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Medieval Women You Should Know

Women making pasta, from the workshop of Giovannino de Grassi, Italy, 1390s

Nobody loves a listsicle like late medieval Christianity. You know the seven deadly sins; now meet the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the six sins against the Holy Spirit, the four sins that cry to heaven (but one of which is silent)…and in late medieval didactic literature, enumerated lists are everywhere. Fortunately, twenty-first century versions like “10 Badass Medieval Women” tend to have slightly more cross-cultural appeal. But a funny thing happens when you start reading through those lists: they can be almost as repetitive as their medieval ancestors. They feature a few sentences or a short paragraph about Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sitt al-Mulk, maybe Jeanne la Flamme or Catherine of Siena.

And so the Medieval Studies Research Blog is proud to introduce our new, non-listsicle series on Medieval Women You Should Know. It aims to use the stories of women around the medieval world to illuminate life in the Middle Ages more broadly. That might mean an examination of the transmission history of a woman-authored text, a look at the relationship dynamic between two women, or the traditional contextualized-biography approach.

Yes, “badass women” will be represented, like the now-nameless mother of eleventh-century vizier al-Afdal, who went undercover as the mother of a deceased soldier to root out opposition to her son’s rule [1]; or Juliana Peutinger, the three-year-old who recited a Latin oration to the Holy Roman Emperor in a premodern version of Toddlers & Tiaras. [2]

But there are also the women known to us only by chance, whose existence is folded into miracle collections or tax registers: women extraordinary only to themselves and their loved ones. Through their eyes and lives we see through the bright lights to the texture of medieval society. As Katherine Anne Wilson points out, we should not look at a photo of a gorgeous tapestry and think only of its master, but also the women who spun the thread, the women who cooked meals for the craftsmen and cared for their children. [3]

To illuminate women great and small also offers the chance to highlight one of my favorite things about medieval studies and our scholars: that is, the ability to draw an entire life story out of a line or two in a court case, a papal petition. Who needs a detailed biography when you can read that nine-year-old Mary de Billingsgate drowned in the Thames, and reconstruct her single mother’s efforts to raise a child, manage a household, and try to earn a living on her own? [4]

And finally, as Medieval Studies Research Blog pageview statistics indicate that the blog is taking on a double life as a medieval studies resource blog, I hope to pay forward a debt from the very beginning of my graduate work. When I first fell in love with medieval women mystics, there was an amazing online resource called “Other Women’s Voices.” It collated biographical data, links to online scholarship, and excerpts from the writing of women from antiquity through the early 1700s. Even more than the Classics of Western Spirituality series and the index of Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Other Women’s Voices was my entry to what was for me an unknown and wondrous world. While the Medieval Studies Research Blog has no intentions of replicating that site (which lives on through archive.org’s Wayback Machine), we hope the posts in this series can provide a similar sort of inspiration: not an end, but a beginning.

Cait Stevenson
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

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[1] Della Cortese and Simonetta Calderini, Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 37.

[2] Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2005), 229-230.

[3] Katherine Anne Wilson, “The Hidden Narratives of Medieval Art,” in Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past, ed. Andrew Albin et al. (Fordham University Press, 2019).

[4] Reginald R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of Coroners Rolls of the City of London, A.D. 1300-1378 (Richard Clay and Sons, Ltd., 1913), 252-253.

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The Phoenix Returns

Although it does not often get the same attention as other wondrous and fiery creatures, such as dragons, the marvelous phoenix has an equally deep and ancient history. One of the oldest known accounts of the phoenix myth comes from Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, translated into ancient Greek around the 5th century B.C.E. The phoenix, called benu by the Egyptian author, becomes increasingly popular, appearing in works by Greek authors, such as Herodotus’s Histories and Antiphanes of Athens’ Homopatrioi, and in works by Latin authors, such as Tacitus’s Annals, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and of course Lactantius’ De ave phoenice, which is adapted, expanded and allegorized in the Old English Phoenix poem found in the medieval codex known as the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501).

Phoenix rising in Aberdeen Bestiary, Aberdeen University Library, Univ Lib. MS 24, f.55v.

As I mentioned in my previous blog centered on translating the Exeter Book Phoenix, the phoenix bird also appears in the Abrahamic tradition, from the bird of paradise (chol) in commentaries on Jewish scripture (especially the Midrash and Talmud) to the phoenix’s allegorization and comparisons with Christ himself by early Christian authors. Sometimes, these early Christian authors would use the phoenix as evidence for the possibility of Christ’s resurrection, as can be observed in Clement of Rome’s Epistula ad Corinthos, Tertullian’s De resurrectione carnis, St. Epiphanius’ Physiologus and in St. Ambrose’s De excessu Satyri. This moralizing interpretation of the phoenix extends into the modern era and continues unto our own contemporary age.

Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawks, comes to Harry Potter’s aid in “The Chamber of Secrets” (2002).

Within the realm of fantasy literature and popular fiction, Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix highlight the longstanding association with the phoenix and moral goodness, in this book the day-saving gang of noble, good and trustworthy witches and wizards, also called as Dumbledore’s army, are known as the Order of the Phoenix. It is this group which twice stands up to Voldemort and his Death-eaters, and each time they succeed.

Indeed, the ultimate white wizard in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world, Albus Dumbledore, has his own pet phoenix named Fawks, who swiftly delivers the sword of Godrick Gryffindor to Harry Potter in his moment of need and bravely pecks the monstrous basilisk’s eyes out in The Chamber of Secrets. Later, Fawks saves his master from unpleasant arrest and an uncomfortable stay in the magical prison Azkaban in The Order of the Phoenix. This extremely positive association is likely a result of medieval Christological allegory often linked the phoenix, which parallels Christ in its death and rebirth.

Fawks helps Dumbledore escape from the Ministry of Magic in “The Order of the Phoenix” (2007).

In the Exeter Book Phoenix, this allegory is emphasized and dramatized as the phoenix is aligned with both paradise in heaven and compared to the westward journey of the sun. Moreover, the mythical bird—like the sun—is repeatedly connected to images of glistening treasure and beautiful jewels. In my translation of the Old English Phoenix, lines 85-119, I do my best to preserve as much of the original poem’s language and semantics as possible, and even at times imitate the cadence, but as with my earlier translation of previous lines 1-49, I take certain creative liberties and mobilize poetic licensure when I feel it enhances my English translation.

Stay tuned for additional forthcoming translations from the Exeter Book Phoenix, reborn as modern English poems!

Richard Fahey
PhD in English
University of Notre Dame

Further Reading

Badke, David. “Phoenix.” The Medieval Bestiary, 2022.

Fahey, Richard. “The Phoenix (85-119).” Medieval Studies Research Blog: Medieval Poetry Project, 2022.

—. “Resurrecting the Phoenix.” Medieval Studies Research Blog, 2015.

—. “The Phoenix (1-49).” Medieval Studies Research Blog: Medieval Poetry Project, 2015.

Fahs, Maria. “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in Medieval Bestiaries.” Medieval Studies Research Blog, 2015.

Hill, John Spencer. “The Phoenix.” Religion and Literature 16.2 (1994): 61-66.

Kosloski, Philip. “Christian symbolism of the Phoenix (and why we chose it for our new comic book).” Voyage, 2021.

—. “This is how the phoenix became a Christian symbol.” Aleteia, 2017.

Niehoff, M. R. “The Phoenix in Rabbinic Literature” The Harvard Theological Review 89.3 (1996).]: 245-265.

Petersen, Helle Falcher. “The Phoenix: The Art of Literary Recycling” NM 101 (2000): 375–386.

Steen, Janie. Verse and Virtuosity: the adaptation of Latin rhetoric in Old English poetry. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, ON, 2008.

Sorensen, Ingrid. “Dumbledore’s Phoenix and the Medieval Bestiary.” Getty: Book of Beasts, 2018.

Videen, Hana. “Phoenix.” Dēor-hord: a Medieval and Modern Bestiary, 2016.

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Public Humanities and the Future of Medieval Studies

It is the work of public humanities to question how we wield memories of the past for present ends. Through community-engaged teaching and learning, medievalists have the opportunity to pass on memories of the Middle Ages that move us toward social justice. We must begin by telling the dangerous memories of suffering that marked the millennium between 500 and 1500 C.E.: the expulsion of Jews from Christian kingdoms, Crusades against Islamic rulers in the Holy Land, and other instances of violence against religious and ethnic minorities. However, violence is not the whole story. At different times and places during these 1000 years, people of different religions and cultures lived peaceably side by side. Jews and Christians in Islamic Spain shared new learnings from Greek and Arabic writings on theology and philosophy. In the Levant, crusaders of diverse ethnicities farmed alongside their Muslim neighbors, not only tolerating the other’s religion but even appreciating their style of worship. Many Christians converted to Islam. Travel along trade and pilgrimage routes brought medieval people into contact with cultural others as they traversed commercial networks spanning from China through Syria and around the Mediterranean to North Africa and Europe. Migration compelled people to settle far from home, carrying their culture with them and adapting to their new circumstances. This is the more complicated story we need to tell.

A student studies a facsimile of the Catalan Atlas in the Medieval Institute library.

Through public humanities initiatives, medievalists can engage community partners in remembering a messier, more complex Middle Ages and discovering the relevance of that memory to our messy and complex world today. At Notre Dame, the Medieval Institute is animating students and faculty to engage the wider community on campus and beyond. This fall we hosted Game Day events during which the community could learn from local artisans who practice historically informed crafts. We sponsored roundtables that put MI faculty fellows in conversation with scholars working on labor and religion to discuss issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This spring we are partnering with a local public high school to offer an elective history course on the global Middle Ages and participating in the public library’s hands-on science programming. These initiatives invite our community partners to think critically with us about popular (mis)conceptions of medieval culture, to challenge modern assumptions about the past, and to lift up the stories of marginated medieval peoples: women, laborers, and religious and ethnic minorities.

Mark Booth talks about training falcons for hunting at a Game Day event in September 2021.

It is challenging to envision ways of engaging a broad public in reimagining history and its meaning for us today. Nevertheless, I care about this work because the dangerous memories of the medieval past help me imagine – and hope for – a more just future. In the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ, executed by the state for challenging the power of empire, is subversive of the status quo and impels Christians to work for liberation. I perceive medieval art and literature to be full of similarly dangerous memories: of women who dared to write against the fearful and patriarchal theologies of their day, of poets who critiqued ecclesiastical abuses of money and power, of reformers who wanted all people to have access to sacred scripture in their mother tongue and who dreamed of “a poor church, for the poor.” Theirs are the stories I want to remember from the Middle Ages – stories that feel urgently relevant for our time, as dangerous then as they are now.

Annie Killian, Ph.D.
Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame