Unquiet Women
Page 22
Celia has much to say about regional customs; about garden plants and the furnishings of grand houses; about the burning of coal, wood or dung in people’s fires; their economy – spinning, weaving, husbandry, milling, the mining of coal and ores; about the sorts of fish that might be caught and sold in the regions, and their prices; about the cost of goods and the comfort or otherwise of the many inns in which she stays. She seems to have had relatives in several counties and takes advantage of her family name to visit many a country seat. In Dorset, after a visit to Bridport, she rode
…thence to Woolfe 4 miles to a relation – Mr Newbery a man of many whymseys – would keep no women servants – had all washing, Ironing dairy and all performed by men – his house look’s like a little village when you Come into the Yard – so many little buildings apart from each other – one for a stillitory – another for out houses and offices, another long building for Silk wormes, and thee dwelling house is but mean…21
In buildings, she prefers brick and stone and lofty ceilings to low timber houses. She betrays only a passing interest in farming or woodsmanship and yet she esteems fruit-growing, on which she casts a knowing eye:
…In most parts of Somersetshire it is very fruitfull for Orchards, plenty of apples and peares, but they are not Curious in the Planting the best sort of fruite which is a great pitty, being so soone produced and such quantetyes, they are likewise as Careless when they make Cider – they press all sorts of Apples together, else they might have as good Cider as in any other parts, even as good as the Herrifordshire – they make great quantetyes of Cider, their presses are very large, so as I have seen a Cheese as they call them which yeilded 2 hoddsheads – they pound their apples, then lay fresh straw on the press, and on that a good lay off Pulp of the apples, then turne in the ends of the straw over it all round and lay fresh straw, then more apples up to the top.22
Celia has disappointingly little to say about women, unless it is a personal acquaintance. Even then her usual preoccupations apply, but the throwaway detail is marvellous. At Malton, in the old East Riding of Yorkshire, she observes
There was one Mr Paumes that marry’d a relation of mine Lord Ewers Coeheiress who is landlady of almost all the town. She has a pretty house in the place. There is the ruins of a very great house which belonged to the family but they not agreeing about it Caused thee defaceing of it. She now makes use of the roomes off the outbuildings and gate house for weaving and Linning Cloth, haveing set up a manuffactory for Linnen which does Employ many poor people. She supply’d me with very good beer, for the Inn had not the best.23
Celia Fiennes’s account of her travels is the first social geography of England by a woman and with all its charms, idiosyncrasies and prejudices, leaves us with a unique portrait of a country and of the life of a gentlewoman on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. She rides the same trail of wanderlust and unquiet curiosity as her forbears, the pilgrims; but while they may have trusted in God to protect them, Celia Fiennes also relied on the solid virtues of a good horse, common sense and a full purse. If she laid an inspirational trail for future women travel writers and explorers to follow she was, nevertheless, a woman pursuing the adventures of the trail for their own sake, and for her own pleasure. She might have been motivated by the words of the apocrypha: ‘Pursue wisdom like a hunter; and lie in wait on her paths.’24
* Windsor: Royal Collection.
† See page 34.
‡ Naples: Capodimonte.
§ Florence: Palazzo Pitti.
# Florence: Uffizi.
∫ Pommersfelden: Schloss Weißenstein.
Ω See page 162.
≈ A society of primarily English women of education and intellect, led by the hostess Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800).
∂ Exactly a hundred years before the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the birth of her daughter, the future Mary Shelley.
π See page 59.
Postscript: New trajectories
At the beginning of this collection of stories, I suggested that with the Age of Enlightenment women’s history began to follow a new trajectory. In 1678 the first woman to obtain a PhD, Elena Piscopia, graduated from Padua University in northern Italy. By the end of the eighteenth century, professional women intellectuals and scientists had become prominent voices in that Enlightenment: the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet, artists like Anne Vallayer-Coster and historians of the stamp of Catherine Macaulay spring readily to mind. Women are prominent among printers and publishers, naturalists and botanists, astronomers and translators and in the field of educational textbooks. In my own exploration of a world of social, political and industrial revolutions in Europe and beyond, The Prometheans, I was able to write in some detail about the careers of many of them: the revolutionary assassin Charlotte Corday; the radical polemicist Mary Wollstonecraft and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley; Mary Somerville (the first person to whom the term ‘scientist’ was applied, in 1830); Germaine de Staël (Napoleon’s antagonist); Caroline Norton and many others. The lives of these women, members of a new cultural elite whose careers were forged, at least partially, independent of social rank, are accessible as never before. In turn, they lay the foundations of the movement that led to the founding of colleges of higher education for women and to women’s suffrage at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Years spent disinterring the urban dead of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spitalfields acquainted me with the more humdrum anthropology of women’s lives in one of the great European cities in that period. Among the many hundreds of citizens populating the vaults of this crypt in their lead-lined coffins, women are represented equally with men – in death, if not in life. Their stories are tales of childbirth and arthritis, of marriage and profession, of immigration and social mobility.
Over the hundred and fifty years or so of burial in the Spitalfields crypt from about 1720, perhaps the least conspicuous and most fundamental change in the fortunes of women is the dramatic reduction in infant mortality that characterises the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Women bore fewer children; more of them survived to adulthood. Perhaps, above all, with that salutary statistic the new trajectory in women’s history can be understood.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
Plate Section
Bibliography and Further reading
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
About Max Adams
Also by Max Adams
An Invitation from the Publisher
Plate Section
1. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, where Egeria the nun came on pilgrimage in the 380s.
(AFP/Getty Images)
2. The Spitalfields woman – buried in a silk shroud in a bespoke lead coffin, she was a native of the Imperial city.
(Mola.org.uk)
3. A woman of Hawara – a mummy portrait of a fashionable Egyptian woman.
(The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
4. A woman teacher explains geometry to her students – inspired by Hypatia of Alexandria?
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
5. Byzantine wool tapestry depicting Hestia, goddess of hearth and community.
(Dumbarton Oaks / Google Art Project)
6. Woman with distaff and spindle, childminding.
(ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
7. The magnificent bed from the Oseberg ship burial. The Trumpington woman’s bed may have been equally splendid.
(Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway / S. Kojan and M. Krogvold)
8. An Andean ‘tocapu’ tunic – ‘superb examples of weaving… give us a sense of women’s place at the heart of South American culture and at the apex of technical brilliance’.
(Wikimedia Commons)
9. Early twentieth-century sculpture of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, reimagined by Asmundur Sveinsson.
(Echo Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
10. Mochica ceramic stirrup vessel portraying childbirth – a midwife’s calling card; or a container for medicine?
(Cris Bouroncle / AFP / Getty Images)
11. Women carding, spinning and weaving: the work of the chambres des dames.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
12. ‘Where Ælfgyva and a certain cleric…’ the enigmatic third woman on the Bayeux tapestry.
(Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France / Bridgeman Images)
13. The backstrap loom is still in use in South America, weaving articles for gift and profit.
(Matthew Williams-Ellis / robertharding)
14. Woman at her toilet. In medieval code, the figures of the Luttrell Psalter portray women as sexually provocative and immodest.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
15. June in the Très riches heures: women raking hay are, for once, on the radar of the idle rich.
(R-G Ojéda / RMN)
16. Christine de Pizan as project manager and mason, constructing the City of Ladies with her companions.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
17. Somehow the beguinages survived suppression and the dawn of the modern world.
(Godong / UIG / Getty Images)
18. Wedding Dance in the Open Air (1566), by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. His Flemish women are ‘no more or less virtuous than their male counterparts.’
(The Holburne Museum, Bath / Bridgeman Images)
19. Detail from The Hay Harvest (1565), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder – peasant women going about their business.
(Lobkowicz Palace, Czech Republic / Bridgeman Images)
20. The ‘first valentine’ – a love letter to John Paston, the ‘ryght welebelovyd Voluntyn’ from Margery Brews. Sometimes love did conquer all.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman)
21. Malintzin – Companion, lover and translator to Cortés the Conquistador, in a drawing of their 1519 meeting with Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler.
(Wikimedia Commons)
22. Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico – power-base of a matriarchal elite?
(DeAgostini / Getty Images)
23. Artemisia Gentileschi’s brilliant self-portrait of 1638–9 – painting herself painting herself.
(Bridgeman Images)
24. Susannah and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1610 – exposing the moral bankruptcy of her male peers.
(Bridgeman Images)
25. Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated pamphlet of 1680 – turning defence into attack during the Popish Plot.
(Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University)
26. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies – Mary Astell’s manifesto for women’s education: the Third Edition of 1696.
(The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
Bibliography and further reading
Chapter One: Portraits
EGERIA THE PILGRIM– Egeria’s Travels by John Wilkinson (trs) (Aris & Phillips, 2006). For Roman women in general, Women in Roman Britain by Lindsay Allason-Jones (Council for British Archaeology, 2004) is the definitive, and very readable work.
THE SPITALFIELDS SARCOPHAGUS – See Julian Richards’s 2012 article in History Extra at: http://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/how-we-solved-the-mystery-of-the-roman-princess; and a 2015 article in Spitalfields Life at: http://spitalfieldslife.com/2015/07/28/the-spitalfields-roman-woman. For the Fayum portraits it’s best to go and see them where they are on display, when you get the chance. The only accessible book is Paul Roberts’s Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt (British Museum Press, 2008).
HANDMAIDS OF GOD – Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 by Charles Thomas (Batsford, 1981); the quote from Tertullian is from The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Volume IV – Fathers of the Third Century by Reverend Alexander Roberts (ed) (T&T Clark, 1885).
HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA – Original quotes are from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II Volume II by Reverend Alexander Roberts (ed) (T&T Clark, 1890). For a more general appreciation, read ‘Hypatia and her mathematics’ by Michael Deakin in The American Mathematical Monthly, March 1994, Vol. 101, 3: 234–243. And see Hypatia’s Heritage by Margaret Alic (Beacon Press, 1986).
ST BRIGIT OF KILDARE – St Brigid of Kildare: Life, Legend, Cult by Noel Kissane (Open air 2017); Cogitosus’s ‘Life of St Brigit: Content and Value’ by Séan Connolly and J. M. Picard, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 117 (1987), pp. 5–27; and ‘Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: Background and Historical Value’ by Séan Connolly, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 119 (1989), pp. 5–49; The History and Topography of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis, chapters 34 and 35, describe Kildare and its folklore. The Penguin Classics edition is translated by John O’Meara, 1982.
HESTIA, GODDESS OF THE HEARTH – Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection catalogue online at: http://museum.doaks.org/OBJ27440.htm; Orphic hymn 83 translated by Thomas Taylor at: http://www.theoi.com/Text/OrphicHymns2.html#83
THE QUIET WOMAN – The main secondary source is Lives of the Cambro British saints, of the fifth and immediate succeeding centuries, from ancient Welsh & Latin mss. in the British Museum and elsewhere by William J. Rees (1853).
Chapter Two: Legacies
EMPEROR WU ZHAO – Wu Zhao: China’s Only Woman Emperor by N. Harry Rothschild and Peter N. Stearns (Library of World Biographies, Pearson, 2007). See also under St Æthelthryth for seventh-century Anglo-Saxon women.
The WEAVERS OF WEST STOW – Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England 450–700, by Penelope Walton Rogers (CBA Research Report, 2006); and listen to Martin Carver’s ‘Three Alpha Females’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nb0sw. There is a fascinating article on the reconstruction of the Pakenham loom by Steven Plunkett in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, Vol. 39, Part 3, 1999.
LA SEÑORA DE CAO – Art of the Andes from Chavín to Inca by Rebecca R. Stone (Thames and Hudson, 2012); and much online material.
CÁIN ADAMNÁIN – Cáin Adamnáin: An Old-Irish Treatise on the Law of Adamnán, by Kuno Meyer (Clarendon Press, 1905); and there are several references in Lisa M. Bitel’s brilliant Land of Women (Cornell University Press, 1996). See also Lisa M. Bitel, ‘“Do Not Marry the Fat Short One”: The Early Irish Wisdom on Women’ in the Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 6, Number 4 / Vol. 7, Number 1, Winter/Spring 1995, pp. 137–159.
ST ÆTHELTHRYTH – Bede is the fundamental source. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People is widely published. I have used the excellent Oxford World Classics edition by Bertram Colgrave, 1969.
THE TRUMPINGTON BED BURIAL – see Dr Sam Lucy: ‘The Trumpington Bed Burial in its Wider Context’ at http://caguk.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-Trumpington-Bed-Burial-in-its-Wider-Context.pdf. The author of The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death (Sutton, 2000), she has made a special study of the Trumpington bed burial. Bed burials are discussed by Martin Carver in ‘Three Alpha Females’ in the Anglo-Saxon Portraits series: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nb0sw
Chapter Three: Testaments
MEDIEVAL WOMEN (GENERAL) – Medieval Women: A social history of women in England 450–1500 by Henrietta Leyser (Phoenix, 1995).
WYNFLÆD’S WILL – ‘Wynflæd’s wardrobe’ by Gale R. Owen in Anglo-Saxon England Vol. 8, 1979, pp. 195–222. And listen to Michael Wood’s appreciation in the Anglo-Saxon Portraits radio series: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rr95k
THE WOMEN FROM THE OSEBERG SHIP BURIAL – See The Viking Ship Finds: The Oseberg, Gokstad, and Tune Ships by Anders Hagen (Universitetets Oldsaksamling, 1968); and the University of Oslo’s website on the Oseberg women: http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/viking-ship-museum/exhibitions/oseberg/3-osebergwomen.html. For the tapestries and other textiles, see another article called ‘The Textiles among the Oseberg finds’, acc
essed from the same page.
ÆTHELFLÆD – It is well worth listening to Martin Carver’s portrait in the BBC radio archive of Anglo-Saxon Portraits: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pzrhp. An appreciation of her career and impact can also be found in my Ælfred’s Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age (Head of Zeus, 2017). The best individual appreciation of Æthelflæd is F. W. Wainwright’s ‘Æthelflæd: Lady of the Mercians’, in the posthumous collection Scandinavian England (Phillimore, 1975), pp. 305–324.
OF AL-ANDALUS AND GANDERSHEIM – The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal (Little, Brown and Co, 2003). Listen to Kamila Shamsie’s radio documentary at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vd5xt. ‘Librarians, rebels, property owners, slaves: Women in al-Andalus’ by Kamila Shamsie, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2016, 52:2, pages 178–188; for Hrotsvitha: Medieval Literature in Translation by Charles W. Jones (ed) (Dover Publications, 2013); and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works by Katharina Wilson (D. S. Brewer, 2000).