Accessibly written history on how medieval society viewed women and how they viewed themselves. Spoiler alert – the “natural” woman is straight up the opposite of what society thinks is “natural” now.
I’ve recently fallen down a Youtube rabbit hole on History Hit. I am finding it somewhat reassuring to learn about other times in history that have dealt with seemingly insurmountable issues that were, eventually, surmounted. So when I learned that one of their historians wrote the history of medieval women? Girl, I ran not walked to the library.
I learned that the reason so many myths include cheating wives was because the general consensus was that women, unlike men, were horny literally nonstop. Marriage cannot contain their ardor and weakness. This is why they couldn’t be in charge of anything.
I also learned more about humours, which I’d heard about, but not really understood in any meaningful way, and honestly, I kind of wish I still didn’t. Men are hot and dry, you see, and women are cold and damp. And being cold and damp is bad, because it’s what corpses are. Based on what is this? Literally nothing, but truth apparently never mattered. Vibes-based medicine.
In case this isn’t a clear enough warning, this book is excellent. It is a great read. It is informative, heavily researched (if on occasion suffering from its own built-in bias), and written in a normal human voice, rather than an academic one. Crucially however, it is not a comforting read. At least for me. My takeaway was essentially that any time women make progress fighting off the ludicrous shit men make up to hold us down, they just make up new shit and pull our progress back.