Authority, Authorship, and the Courage to Argue
​Christine de Pizan stands at a turning point in late medieval literary culture as a woman who claimed intellectual authority openly, persistently, and professionally. Writing in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century France, she supported herself through her pen and engaged directly with the political, moral, and literary debates of her time. Unlike figures whose authority was cloistered, visionary, or inherited, Christine’s was constructed through argument, learning, and sustained public presence.

A Life Shaped by Learning and Loss
Born in Venice in 1364 and raised at the French royal court, Christine was the daughter of Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, a physician and astrologer to King Charles V of France. Her early education, unusual for a woman, immersed her in classical texts, history, and moral philosophy. This intellectual formation proved decisive when her circumstances changed abruptly.
Widowed in her mid-twenties and left with children and dependents to support, Christine turned to writing as a profession. What began as necessity became vocation. Over the course of her career, she produced poetry, political treatises, biographies, and allegorical works, establishing herself as one of the most prolific authors of her generation.

Writing as Intervention
Christine did not write from a position of detachment. She wrote to intervene. Her early poetic works engage themes of grief and loyalty, but she soon moved into overtly argumentative territory. Most famously, she entered the Querelle de la Rose, challenging the misogynistic representations of women in Jean de Meun’s continuation of The Romance of the Rose.
Christine’s objections were not prudish or merely personal. She critiqued the ethical and social consequences of literature that normalized contempt for women, insisting that words shape behavior and belief. In doing so, she articulated an early and rigorous defense of women’s moral and intellectual dignity.

The Book of the City of Ladies: Building with Words
Christine’s most enduring work, The Book of the City of Ladies, offers a carefully structured response to centuries of hostile tradition. Framed as an allegorical city built by women and populated with exemplary female figures from history, scripture, and legend, the text is both imaginative and methodical.
Christine does not deny women’s flaws; instead, she exposes the selective reasoning that magnified those flaws while ignoring male vice. Her argument is cumulative, grounded in precedent and logic. Authority, she insists, emerges from evidence thoughtfully assembled.

Power, Politics, and Public Voice
Christine also wrote extensively on governance, warfare, and ethical leadership, addressing princes directly and participating in contemporary political discourse. Her Book of the Body Politic reflects a vision of society grounded in mutual responsibility and moral restraint.
In her later years, Christine withdrew from public life, returning briefly to writing to celebrate Joan of Arc—recognizing in Joan another woman who unsettled expectations through action rather than compliance.

Why Christine de Pizan Still Matters
​Christine de Pizan matters because she demonstrates that female intellectual authority need not be implicit, indirect, or apologetic. She argues. She cites. She corrects. She expects to be taken seriously—and structures her work so that it must be.
For modern readers, Christine feels strikingly contemporary in her insistence that culture shapes ethics and that exclusion is neither natural nor inevitable. She did not ask permission to enter debate; she entered it prepared.
Christine de Pizan built her authority sentence by sentence, book by book. The city she imagined was allegorical, but the intellectual space she carved out was real—and it remains inhabited.

Power, Pragmatism, and the Making of England
Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, occupies a remarkable position in early medieval history as a woman who ruled not symbolically, but effectively. Active in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, she governed Mercia during a period of sustained military crisis and political transformation. Unlike many medieval women remembered primarily through marriage or motherhood, Æthelflæd is remembered for strategy, administration, and success. Her authority was practical, public, and difficult to dismiss.

A Daughter of Wessex, a Ruler of Mercia
Æthelflæd was the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, and grew up in a court shaped by near-constant conflict with Viking armies. Her marriage to Æthelred, lord of Mercia, was politically significant, binding Mercia and Wessex in a shared defensive project. Over time, however, Æthelflæd’s role expanded beyond that of consort.
By the early tenth century, as Æthelred’s health declined, Æthelflæd assumed effective control of Mercia. After his death in 911, she ruled alone, acknowledged not as queen, but as Myrcna hlæfdige—Lady of the Mercians. The title signals both constraint and innovation: she did not claim kingship, yet she exercised its functions with notable authority.

Leadership in Action
Æthelflæd’s rule is best understood through action rather than ideology. She oversaw the construction and reinforcement of a network of fortified towns, or burhs, strengthening Mercia’s defenses against Viking incursions. These fortifications were not merely military installations, but centers of administration, trade, and settlement, contributing to long-term political stability.
She also led military campaigns, coordinated with her brother Edward the Elder, and played a decisive role in reclaiming territories under Scandinavian control. Contemporary sources credit her with victories at Derby and Leicester, achievements that reflect both strategic planning and local support.
Notably, Æthelflæd appears in the historical record not as an anomaly requiring explanation, but as a ruler whose authority was accepted by allies and adversaries alike. The sources do not dwell on her gender; they record her effectiveness.

Memory, Gender, and Historical Silence
Despite her accomplishments, Æthelflæd’s legacy has often been overshadowed by those of her father and brother. Later narratives of English kingship, shaped by male succession and centralized monarchy, had little room for a female ruler whose authority did not fit a familiar template.
Yet the evidence that survives—from annals, charters, and archaeological remains—suggests a leader deeply embedded in the political realities of her time. Æthelflæd ruled collaboratively, pragmatically, and with clear purpose. Her power was not performative; it was infrastructural.

Why Æthelflæd Still Matters
​Æthelflæd matters because she complicates assumptions about women and power in early medieval England. She did not rule as a regent waiting to be replaced, nor as a symbolic figurehead. She ruled as a problem-solver in a moment of existential threat, and she did so successfully.
For modern readers, Æthelflæd offers a reminder that leadership is not always loud or revolutionary. Sometimes it looks like planning, building, coordinating, and holding the line. Her legacy is written not in manifestos, but in towns that endured and borders that held.
Æthelflæd did not leave behind a book or a theological system. She left something arguably more fragile and more lasting: a political landscape shaped by competence, resolve, and a clear understanding of what survival required.

Authority, Anchoress, and the Courage to Trust Love
​Julian of Norwich occupies a distinctive and quietly powerful place in medieval spiritual literature. Writing in late fourteenth-century England, she is best known for Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman. Unlike Margery Kempe’s public intensity or Anna Comnena’s political proximity, Julian’s authority emerges from enclosure, reflection, and sustained theological thought. Her voice is calm, deliberate, and intellectually daring in its restraint.

A Life Defined by Withdrawal
Little is known with certainty about Julian’s life, including even her given name, which likely derives from the Church of St Julian in Norwich where she lived as an anchoress. What is clear is that she experienced a series of vivid visions, or “showings,” during a severe illness around 1373, when she was approximately thirty years old. Believing herself close to death, Julian received sixteen revelations focused on Christ’s suffering, divine love, and the nature of salvation.
Unlike many visionary figures, Julian did not rush to public proclamation. Instead, she spent decades contemplating these experiences, producing both a short and a long version of her text. This long process of reflection signals a mind deeply committed to theological precision rather than emotional immediacy.

Revelations of Divine Love: Thoughtful, Radical Theology
At first glance, Julian’s writing appears gentle and reassuring. Her language is measured, her imagery intimate, her tone unfailingly composed. Yet beneath this surface lies a theology that is quietly radical. Julian insists on the fundamental goodness of creation and repeatedly emphasizes that divine love, not wrath, defines God’s relationship with humanity.
Her most famous assurance—that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”—is not a denial of suffering, but a theological claim forged through sustained engagement with pain, sin, and uncertainty. Julian confronts the problem of evil directly, refusing simplistic explanations while maintaining profound trust in divine compassion.

Gender, Language, and Divine Authority
Julian’s reflections on God’s motherhood are among the most striking elements of her work. She presents Christ as both mother and savior, nurturing, feeding, and sustaining humanity. This imagery is not sentimental; it is carefully argued and deeply embedded in her understanding of incarnation and redemption.
Julian never explicitly challenges ecclesiastical authority, yet she confidently interprets doctrine for herself. Her enclosure provided protection, but her intellectual authority derives from disciplined reasoning and theological courage. She writes not to persuade through argument alone, but to invite contemplation.

Why Julian of Norwich Still Matters
​Julian of Norwich matters because she demonstrates that spiritual authority can be exercised through patience, humility, and sustained thought. Her work offers an alternative model of power—one grounded in trust, reflection, and love rather than performance or polemic.
For modern readers, Julian’s writing feels remarkably contemporary in its refusal of fear-based theology. She does not minimize suffering, but she refuses to grant it the final word. In doing so, she offers a vision of faith that is intellectually serious, emotionally grounded, and enduringly hopeful.
Julian of Norwich did not seek attention, nor did she raise her voice. Yet her words, shaped by decades of contemplation, continue to resonate precisely because of their quiet confidence—and their insistence that love, ultimately, is stronger than despair.

Anna Comnena: Power, History, and a Woman Who Would Not Forget
Anna Comnena occupies a distinctive place in medieval intellectual history as a woman who wrote not from the margins, but from the very center of power. Born in 1083 as the eldest child of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, Anna was a princess, a scholar, and the author of The Alexiad, a monumental history of her father’s reign. Learned, ambitious, and keenly self-aware, Anna presents a model of female authorship shaped not by exclusion, but by proximity to authority—and by its loss.

An Education Fit for an Empire
Anna was raised within the imperial court of Constantinople, one of the most sophisticated intellectual environments of the medieval world. She received an exceptional education, studying philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and classical Greek literature. Her writing reflects deep familiarity with Homer, Thucydides, and classical historiography, as well as with contemporary political and military realities.
This education was not merely ornamental. Anna understood history as a serious intellectual discipline and positioned herself deliberately within its tradition. She writes as someone fully conscious of genre, precedent, and rhetorical expectation, and she expects the same seriousness from her readers.

The Alexiad: History as Memory and Defence
The Alexiad recounts the reign of Alexios I, including the internal challenges of empire and the arrival of the First Crusade. While Anna insists on historical accuracy, the work is also openly shaped by filial devotion. Her father is presented as a model ruler: strategic, pious, and endlessly resourceful. Critics have sometimes dismissed this as bias, but such judgments overlook the conventions of medieval historiography, where moral evaluation and commemoration were central aims.
What distinguishes Anna’s history is not simply praise, but interpretation. She offers detailed analysis of political decision-making, military logistics, and diplomatic negotiation. Her treatment of the Crusaders, in particular, is shrewd and often skeptical, revealing a Byzantine perspective rarely preserved in Western sources.

Gender, Authority, and Exile
Anna’s position as historian is inseparable from her political fate. After her father’s death, she was involved—directly or indirectly—in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent her brother John II from taking the throne. Following this failure, Anna was confined to a convent, where she spent the later years of her life.
It is from this position of enforced withdrawal that The Alexiad was written. The text thus becomes an act of intellectual resistance as well as remembrance. Denied formal power, Anna asserts authority through narrative, scholarship, and interpretation. Her history insists that she remains a legitimate witness to events and a rightful participant in their meaning.
While Anna does not frame her exclusion in explicitly gendered terms, her work nonetheless exposes the fragility of female authority within dynastic politics. Education and proximity to power could elevate a woman’s voice—but not secure her position.

Why Anna Comnena Still Matters
​Anna Comnena matters because she demonstrates that women were not only subjects of history, but its architects. The Alexiad stands as one of the most important Byzantine historical texts, valued not despite its female authorship, but because of its analytical depth and literary sophistication.
For modern readers, Anna offers a portrait of a woman who refused to relinquish intellectual authority even when political authority was stripped away. Her work reminds us that history is never neutral: it is shaped by memory, loyalty, and loss.
Anna Comnena wrote to preserve an empire as she understood it—and to secure her own place within its story. That ambition, carefully and eloquently realized, is precisely why she continues to be read.

A Life Lived Publicly
Born around 1373 in King’s Lynn, a prosperous port town, Margery was the daughter of a prominent civic official. She married, had fourteen children, and experienced what she later described as a profound spiritual crisis following the birth of her first child. From this moment onward, her life unfolded not quietly or privately, but conspicuously—often uncomfortably so for those around her.
Margery claimed frequent visions of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other holy figures, and she expressed her devotion through loud weeping, sobbing, and public displays of emotion. These behaviors drew suspicion and criticism, placing her repeatedly at risk of accusations of heresy. Yet she remained orthodox in doctrine and remarkably persistent in defending her spiritual experiences.

The Book of Margery Kempe: Authorship and Authority
Margery herself was illiterate, and her book was dictated to scribes late in her life. This collaborative mode of authorship complicates modern notions of literary creation, but it does not diminish Margery’s narrative control. The text is carefully structured, selective, and purposeful. Margery chooses what to recount, how to frame her experiences, and how to defend herself against critics—often by quoting Christ directly as her ultimate authority.
The Book blends genres: spiritual autobiography, pilgrimage narrative, theological reflection, and personal defense. Margery recounts extensive pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela, situating her life within a broader Christian world while emphasizing her endurance as a woman traveling largely alone.

Emotion, Gender, and Suspicion
One of the most striking aspects of Margery Kempe’s text is its unapologetic emotionality. Her tears—frequent, loud, and uncontrollable—are both the source of her spiritual authority and the cause of her social marginalization. In a culture that valued restraint, particularly in women, Margery’s affective devotion challenged expectations of proper behavior.
Her encounters with clergy and civic authorities reveal the precarious position of a woman who claimed direct access to divine truth. Margery is repeatedly interrogated, mocked, or dismissed, yet she consistently articulates her faith with clarity and theological awareness. The text thus becomes a sustained argument for the legitimacy of embodied, emotional spirituality.

Why Margery Kempe Still Matters
Margery Kempe matters not because she was agreeable or exemplary, but because she was insistent. She carved out space for a female voice within a religious culture that often preferred women silent, enclosed, or mediated by male authority. Her book preserves a life lived in tension—with family, community, and institutions—and does so without apology.
For modern readers, Margery is both unsettling and fascinating. She resists easy admiration, yet her refusal to be erased is profoundly compelling. Her narrative expands our understanding of medieval religious life and reminds us that spiritual authority has long taken diverse and uncomfortable forms.
Margery Kempe did not write quietly, and she did not live quietly either. Thanks to the survival of her book, her voice—emotional, argumentative, and deeply human—continues to be heard.

Marie de France: A Quiet Revolutionary of Medieval Literature
Marie de France occupies a singular and important position in medieval literary history. Writing in the late twelfth century, she is the earliest known woman to compose literary works in French, and her surviving texts reveal an author of intellectual confidence, narrative sophistication, and subtle originality. While much about her life remains uncertain, her work speaks with remarkable clarity across the centuries.

An Author Shaped by Courts and Cultures
Marie identifies herself simply as “Marie” and notes that she is “from France,” a statement that has generated centuries of scholarly speculation rather than certainty. Linguistic evidence and thematic interests suggest that she likely lived and wrote in England, possibly within or near the Anglo-Norman court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her education—evident in her command of Latin sources, classical references, and rhetorical structure—places her firmly among the intellectual elite of her time.
What matters most, however, is not the precise location of her residence, but her self-conscious presence as an author. Marie presents herself as a learned interpreter of stories, someone who understands the responsibility of transmitting meaning as well as entertainment.

The Lais: Elegance, Restraint, and Emotional Precision
Marie de France is best known for her Lais, a collection of short narrative poems rooted in Breton storytelling traditions. These works are notable not for spectacle alone, but for their emotional economy and moral seriousness. Within relatively brief narratives, Marie explores enduring concerns: love constrained by social structures, loyalty tested by secrecy, and the ethical consequences of desire.
Her treatment of female experience is particularly striking. Women in the lais are frequently intelligent, perceptive, and emotionally articulate, even when trapped by unhappy marriages or rigid social expectations. In Lanval, Marie critiques courtly hypocrisy through a knight excluded from Arthur’s favor and redeemed by a woman who holds economic and emotional power. In Yonec, she presents marriage as a potential site of cruelty rather than stability, challenging idealized medieval norms.
Rather than offering simple moral judgments, Marie allows ambiguity to remain. Her characters act within constraints, and the outcomes—sometimes rewarding, sometimes tragic—feel earned rather than imposed.

Language, Authority, and Literary Choice
One of Marie’s most consequential decisions was to write in Anglo-Norman French rather than Latin. This choice positioned her work within a growing vernacular literary culture and expanded access beyond clerical audiences. It also allowed her to shape a distinctly literary voice at a moment when French prose and poetry were still defining themselves.
Marie repeatedly emphasizes the importance of interpretation, memory, and craft. She frames her work as both preservation and transformation, signaling an awareness of authorship that feels strikingly modern. Her confidence is never overtly polemical, but it is unmistakable.

Beyond the Lais
Marie’s literary output extends beyond her narrative poems. Her Fables, adapted from Aesopic traditions, demonstrate moral clarity and social insight, often addressing power, justice, and human folly with restrained wit. Her translation of The Espurgatoire Seint Patriz shows theological engagement and narrative control, underscoring her versatility as a writer and translator.
Together, these works suggest an author deeply invested in the ethical dimensions of storytelling.

Why Marie de France Endured
Marie de France remains compelling not simply because she was “the first,” but because she was excellent. Her writing is controlled without being cold, emotionally resonant without excess, and intellectually rigorous without display. She offers a medieval perspective that is neither naïve nor ornamental, but reflective and humane.
For modern readers, Marie provides a reminder that women’s literary authority is not a recent development, but a long-standing reality often obscured by historical silence. Her work continues to reward careful reading, inviting reflection on love, power, and moral responsibility.
Marie de France does not announce herself loudly—but she does not need to. Her voice, once encountered, is difficult to forge

Authority, Inversion, and Women Who Refused Their Place
​Medieval society is often imagined as rigidly hierarchical, orderly, and unchanging—a world where power flowed predictably from God to king to subject, and where deviation from prescribed roles was swiftly punished. There is truth in this picture, but it is not the whole truth. Medieval culture also possessed a deep and paradoxical awareness that order could be tested, inverted, and even temporarily overturned in order to understand it more fully.
One of the clearest expressions of this tension was the tradition of the Lord of Misrule.​

Misrule and the Meaning of Order
During certain festivals—particularly in the Christmas season—a Lord of Misrule might be appointed to preside over games, feasting, mock ceremonies, and sanctioned disorder. This figure, often of low status, temporarily commanded attention and authority, parodying hierarchy through excess, humor, and inversion. Rules were bent, roles reversed, and the absurd was permitted to reign.
Crucially, misrule did not exist to destroy order, but to expose it. By allowing controlled disruption, medieval society acknowledged that power was neither natural nor inevitable—it was constructed, maintained, and therefore visible when turned upside down. Once the festival ended, hierarchy returned, ostensibly reaffirmed.
But not all inversions were temporary.

Women, Authority, and the Problem of Permanence
The women who have inspired our fibre this year are writers, rulers, mystics, artists, abbesses. They did not exercise authority for a day or a season. They did not step into power as a joke or a ritual safety valve. Their authority endured, unsettled, and demanded recognition.
This is precisely what makes them difficult for historical narratives that prefer clean lines and stable categories. Medieval culture could accommodate a Lord of Misrule because he was meant to disappear. A woman who governed wisely, wrote persuasively, argued publicly, or shaped institutions posed a deeper challenge: she made inversion permanent.
Rather than treating these women as exceptions or curiosities, this series approaches them as evidence—evidence that medieval society contained multiple models of authority, some officially acknowledged, others grudgingly tolerated, and many later smoothed out of memory.

Forms of Authority, Not a Single Story
​The figures explored here do not share a single path to power. Some claim authority through learning, others through vision, governance, argument, or artistic mastery. Some operate within institutions; others press against their limits. What unites them is not rebellion for its own sake, but competence sustained over time.
They are not Lords of Misrule. They are something more unsettling: women whose authority worked, I described them as ladies of Misrule, but in reality they are anything but.
By placing these figures side by side, this series invites readers to reconsider what medieval power looked like, how it functioned, and who was permitted to wield it. The result is not a story of constant resistance or triumph, but a landscape of negotiation—between gender, institution, culture, and historical memory.
The medieval world understood that order could be questioned, inverted, and examined. The women who follow did more than that. They lived inside that question and refused to resolve it neatly.
Welcome to a series about authority—serious, strategic, occasionally inconvenient, and very real.

Over the coming days we'll meet a new Medieval woman each day, and the limited edition of fibre named after them. Spare fibre will be available in the shop, and today there's lots of new colours of Superfine Merino, Peduncle Oil and Baby Camel listed.