The Ladies of Misrule

​Our Ladies of Misrule, finally together as they never were in life.
Spanning 600 years of history these medieval women shaped the world around them, and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them more over the past 12 days.

After Misrule, What Remains?
The medieval tradition of misrule ended as it was meant to: with order restored, hierarchy reasserted, and power returned to its customary hands. The Lord of Misrule laid aside his mock authority, the festival dissolved, and the world resumed its familiar shape. Misrule was never intended to last. Its value lay in its impermanence.
The women traced in this series trouble that logic.
They do not fit comfortably into the framework of sanctioned inversion. Their authority was not granted for a season, nor designed to burn off social pressure before disappearing. It persisted. It adapted. In some cases, it outlived the institutions that attempted to contain it.

Authority Without the Exit Cue
Marie de France did not return her voice at the end of the poem. Margery Kempe did not quiet herself once examined. Julian of Norwich did not abandon her theology when reassurance proved difficult. Anna Comnena wrote history after power was taken from her. Æthelflæd governed until the moment she could no longer do so. Christine de Pizan argued until argument itself became her profession. Hildegard of Bingen spoke because she believed silence would be disobedience. Ende signed her work. Hilda of Whitby convened. Hrotsvitha rewrote the canon. Eleanor of Aquitaine endured.
None of these acts resemble misrule as medieval society understood it. There is no theatrical reversal here, no promise of restoration once the disruption has made its point. What these lives reveal instead is a range of functional authorities—intellectual, spiritual, political, artistic—that medieval culture could not entirely prevent, even when it could not fully endorse them.

Not Exceptions, but Evidence
It is tempting to treat these women as anomalies: brilliant outliers in an otherwise closed system. Yet taken together, they suggest something more instructive. Medieval society was not a monolith; it was a negotiated space, full of contradiction, accommodation, and selective memory.
The existence of these women does not mean the Middle Ages were egalitarian. They were not. But it does mean that authority was more situational, more pragmatic, and more responsive to competence than later narratives often allow. When women could teach, govern, interpret, organize, or create effectively, their authority was sometimes—often reluctantly—recognized.
That recognition, however, came at a cost. These women were scrutinized, constrained, praised carefully, remembered unevenly, and frequently reframed to make their power seem safer than it was. Misrule could be laughed away. Enduring authority had to be explained.

Closing the Circle
The Lord of Misrule revealed power by exaggerating it. The women in this series revealed power by using it.
They did not overturn medieval structures wholesale, nor did they always seek to. Instead, they inhabited those structures so thoroughly—through learning, discipline, endurance, and skill—that exclusion became impractical. Their authority was not symbolic. It worked.
If misrule was a reminder that hierarchy was constructed, these women are a reminder that it was also permeable. Not infinitely so, not justly so—but enough to allow competence to leave its mark.
What remains after misrule ends is the return of order. What remains after these women is something quieter and more enduring: evidence that medieval power was never as simple, stable, or exclusively male as it liked to pretend.
The festival ends. History does not.
 "Well-behaved women seldom make history"