One of the greatest failings of modern representations of history – whether in academia or entertainment – is ‘presentism’. That is, the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives.
In entertainment, it manifests as the idea that any and every historical era must somehow be ‘representative’ of modern, Western inner-cities. And so we get black, female, ‘Viking Jarls’, Iron Age English villages thronging with Africans and Arabs, or ‘Egyptians’ who talk and act like middle-class Angelenos.
It’s worse, though, when academics fall into the same trap. Or, more accurately, peddle the same ideologically slanted garbage.
For instance, when ‘studies’ claim that, say, Ancient Britons or Irish were ‘black’. This is arrant nonsense. The genetic science such studies are based on is wildly inaccurate. To test them, for example, a researcher input his own DNA. It told him he was dark-skinned, with dark hair and blue eyes. He was in fact a fair-skinned, fair-haired, ethnic Englishman. In at least one such case, the study authors admitted that they decided to say the subject was ‘black’, even though the results gave an equal chance of being fair skinned, because they didn’t want to ‘fuel racism’.
When it comes to the subject of women in history, academics are every bit as willfully tendentious.
Medieval women – they were ‘just like us’. Except that they weren’t.
Mediaeval people were very different from us. Ancients, even more so. Certainly, they had much in common, too: they were, after all, human beings. But the historical records reveal often shocking differences. The obvious utter lack of empathy for individual suffering, for instance. Even just a few centuries ago, executions and unspeakable cruelty to animals were public entertainment for even the highest classes.
The lives of mediaeval women were utterly different to anything a modern, middle-class, feminist academic could ever experience. Or, apparently, understand.
Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife is the first popular book by the academic and New Generation thinker Hetta Howes. It is a history of medieval women in relation to four celebrated figures – Marie de France (poet), Julian of Norwich (mystic), Christine de Pizan (widow) and Margery Kempe (wife) – whose lives have been retold recently in excellent studies by Anthony Bale, Marion Turner and Janina Ramirez. Howes’s book is highly readable and informative.
But…
Howes limits her scope, however, by looking too narrowly for ‘relatability’ in the medieval lives she surveys, where this is determined by the boundaries of her own experience.
In other words, the experience of a middle-class white woman who attended a selective grammar school, studied at Cambridge and holds an academic position at City, University of London.
The sheer depth and breadth of her relatability to medieval women is no doubt astonishing.
In her introduction, she claims that over the past two years she has ‘felt closer to these women than ever’. I was curious: did she have a vision of the universe appearing like a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, like Julian? Did she renounce sex and take to the public square weeping, like Margery? Did she write an allegorical takedown of her detractors, like Christine? Or did she compose a ground-breaking translation of Aesop’s Fables, like Marie? No: she planned a wedding and became pregnant.
Just like the wedding planners of yore.
I struggle to see how such experiences shed any light on medieval lives, given that the paraphernalia of contemporary marriage – from the white dress to canapés to the typically non-Latinate service – would have been entirely alien to medieval people. There is no such thing as a transhistorical quintessentially ‘female’ experience – but if there were, it definitely wouldn’t be wedding-planning.
In fact, as it happens, what evidence survives doesn’t much indicate that wedding-planning and having the 1.2 children was what particularly occupied the minds of Howe’s subjects. I mean, Margery Kempe had children – 14 of them – but this seems to have been more an unavoidable consequence of being a woman in mediaeval England. Family planning in that era, after all, was pretty much limited to surviving repeated pregnancies.
[Margery] describes the excruciating pain of childbirth. But the only time in her autobiography that any of her children feature is when one of her daughters tries to prevent her from going to Germany – which Margery is righteously indignant about. By focusing on Kempe’s marriage and the children, Howes manages to pull out the parts of life which the woman herself seems least interested in.
Tellingly, too, Howes focuses on and interprets Kempe’s religious experience entirely through the lens of an middle-class feminist.
Howes describes Margery’s mystical transformation as ‘an illness that sounds remarkably like postnatal depression’. Attempting to diagnose Kempe’s malady has been a tired vein in academic criticism for decades, but I thought we had moved beyond that. Howes flattens the diversity and strangeness of medieval lives into a recognisable package when she re-labels them uncritically in this way.
Like the insufferable QI host, Sandi Toksvig, Howes repeatedly shoehorns her own very modern prejudices into any cranny she can find. Toksvig, for instance, relates her umbrage that a professor once described a bone with 28 notches as ‘man’s first attempt at a calendar’. Harrumph, she sniffs, why would a man want to record a 28-day cycle?
Firstly, Toksvig willfully ignores that the (female) professor was clearly referring to ‘mankind’, not the male half of it. Secondly, she seems completely unable to comprehend that primitive humans were keenly aware of another 28-day cycle: one which dominated the night sky and regulated the seasons and especially the behaviours of animals, on which hunter-gatherers so critically depended. Indeed, until the mid-19th century, the full moon was the only source of illumination for night-time public events.
Howes begins her book with a critique of the essentialism of medieval misogyny. But she would have benefitted from applying that critique to her own uninterrogated and essentialist assumptions about gender. She writes that ‘we are now incorporating’ medieval texts into ‘our own 21st-century approach’. I dispute that claim. Her approach belongs in the 20th century.
Or, rather, and in the worst possible way, to the 21st.
