so these medieval visionaries were walking a really fine line between sainthood and condemnation and severe punishment. And it really depended on whether you got approval from the authorities or not, which could be quite arbitrary. So Marguerite Poiret is someone who came out unlucky. She was a French mystic who wrote this incredible text.

the mirror of divine souls, where the central idea in that is that the soul can achieve complete union with God. And this was an idea that church authorities took issue with. Although actually, it was an idea that some male authors had also considered and that had been fine.

So actually, probably the main thing which got Marguerite into trouble was the fact that she was an independent woman. She wasn't connected to a religious order. She was writing about spiritual matters. She was preaching and she was doing it all in a way that men could not control. And so they felt very threatened by her.

And initially she was tried and she was told that she had to recant her book. She had to stop circulating her book. She had to stop preaching and she didn't do it. She continued. And so the second time round, she was condemned to death and she was burned at the stake. And it was decreed that all copies of her book had to be destroyed.

And for a long time, it was thought that that had been successful, that there were no copies of The Mirror of Simple Souls surviving until only in the 20th century, a scholar identified this text, which was circulating anonymously in various different translations around Europe as being the lost text of Marguerite Porret's Mirror of Simple Souls. And since then, many different copies have come to light. ♪

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry VIII, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors, murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title, really. So follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

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It's, I think, a really, really special book. And it's something that, you know, nerdy medievalists like to think about. But it's one of these things where a lot of the time when you get in trouble with the church, we don't get to read why. Because they do a pretty good job of getting rid of the books in question. So it's a really nice one to be able to actually see with my own eyes for a change. And a text that someone genuinely died for. Absolutely. And this shows you how women really have...

these strong convictions. And we see lots of women who died for things in this exhibition, very sadly. But that's one of the big ways that we find women in the Middle Ages is you kind of come to the historical record when you get in trouble. But you've also got one of my favorite women who gets in trouble, or at least

female presenting people, which is you've got the role of Eleanor Reichner. Yeah, so when we were doing this exhibition, we really wanted to be as inclusive as possible. And we wanted to try to find those stories which often are the least likely to survive. So these are the people who were living on the margins of society and were often

often people who were discriminated against for various different reasons and who were often not able to tell their own story. So the questioning of Eleanor Reichner is a really fascinating document for that in that it's really quite unique for the medieval period. So this is a document recording the questioning of a female presenting person who was brought before the mayor's court

in London, charged with committing sex in a public place. And it emerges that she actually was born John Reichner, but she's presenting as Eleanor Reichner. And she's living as a woman, wearing women's clothes, working as a sex worker and a barmaid and an embroideress, really on the margins of society. And

The court, they question her and she gives a really quite detailed account of her life, which is very unusual for the time. Yeah, it's such an important document because we don't get these snippets until things like this happen. But another similarly really exciting one, which I had no idea about, which is

A testament of a woman named Maria Moriana. Yeah. I was wondering if you could tell us about that. Yeah, so this was another really fascinating document that I was really excited to come across when researching this exhibition. So I think sometimes there's a perception that medieval Europe was all white.

but it wasn't at all. And this is a document that is about a woman who is petitioning the Sheriff of London for her freedom. And she is very probably a woman of colour, so that the name Maria Moriana, Moriana is probably an ethnic name relating to the term Moor, which suggests

a person of colour, possibly of Muslim descent. And she's in this document. She describes how her master, who's an Italian merchant living in England, is trying to sell her and

It seems, subtext, is that he thinks she is his slave. He's trying to sell her, but she is refusing to be sold. So she clearly does not think she is a slave. And in fact, she is correct because in England at this time, there was no legally recognized slavery there.

And so she's trying to get her freedom. We don't know what happened. I hope she got it. I know. It's really an important document, I think, because it shows the real humanity of the people who others enslave, right? There's a tendency, at least in the later medieval world, yeah, in England you can't hold people as enslaved, which is great.

But then when people talk about slavery, everyone says, oh, it's just how it was at the time and no one had a problem with it. It's like, well, I think the people who were enslaved had a pretty big problem with it. And we see this here with Maria. And not only is she unwilling to

to say, yes, I am enslaved and you can go ahead and sell me. She knows her rights. Yeah. She knows that in England, you can't do that. Yeah. And one thing that I find striking in the document is throughout, she's referred to as your oratress, which...

kind of tells me that she's there in the courtroom speaking for herself. Oratrice, it's the female form of orator, so someone who's speaking. So she's actually in the courtroom speaking up for herself. It's just such an incredible document, just incredibly, incredibly exciting to see. But also what you do in this exhibition, we see these great direct images

of what a woman is thinking or doing. But you also show how, because women don't always enter the written record, how we find them. And oftentimes a big way that we do is through medical manuals. Because one of the things about women is they're not men, are they? Right.

That's what many people sort of think, is that a woman is sort of an opposite of a man. And so you end up getting really great documents specifically about gynecological or obstetric manuscripts. In the exhibition, we have a section on women's health care where we look at how women's bodies were cared for in their communities. You know, there was no formal health care at the time. So often there was female medical practice.

practitioners that were looking after women's health. One item that we have, which I find really striking, is we have a birth girdle. So this is a manuscript, which is like a long, thin scroll covered in charms and prayers and images of devotional things like the wound of Christ and the nails with which Christ was nailed to the cross.

And the idea with a birthing girdle was that if a woman was to see it or have it laid on her when she was in labor, then it would protect her and the unborn child. So it's kind of an amulet, a protective amulet for use in childbirth. And we actually know that these things really were used because there has been...

scientific analysis done on one of the birth girdles that survives at the Wellcome Institute, which has analyzed the proteins that is found on that document and shown that it has cervico-vaginal juices and blood and all kinds of different fluids that shows that it really was being used. This is just one of these ways where documents are so incredibly fascinating because it shows us all of the

these very human elements to things. I think people have a tendency to think documents are just, oh, it's just a book. It's just, you know, some boring old piece of governmental something. But all of these have their own life as an object. Yes. And medieval books were not just about reading. People engaged with them in all kinds of different ways. And these

Amuletic texts in particular were as much about seeing and touching as they were about reading. Absolutely. And, you know, I think that that is something that comes across really well in the exhibition because it's easy when you are not someone who works with medieval things all of the time to kind of imagine the past as a really grey place, a really dull place. Mm.

especially because a big way that we interact with medieval buildings in particular. I think that's the main thing that everyone kind of deals with. You know, the plaster has fallen off the walls and we don't get to see the cool old paintings anymore. And we don't realize how bright the Middle Ages was. But when you look at these documents, they are gorgeous. Even a birthing girdle that you take into, you know, into labor with you has beauty.

images and colors, and it all comes across so beautifully. Yeah, and that is one of the wonderful things about manuscripts, because most of the time throughout their hundreds of years of existence, they have been kept closed on a shelf. And so they have not been damaged. They have not suffered the light damage that

Other works that have been more exposed have suffered over those centuries. So many of them, they just have the same colors as when they were painted. And you really get a sense of the richness of the medieval palette. Well, I could not agree more. And I could not recommend coming along to this exhibition so that people can experience it themselves.

Ellie, thank you so, so much for talking to me about one of my favorite things in the world. Oh, thank you so much for coming to the exhibition of your kind words. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. I'd like to thank Ellie once again for joining me and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you're interested in learning more about some of the topics we discussed today, you can check out our past episodes on Joan of Arc, Marjorie Kemp, and medieval women more generally.

Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. And we're offering 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval. If you can't bear to be apart from me for a whole week, there are some fabulous films we've made to enjoy, including my episode on the working lives of medieval women working more than nine to five.

Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell all your friends and family about us. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. At any rate, my co-host Matt Lewis will be back on the Gone Medieval throne on Friday, and I'll be back again, as always, next Tuesday. Until next time.

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