THE British Library published this richly illustrated volume to accompany an exhibition that was held there (25 October 2024 to 2 March 2025). It focuses on the private, public, working, and spiritual lives of women in Western Europe.
There had been a flurry of international news interest in January 2019 when Anita Radini published her research findings of a nun’s skull from Dalheim, which was found with lapis-lazuli flecks on her teeth from sucking on her brush as an illuminated-manuscript writer. She had lived some time between 997 and 1162, and the press claimed this as evidence of women working in a previously deemed male world of artistic illustration.
Radini Skull B78 simply confirmed what had been known to the scholarly community for generations. Women, both nuns and widows, were engaged in illustrating manuscripts alongside men. In 2021, it was found that a 15th-century nun at another German house, Sister Modesta, had proudly signed her illustrated breviary: “Soror Modesta me scripsi deo gratias” (BL. Harley MS 2975).
The editors bring together 19 authors to contribute essays, drawing largely on the collections in Euston Road, showing that women were not only scribes and artists, but also authors, patrons, and political and economic agents. Domestic drudgery and oppression may have been the lot for the majority, perhaps, but the survey finds women in all levels of society, including prostitutes and silk workers.
Jeanne de Montbaston collaborated with her husband, and is depicted with him in the margin of one of their books, Roman de la Rose, in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (MS. Fr.25526, f.77v). She was a widow by 1353 when she was recorded as an illuminator and a bookseller.
She inherited her husband’s lucrative Paris business illuminating books. Her newfound freedoms or her humour seem to have got the better of her; one of her illuminations in the same volume (f.106v) depicts a nun picking phalluses from a tree. Years before (1333-40), she and her husband had illustrated a collection of travel writings from the East for King Philip VI or his queen, Jeanne de Bourgogne (B.L. Royal MS. 19 D I).
AlamyAn illustration for the Italian author Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies
Born slightly later in the 14th century, the Italian Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1430) is regarded as the first professional authoress. Widowed at 25 with three children living at a foreign court, she began as a scribe and a lyric poet, taking to task the male-driven romances that dominated the French market.
“Why on earth”, she asked in The Book of the City of Ladies, “is it that so many men, both clerks and others, have said and continue to say and write such awful and damning things about women?” She established her own workshop and, in a presentation copy of her collected writings for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria (of 1410-14), she is depicted drafting a book in a cutaway section of her house with its red tiled roofs and open dormers (BL. Harley MS. 4431/1, f.4r). Underneath her desk, which has a green cloth cover, her expensive blue dress floods across the tiled floor: she is a woman of some standing in a man’s world.
The coming of the Reformation and the suppression of monastic communities had long-term socio-economic consequences, seen in the much defaced Battel Hall Retable from Dartford Priory (c.1410) with St Dominic and five female saints surrounding the Virgin and Child (Leeds Castle).
With the extravagant cup and cover made (1435-1445) for Eleanor Cobham (Christ’s College, Cambridge), Mary Wellesley introduces the story of her downfall on a trumped-up charge of treasonable necromancy, intended to curtail the power of her husband, Duke of Gloucester, who had served as Lord Protector for his nephew, Henry VI.
Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, is one of the memorable women who live beyond the pages of this volume. Queen Melisende was the daughter of an Armenian princess and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, and became Queen of Jerusalem at her father’s death in 1131, sharing the throne with her husband Fulk V and their young son Baldwin, an awkward arrangement only partly resolved at Fulk’s early death in a hunting accident (1143).
In her richly illuminated prayer book (B. L. Egerton MS. 1139) decorated in the Holy Sepulchre Monastery, in Jerusalem, the localised scene of the Nunc Dimittis takes place in front of a representation of the onion dome of the Holy Sepulchre church. The (detached) outer book covers are intricately cut in ivory. The life of David is on the front, interspersed with the violent struggles of virtues and vices, and, on the back, emperors undertake corporal acts of charity (Matthew XXV).
The last essay examines the mortuary roll (c.1225-30) written at the death of Lucy de Vere, the foundress and first prioress of a house at Hedingham in Essex. The opening illustrations show her funeral, with her soul taken up to heaven, where the enthroned Virgin and Child reach out to receive it. Such was her reputation that the roll was sent out, as a book of condolence, to 122 other religious houses across East Anglia and southern England as far as Wilton, Sherborne, Bristol, and Wales (Llanthony). There are more than six metres of written tributes to her. Even in death she was never silent.
Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.
Medieval Women: Voices and visions
Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, editors
British Library Publishing £35
(978-0-7123-5590-2)
Church House Bookshop £31.50
