Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife, by Hetta Howes
This book is about womanhood in the Middle Ages. What did women's lives look like? How did they experience marriage, friendship, motherhood, the world of work? In what ways did they resist patriarchy? Hetta Howes explores these questions by studying the literary output of four remarkable medieval women. Now this really excited me because medieval literature is my degree specialism - I love the writing that emerged from the Middle Ages. This area of expertise is so niche, so nerdy, yet here it was in a book on display in Waterstones, hot off the press and out in the public! There was no question: I had to read it.
'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife' hangs on four women and their writing. The poet is Marie de France, who wrote 'lais' (poems) about women being clever - and famously put her name to her work. The mystic is Julian of Norwich, who lived as an anchoress in a cell and wrote about her visions of God. The widow is Christine de Pizan, a well-heeled woman of the French courts who made writing her career after her husband died. The wife is Margery Kempe, author of the first known autobiography in the English language, who bore fourteen children before committing her life to Jesus and going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Because I'm a medievalist, I did recognise the names of these women. I have actually read The Book of Margery Kempe in Middle English, and have studied and translated several of the other texts that appear in 'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife'. But I'm not going to review this book with my academic hat on. That's firstly because I'm well aware that I'm in a small minority of Howes's readers who have an existing working knowledge of the medieval period. It's secondly because Howes didn't write this book for academics: she wrote it for women. The central message of 'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife' is that the struggles and triumphs of womanhood are strikingly similar across the centuries, that these four distant women are in fact highly relatable - to any woman living in the 21st Century (not just the literature grads). And so I shall refrain from hermeneutic critique, and instead review this book simply as a woman.
Relatability was built in to the very structure of 'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife'. Rather than arrange the book to follow each of the four women separately, which is what I expected, Howes instead constellated moments from all four lives under thematic headings based around key female experiences. She covered everything from travelling to side-hustling, from raising a child to preparing for death - these are things that women still do, that we ourselves have done (or may yet). Already we see the connections spanning the centuries. Each chapter ended with a conclusion that nodded to our lives today, and the epilogue was a great finale that pulled together the parallels between the medieval ways and ours, with examples all the way up to 2024. It was extremely well-argued, with the tightness and rigour of an academic thesis.
That's not to say that the book was dense, dry, or technical - far from it. It was a PhD in substance but not in style. Howes is eminently readable, with a chatty, down-to-earth tone that brought the scenes and characters right to life. The four women leap off the page, zippy and vivid, as though they are figures from recent history, or people that Howes has met. We can hear their voices, picture their facial expressions, understand their situations - and Howes reveals their courage and wit with such feminist flair that we find ourselves full of admiration for our medieval sisters. Besides, there's nothing dull about the Middle Ages. Medieval history is highly entertaining, full of lewd humour, quirky traditions, and surprising characters. Howes regales us with stories and insights, which caused me to raise a chuckle and an eyebrow on more than one occasion.
The fact that 'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife' is so vivid is no mean feat. Medieval studies are by their very nature challenging, because there is so little material to work from. Even the writing that has survived is often fragmentary, or anonymous, or changed through errors of scribing and memory - and the writing of women is even harder to pin down. History is a collage pieced together through inference, and Howes has collated a spectacular bibliography to make this work. She reads across everything from medical texts to conduct guidebooks, from religious tracts to romance poems, from letters to charters to dream visions. It's an impressive project, rich with detail and wise in its self-reflection, and it gives a fantastically wide view of medieval life in all its forms.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed this book. There were a couple of tiny moments where it felt repetitive: sometimes facts from earlier chapters were mentioned again in later chapters, but phrased as if we were hearing them for the first time. These blips were momentarily jarring, but fortunately they did not detract from the overall effect. 'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife' was well-researched, convincingly argued, witty, funny, and brilliantly feminist. It was a delight to read fresh commentary on the period I love so much, and I hope that it will inspire many others to get excited about the Middle Ages!
You can buy 'Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife' from Waterstones by following this link (I'll receive a small commission if you do):
Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife, Hetta Howes - Waterstones
