Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife

About the book

-- As featured in The Bookseller Buyer's Guide Seasonal Highlights

A spectacular, vivid, groundbreaking work of history which takes us into the minds and lives of medieval women.

What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives? And how can we hear the stories of women from this period?

Few women had the luxury of writing down their thoughts and feelings during medieval times. But remarkably, there are at least four extraordinary women who did. Those women were: Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a "no-good wife". In their own ways these four very different writers pushed back against the misogyny of the period. Each of them broke new ground in women's writing and left us incredible insights into the world of medieval life and politics.

Hetta Howes has spent her working life uncovering these women's stories to give us a valuable and unique historical biography of their lives that challenges what we hold to be common knowledge about medieval women in Europe. Women did earn money, they could live independent lives, and they thought, loved, fought and suffered just as we do today.

This mesmerising book is an unforgettably lively and immersive journey into the everyday lives of medieval women through the stories of these four iconic women writers, some of which are retold here for general readers for the first time.