Japanese artists before the 20th century were mostly men, and so the painter and calligrapher Tokuyama Gyokuran (aka Ike Gyokuran) was a wonderfully talented anomaly. Living during the last age of the Shogun in the 18th-century Edo period, Gyokuran really departed from traditional women’s roles — she didn’t even shave her eyebrows, like married women […]
As a Medieval historian, one of the things I do is study saints of the Middle Ages — they were akin to our modern-day superheroes, and their special qualities give us a good lens for understanding the values of the distant past. The holy woman featured here today — Rita of Cascia, nee Margherita Ferri
Rita of Cascia, Patroness of Lost Causes Read More »
This reconstruction of a Swedish woman from 7,000 years ago (using DNA as well as bone and archaeological burial remains) tells us she died when she was between 30-40 years old. Despite this relatively young age by modern standards, it is likely the female members of her community were healthier than many of her global
In the late 1600s, a young wealthy Englishwoman decided to lead a very different life than her aristocratic sisters: this was one Celia Finnes (1662-1741), who decided not to marry and instead to travel all over the countryside on horseback — for over two decades. Celia Finnes had a couple servants who joined her, but
This is the face of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, a hero so important to Jamaican history that she earned her visage on the $500 Jamaican bill. Living from indeterminate dates from the 1600s to 1700s, accounts of Queen Nanny largely come from oral histories and are difficult to pin down with certainty. She probably
Queen Nanny of the Maroons Read More »
Miracle stories from the early Middle Ages include some accounts of saints who could successfully induce abortions. One such legend is from a seventh-century book of the life and miracles of the Irish St. Brigid of Kildare, who was said to have died around 525 CE. In the story, a woman had sex for pleasure
St. Brigid of Kildare Read More »
This is Hertha Ayerton, a British Engineer whose discoveries unveiled mysteries about the behavior of electricity and helped develop technology to protect soldiers in the trenches of the First World War from poisonous gasses. Sarah Phoebe Banks was born in 1854 to a family of eight children, her father dying when she was just eight.
Just in time for the fall season, *and* Halloween, comes the news of a recent discovery in Poland of a 17th-century “Vampire” burial. An archaeological team led by Dariusz Polinsky of the Nicholas Copernicus University was conducting excavations around an Early Modern graveyard near Bydgoszcz when they unearthed the skeleton shown here. It belonged to
The title here “A brief discourse of a disease called the Suffocation of the Mother” is really misleading. Not a tract about matricide, instead it was the first English publication (1603) on hysteria — thought to be a disease that only infected women. And it’s pretty messed up from every angle. For instance, the intent
Studies on Hysteria Read More »
The woman you see in this 15th-c illumination is mounted on a warhorse, and leading a surprise attack upon her enemies — this is Joanna of Flanders (c. 1295-1374), and so famed were her military ventures that philosopher David Hume called her “the most extraordinary woman of the age”. Joanna, born into the nobility of
Joanna of Flanders Read More »
The game of _Monopoly_ has been played by millions for over a century: my own kids learned a bit about adding and subtracting large numbers in their heads from it, while I learned how to only let the game go on until all the properties were sold, so as to prevent in-game death by slow
The Original Monopoly Game Read More »
#what-I-didn’t-see-on-my-way-to-work-this-morning Here is a detail from a 15th-century manuscript showing a mermaid playing music. She’s got two instruments and only two arms, so she is obviously quite the bard. Mermaids were widely believed to be real creatures in the Middle Ages. In fact, women/sea-creature hybrids have been fabulous legends across many civilizations, but they end
This is one of the most fantastic pieces of pottery ever. Dating to about 1590, it depicts three women changing into geese, with the label “Winchester Geese” at the bottom of the platter. The shapes surrounding the geese might look like rounded diamonds, or alternatively, like vulvas. Give me a minute, and you’re probably going
“Winchester Geese” Read More »
If ever you were to consider the history of fabric-making, you are unlikely to have associated it with horror. But that is just what this contemporary rendering of the Norse poem “Darratharljóth” conveys, and it’s really quite sick. In the poem, which appears in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, a man sees a vision of twelve
Viking Women, Weaving, and Power Read More »
Everyone knows about the great witch-hunts of the Early Modern period in Europe, when up to 45,000 people were executed for crimes of using magic and consorting with devils — most of these alleged witches were women, and one of the areas most affected were German-speaking lands. The old woman riding backwards on a goat
Christina Rauscher, the Witch Read More »
One evening in New York City in 1917, a woman in her early 30s was helping her mother make dinner when, as she leaned over her oven, she felt a sharp pain in her left breast and saw a three-dimensional crucifix emerging from her body, covered in blood. The woman was named Margaret Reilly, and
Sister Crown of Thornes Read More »
Japanese history has a remarkable record of women who excelled in the martial arts, despite the overall legacy of Medieval patriarchy that co-existed for so long. Many stories of female generals and warriors only appear briefly in the historical sources, and cloud the details of such women’s lives. And this is one of the reasons
The way cutting-edge technology lets us see into the distant past is so cool. Recently, a technique called “photometric stereo workflow” enabled Medieval historian Jessica Hodgkinson take a fresh appraisal of the pages of a manuscript written in south-east England in the first half of the 700s. The historian discovered that the name of a
Medieval Women’s Literacy Read More »
The Heraea was an Ancient Greek holiday featuring sporting events with women participants. Done in honor of Hera, the goddess of fertility, the competitors raced each other for prizes. The runner featured here is a Spartan, and she wears the short tunic and one-shoulder garment typical for that city-state.
What is the luckier life? The one where you get to do what you want and live authentically, or the one that lasts longer? For much of history, much of humanity had neither of these options, but for the mother-daughter royal pair featured here, the options were split. In Denmark during the age of the
The Princesses Caroline Matilda and Louise Augusta Read More »
