Hildegard is one woman who hasn’t been forgotten, her legacy carried down by men, she says.
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She wrote to the emperor, to the kings and queens of the world instructing them on how to govern and she wrote music, the most extraordinary music, plays, poetry, and she was an artist." "She wrote beautiful mythical works, but also philosophical works. "I can't think of a person alive today that could rival Hildegard in the breadth of their knowledge.”Ī scientist, Hildegard wrote the natural histories that still form the basis of herbology and an understanding of gems and minerals, Ramirez says. Hildegard spent the first 40 years of her life in a predominately male monastery on very isolated hilltop in a remote part of Germany.įrom a humble beginning healing the sick and learning about the natural world, Ramirez says an extraordinary mind emerged. Hildegard was an “extraordinary polymath” who had almost more influence than any of her male contemporaries in the early 12th Century, Ramirez says. Though, Ramirez says, she was eventually deliberately written out of the Chronicles by male rulers. The daughter of King Alfred the Great, after her husband’s death Aethelflaed became the Lady of the Mercians, ruling the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia until her death in 918.Īs Aethelflaed had refused to subject herself to childbirth after the birth of her first child, in the only case in English history, her crown as Lady the Mercians passed directly to her daughter after her death. In England itself, that's where the problem came.” So, her reputation survived in a lot of Old Norse texts because she was battling against Viking incursions, but also in Irish texts, because she was well respected on over in Ireland as well. “She had the utmost respect of people that she was fighting against. ÆthelflædĪethelflaed was celebrated in her lifetime as more illustrious than Ceasar, Ramirez says.Īethelflaed as depicted in the cartulary of Abingdon. Lo and behold, it was this dusty book.”Īmong the books was the book of Marjorie Kemp. “But his guest is a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and he cautions Bowdon and says 'I don't think you want to do that there might be something of real value in there'. And he starts pulling them out in front of his guests, and he says, "I'm going to burn the lot of them so that I may find ping pong balls when I wish. “He’s rummaging around in this dusty cupboard trying to find bats and balls and there's two dusty old books in there. The only surviving manuscript of Margery’s book was discovered in 1934 by a man named William Ignatius Butler Bowdon – who very nearly destroyed it. And she does all this through walking, riding on carts traveling on a horse.” But with Margery, she travels up to Scandinavia, she does the Compostela over Spain, she goes all the way across Poland, Germany, France, and gets all the way to Jerusalem. “We have this idea the medieval period is very parochial, everyone living and dying in sight of their local parish church. But around all of that, what you also get are these incredible insights into real life for 14th Century women. “She begins this sequence of experiences, encounters with Jesus with the saints.
Margery, a “pretty well off but not an elite woman”, was somewhat of an entrepreneur, Ramirez says, and saw a trend in her lifetime of secular women turning to mysticism.Īfter having 14 children, Margery declared she was in fact a virgin and decided to become a mystic. The first autobiography written in the English language was The Book of Margery Kempe, a “mystical” and “extraordinary” text written in the 14 Century, Ramirez says.
With a fire in her belly, as she puts it, Ramirez set out to allow women back into the texts of history. "But there was this term femina that was popping up, and it means that it was written by a woman, and therefore, is either destroyed or lost or not considered worthy of continuing to remain in that collection. Other reasons included sorcery of witchcraft.
The most common being heretical, because it was no longer considered orthodox. Often when a book has been lost, destroyed or removed from a library, a reason is given, she says. Ramirez tells Kathryn Ryan she came across the word Femina - the Latin word for woman - when she was searching through library catalogues from the 17th and 18th centuries.
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