Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies [British Library]

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WHEN Lidwina, a Dutch teenage girl, fell and broke her rib while ice skating, little did she realise her life was about to change beyond measure.

The injury set off a series of health problems that left her bedbound for most of her life. She decided to devote her life to religion, experiencing spiritual visions and working as a healer.

When she died in 1433 in her hometown of Schiedam, worshippers visited her tomb and “Lidwina of Schiedam” was later canonised and remains the patron saint of chronic pain and ice skating.

Lidwina’s fascinating story from carefree teenager to Christian mystic is just one of the many featured in the must-see British Library exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words.

At a time when the male voice dominated, this exhibition gives us a glimpse into the lives of women through their surviving testimonies.

Roughly spanning the period 1100-1500 and focusing on Europe, objects on display include illuminated manuscripts, books, letters, petitions, textiles, and other artefacts.

There are specially commissioned scents to sniff offering a sensory insight, as well as narrations that echo around the exhibition and interactive quizzes – one of which asks the leading question: “Are you a witch?”

We encounter medieval women in three spheres: their private, public and spiritual lives.

In Private Lives, there are discussions of healthcare, marriage and family and domestic life. At the time women’s bodies were deemed inferior to men’s, but the female medieval Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain was having none of that.

In her poem Cywydd y cedor (Poem to the Vagina), she pokes fun at men who praise all women’s body parts except for the one she believes is the best.

And while women were excluded from the medical elite, they did work as healers, midwives and even surgeons. In medieval France, for example, roughly 1.5 per cent of medical practit­ioners, whose names survive, were women and of these around 36 per cent were midwives.

A portrait of Joanna of Castile kneeling before an open book [Book of Hours, Use of Rome (The ‘Hours of Joanna I of Castile’) © British Library Board]

The wider world of work is examined in Public Lives where we read of women labourers, businesswomen, writers and artisans.

There is also the depressingly familiar example of gender pay gap as evidenced in accounts from 1483 for an Essex farm. Here the male workers receive 4 pence per day while the women workers receive 3 pence.

And in politics, an account of the Peasant’s Revolt in Cambridge details rioters, angered by the university and its privileges, burning university documents. An old woman, Margaret Starre scatters their ashes in the air crying: “Away with the learnings of clerks! Away with it!”

Women also used letters and petitions to press for freedoms and equality.

A petition made by Maria Moriana, an immigrant and probably a woman of colour, to the Mayor of London, when her master tried to sell her and then imprisoned her when she refused. She describes his behaviour as “unlawful” and “contrary to all right and conscience”. Alas, we do not know what became of Maria.

At the other end of power is Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England by marriage to King Henry VI. An account book for her lavish journey from France to England includes payments for the upkeep of a lion who accompanied her and who was to live in the Tower of London.

A skull of a Barbary lion on display in the exhibition was found in the moat of the Tower in the 1930s and has been carbon-dated to the period 1420-1480, offering the tantalising question: could it be Margaret’s lion?

A large oak altarpiece, probably made c1400 for the Dominican nuns of Dartford Priory, featuring portraits of saints, including St Agatha, St Catherine and St Margaret. [Battel Hall Retable © Leeds Castle]

Aside from her big cat preoccupations, Margaret, was praised for “her valiant courage and undaunted spirit”, and led the Lancastrian side in the War of the Roses.

Other notable women featured in the exhibition include the visionary, prophet and author Hildegard of Bingen; Estellina Conat, the first recorded woman to print a book under her own name; Christine de Pizan, the first professional woman author in Europe and Joan of Arc, the visionary and military leader who led the French to triumph at the siege of Orléans.

We see the original letter from Joan to the citizens of Riom in 1429, asking that they provide her with military aid, which contains the earliest known example of her signature and has never before been displayed outside France.

La sainte abbaye (The Holy Abbey), France, 1290s, miniature showing nuns attending church [The nuns’ procession to mass: Yates Thompson MS 11, f. 6v © British Library Board]

There is also The Book of Margery Kempe, the earliest known autobiography in English. Written in around 1438, it is the only surviving copy and chronicles her life as a female mystic.
For the romantically inclined there is the oldest surviving Valentine’s Day letter in the English language, sent in 1477 by gentlewoman Margery Brews to her aristocratic fiancé John Paston.

As this brilliant, insightful and often quirky exhibition concludes, through these words, artworks, objects and recorded experiences “medieval women declare that they existed, that they had personality, presence and vital things to say. It is our task to seek them out and learn from them.”

• Medieval Women: In Their Own Words is at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB until March 2, 2025.
For more details visit https://www.bl.uk/whats-on/medieval-women/