by Adams, Max;
UNQUIET WOMEN
Max Adams
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Table of Contents
AN APOLLO BOOK
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About Unquiet Women
Unquiet Women is an exquisitely crafted patchwork of the forgotten lives of some of the most remarkable women in history.
Wynflæd was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who owned male slaves and badger-skin gowns; Egeria a Gaulish nun who toured the Holy Land as the Roman Empire was collapsing; Gudrid an Icelandic explorer and the first woman to give birth to a European child on American soil; Mary Astell a philosopher who out-thought John Locke.
In this exploration of the lives of women living between the last days of Rome and the Enlightenment, Max Adams triumphantly overturns the idea that women of this period were either queens, nuns or invisible. A kaleidoscopic study of women’s creativity, intellect and influence, Unquiet Women brings to life the experiences of women whose stories are all too rarely told. Thanks to its author’s rigorous work of rescue and recovery, their voices can be heard across the centuries – still passionate and still strong.
Contents
Welcome Page
About Unquiet Women
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. Portraits
EGERIA THE PILGRIM ~ THE SPITALFIELDS SARCOPHAGUS ~ HANDMAIDS OF GOD ~ HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA ~ ST BRIGIT OF KILDARE ~ HESTIA, GODDESS OF THE HEARTH ~ THE QUIET WOMAN
2. Legacies
EMPRESS WU ZHAO ~ THE WEAVERS OF WEST STOW ~ LA SEÑORA DE CAO ~ CÁIN ADOMNÁIN: THE FIRST LAWS FOR WOMEN ~ ST ÆTHELTHRYTH ~ THE TRUMPINGTON BED BURIAL
3. Testaments
WYNFLÆD’S WILL ~ THE WOMEN FROM THE OSEBERG SHIP BURIAL ~ ÆTHELFLÆD: ‘LADY OF THE MERCIANS’ ~ OF AL-ANDALUS AND GANDERSHEIM ~ DHUODA: A MOTHER’S HANDBOOK FOR HER SON ~ ANNA COMNENA
4. Chosen paths
GUDRID THORBJARNARDÓTTIR ~ SEERESSES AND CUNNING-WOMEN ~ TROTA, THE MEDIC OF SALERNO ~ A MOCHICA STIRRUP VESSEL ~ PEACE-WEAVERS, WAR-SPINNERS ~ A VIKING FEMALE WARRIOR’S GRAVE?
5. Hard times
CHRISTINA OF MARKYATE ~ OF BAYEUX AND DOMESDAY ~ CHAMBRES DES DAMES – WOMEN’S WORKSHOPS ~ HÉLOÏSE AND ABÉLARD ~ TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS ~ WOMEN IN VIRTUAL LANDSCAPES
6. A room of one’s own
BÉATRICE DE PLANISOLES ~ BEGIN THE BEGUINES ~ MARGERY KEMPE: ALEWIFE, MILLER, MYSTIC ~ THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES ~ A TALE OF THREE MARRIAGES
7. New worlds
QUEEN NJINGA OF NDONGO ~ TWO NATIVE WOMEN: MALINTZIN AND ANACAONA ~ MATRIARCHS OF CHACO CANYON ~ ANNE BRADSTREET: HIGH AND MIGHTY ~ THE WILL OF ANA DE LA CALLE
8. The unquiet chorus
THREE FACES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI ~ MALICE DEFEATED: ELIZABETH CELLIER ~ MARY ASTELL’S SERIOUS PROPOSAL ~ CELIA FIENNES
Postscript: New trajectories
Plate Section
Bibliography and further reading
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
About Max Adams
Also by Max Adams
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For my sisters
In memory of Constance Alexandra Crofts
Since the men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women; and when they take notice of them, ’tis with this wise Remark, That such women acted above their sex. By which one must suppose they wou’d have their Readers understand, That they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!
MARY ASTELL, THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 1705
Introduction
✥
‘From all these sources I wove the whole fabric of my truthful history.’
ANNA COMNENA, ALEXIAD 11.VII
My grandmother, Constance Alexandra Corinna Johnson, was born in the Northamptonshire village of Moreton Pinkney in 1902. The Johnsons were joiners and undertakers, but her mother had been in service to a lady of means – hence the grandiose middle names. Constance married my grandfather, Harry Charles Crofts, after his return from the First World War. He had survived Mons and long years as a POW in the mines of Silesia. His family were agricultural workers from the village of Crick, famous for its very long canal tunnel. For the rest of his working life, Harry was a porter – eventually head porter – at the Hospital of St Cross in Rugby, close to its public school. Harry and Connie were given a cottage in the hospital grounds in which to raise a family and Connie ran the hospital laundry. She bore fourteen children.
A son, Walter, died soon after birth. Two girls, Kathleen and ‘Little’ Anne, were also casualties of the sorts of fates common to large families before modern emergency care and advanced antibiotics: deaths by scalding, when a pan fell from a stove, and a rare throat infection. Seven daughters and four sons survived to adulthood. The boys made careers in the military, in the building trade, in farming and business. Some of the girls were put out to service when their school education ended at the age of fourteen; three of them received formal training as nurses, having served inevitable apprenticeships on the wards and in the mortuary of St Cross. The older girls raised their younger siblings. Without exception they were articulate, capable and striking in looks. They suffered the common childhood diseases of their era: diphtheria, measles and scarlet fever. They scrumped apples and flirted with the posh boys at the big school. They dreamed of being Greta Garbo or Vivien Leigh or of finding work in one of London’s fine department stores. During the Blitz of November 1940, they watched the skies turn red over Coventry. They learned to close their blackout curtains or else; to go without luxuries; to count every penny.
At the age of fifteen or sixteen, my mother, Thelma, was sent to skivvy for the wife of a master at Rugby School. In 1945 he became headmaster at Berkhamsted – Graham Greene’s alma mater; my mother, aged seventeen, went unwillingly with them and sent her wages home. It was an unhappy servitude and it ended disastrously when my mother and Berkhamsted’s head boy, Warwick Adams, were found to be courting. My father was sent down.
Thelma and her sisters married well; raised children; were housewives. They were also artists, seamstresses, nurses, florists, letter-writers, mentors, home-makers and decorators; aunts, mothers-in-law, sisters and daughters. They were curious and aspiring. Their children were the first generation in the family to go to university. My grandmother, in later years, maintained her skills as a professional laundress and managed to salt away the bulk of her wages, so that when Harry retired in 1960 she was able to purchase six adjacent, derelict, one-up one-down cottages in Harry’s home village, Crick, for a hundred pounds each. They knocked them together and renovated them to create a home where children and grandchildren could gather: a Boxing Day houseful numbered fifty. Harry died in 1974; Connie survived him by eighteen years and died at the age of ninety.
My grandmother, my aunts and my mother, who raised three children single-handed, may or may not have been typical of their generation or of those that went before. They seemed, and seem, remarkable both as individuals and as a family.
There is a common thread of restlessness, a refusal to accept fate passively, in the lives of the women in my family and in those of the small gathering of women whose stories are told in this book. At all times, and in the face of oppression, ignorance and the casual hand of fate, women have found ways and means to tell their stories and to negotiate access to power – not, in most cases, the supreme political power of emperors, kings and popes, nor, for the most part, the power wielded by force of arms or professional status; but in the spheres that matter to most people most of the time: in family, home, community, education and i
n the broader access to culture that so many crave. This unquiet spirit of curiosity and creativity, of passion and determination, rings with increasing clarity from the dusk of the Roman empire, through twelve or so centuries up to the dawning of the age of Enlightenment when, it seems to me, women’s history starts to follow a new trajectory.
I have often been taxed by students with the lack of women’s stories in history. It is not so much that women’s lives are absent from either the historical or archaeological record; more that they are neglected, or that they don’t fit neatly into the grand narratives – men’s stories, if you will – of sweeping change. During the research for many books I have collected a lot of material concerning women’s history, archaeology and anthropology. It is time for at least some of this material to see the light of day. But this is a personal collection; there are many, many more women whose stories might be included. I have taken the slightly indulgent view that the lives of those women whom I find most interesting will also interest readers. These are not, generally, the queens and femmes fatales or heroines of popular culture, nor those who have necessarily achieved power or greatness in the ordinary sense. Some of the women in these pages have come down to us with no name. Sometimes I can do no more than infer their existence from fragments of artefacts or whispers off-stage. But I do not underestimate the importance of all those lives whose faint echoes must speak for the millions of women about whom we know little or nothing. If there is a common thread to the lives included here, it is a restlessness and energy – an unquietness – that confronts or brushes aside expectation and oppression.
In each chapter of this book, arranged in broadly chronological fashion, biographical sketches are interwoven with stories exploring aspects of contemporary women’s lives and experience that seem to me to speak to one another. Many of these stories emerged from a course that I taught at the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Newcastle upon Tyne, called ‘Seven Women’.
Four themes have struck me very forcibly in the compilation of these stories. First, that in the design, production and distribution of textiles and other so-called craft media, women have historically found an alternative means to tell their stories, to develop sophisticated creative techniques, to forge econo-mic enterprises and bequeath an artistic legacy to following generations in parallel with, but quite distinct from, the overwhelmingly male clerical preserve of the written word – at least until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Secondly, women’s authorship, either through their own narratives – letters, hagiography, song, poetry, embroidery, weaving or ceramics – or in the retelling of their stories by men, is for the most part understated and therefore easily ignored or misconstrued. And then it is also striking to see how widowhood has provided a path of liberation for so many women and empowered them to exercise the capital of patronage and independence that property and security confer. Lastly, it is possible to detect, across the generations, countercurrents in which enlightened men have been covertly or overtly complicit in promoting and supporting women’s achievements and interests: fathers training daughters, uncles teaching nieces to read, patrons commissioning works, secretaries transcribing their words, friends offering support and understanding; even opponents admitting defeat.
Emerging from these themes is a conviction that history is polyphonic – that it must be told by many voices; that the ear must be tuned, and tuned finely, to the individual and the collective at one and the same time.
Note: dates are given CE (Common Era). Quotations have been referenced in endnotes and there is a list of sources and recommended further reading at the end of the book.
Chapter One
Portraits
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EGERIA THE PILGRIM ~ THE SPITALFIELDS SARCOPHAGUS ~ HANDMAIDS OF GOD ~ HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA ~ ST BRIGIT OF KILDARE ~ HESTIA, GODDESS OF THE HEARTH ~ THE QUIET WOMAN
Like fragments of a broken mirror, each of the stories in this first section is a mere shard, a glimpse of a life or lives. They fit into a rough chronological and spatial frame embracing the late antique world and the birth of medieval Europe, but otherwise it is for the reader to make connections between them, and with other chapters. I have gathered them together from the few, disparate sources that survive, and they offer no seamless narrative of progress. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that the women so ephemerally portrayed here speak with a distinct voice that invites wonder and admiration.
Egeria the pilgrim
In the fading decades of the Roman Empire, a provincial Christian woman from a community of ‘sisters’ somewhere on the Atlantic coast of either Galicia or Gaul set off on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The very thought of that three-thousand-mile journey by land and sea evokes the image of a woman of dauntless bravery, or of insouciant disregard for the dangers of the trail. Egeria spent three years in Jerusalem, toured Egypt and Sinai and travelled across Asia Minor to and from Constantinople. In about the year 384 she sent home a lively account of her travels, which, by happy chance, survives in large part.
Egeria climbed Mount Sinai and met the ascetic hermits of the desert. She made the acquaintance of bishops, experienced the divine mysteries at the heart of early Christian worship and, incidentally, recorded a unique account of the creation of an archaeology of the Bible. She is one of the very earliest witnesses to the Easter festivities and ceremonies that grew up around Christ’s tomb on Golgotha and the site of the nativity in Bethlehem. Her energy and optimism, her stamina and powers of observation, should have assured her a seat alongside the greatest women travel writers; but her journeys were almost completely unknown to historians before the late nineteenth century.
Some time in the 600s a monk named Valerius wrote to his fellow brethren about the ‘blessed Egeria’ who ‘fearlessly set out on an immense journey to the other side of the world’. In the ninth and twelfth centuries her journeys and writings were occasionally quoted in works describing the Holy Places. More than half a millennium later, in 1884, the scholar J. F. Gamurrini unearthed a manuscript in the collection of a lay fraternity in Arezzo, in Italy, recognised it as a copy of Egeria’s missing account and published it three years later. Regrettably, the beginning and ending of the manuscript are missing, so any dedicatory preface that might have revealed something about Egeria’s background, or the immediate motivation for her journey, is irretrievably lost, along with the earlier and later stages of her travels. But what remains is late Latin prose full of vigour, energy and the sort of crisp circumstantial detail that historians relish. The modern reader can hear her enthusiastic, slightly waspish voice ringing out across the centuries. Had 1950s’ Hollywood produced her biopic, Katharine Hepburn would surely have been cast in the lead role.
We first meet Egeria on the dramatic approach to the 2,285-metre (7,497-ft) Mount Sinai, Jebel Musa, armed with the words of the Bible as her Baedeker and the landscape as a revelation of its literal truth:
…we made our way across the head of the valley and approached the Mount of God. It looks like a single mountain as you are going round it, but when you actually go into it there are really several peaks, all of them known as the Mount of God, and the principal one, the summit on which the Bible tells us that ‘God’s glory came down’, is in the middle of them. I never thought I had seen mountains as high as those which stood around it, but the one in the middle where God’s glory came down was the highest of all, so much so that, when we were on top, all the other peaks we had seen and thought so high looked like little hillocks far below us.
Late on Saturday, then, we arrived at the mountain and came to some cells. The monks who lived in them received us most hospitably, showing us every kindness. There is a church there, with a presbyter; that is where we spent the night and, pretty early on Sunday, we set off with the presbyter and the monks who live there to climb each of the mountains.
They are hard to climb. You do not go round and round them, but straight up each one as if you were going up a wall, and then straight down to the foot, till
you reach the foot of the central mountain, Sinai itself. Here then, impelled by Christ our God and assisted by the prayers of the holy men who accompanied us, we made the great effort of the climb…
So at ten o’clock we arrived on the summit of Sinai, the Mount of God where the Law was given, and the place where God’s glory came down on the day when the mountain was smoking. The church which is now there is not impressive for its size (there is too little room on the summit) but it has a grace all its own. And when with God’s help we had climbed right to the top and reached the door of this church, there was the presbyter, the one who is appointed to the church, coming to meet us from his cell. He was a healthy old man, a monk from his boyhood and an ‘ascetic’ as they call it here – in fact, just the man for the place.
…As we were coming out of church the presbyters of the place gave us ‘blessings’, some fruits which grow on the mountain itself. For although Sinai, the holy Mount, is too stony even for bushes to grow on it, there is a little soil round the foot of the mountains… and in this the holy monks are always busy planting shrubs, and setting out orchards or vegetable beds round their cells.
From Sinai, Egeria made her way north and west along what is now the Gulf of Suez and then east into Arabia, following in the footsteps of the children of Israel, each day’s journey linking an ancient staging post:
…the desert is of a kind where they have to have quarters at each staging post for soldiers and their officers, who escorted us from one fort to the next. All the way I kept asking to see the different places mentioned in the Bible.
I am struck by the thought that, in a period in which historians, with the benefit of hindsight, search for signs of imminent imperial collapse, a nun from the Atlantic West could make such a prolonged and extensive tour without, apparently, being burdened by fears for her own security, or getting into any trouble. It seems that in the 380s the Roman empire’s arm was still long, and still effective. In the fertile Nile delta, the Goshen of the Book of Genesis where Pharaoh told Joseph to settle his people, Egeria describes vineyards, orchards, well-kept fields and gardens. She renews an acquaintance with a bishop: ‘I knew him quite well from the time I visited the Thebaid, and he is a holy man, a true man of God.’ Then, like any modern tourist, having seen all the sights she leaves Egypt and returns to Jerusalem, whence she had come.