How Did People Smell in Medieval Times?
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Hello, my lovely Bertwicksters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Bertwickster Sheets. So I hope you are in the right place, strapped in, buckled up and ready to go. But before we can go anywhere at all, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Have you managed to tick all of those boxes? If there is even one that you cannot cross off your list, then we don't want you here, quite frankly. Pack up your stuff and be off with you. For the rest of you, on with the show! ♪

You might know this by now, Betwixters, but I am a lover, a proficionado, if you will, of the scented world. All right, fine, no one's ever called me that, but I call myself that. I like perfumes. I do. I'm a proper perfume girly. Ask anyone, they'll tell you that I smell amazing. And if they don't, I'll kick them in the shins. But perfumes and scents can connect us to the past in a way that other sensory triggers just can't.

Whether that's the smell of freshly cut grass taking you back to long summer days of your youth, or, as we will find out today, a perfume from 15th century Italy. You can look at historical artefacts. If you're really lucky, you might be able to pick them up, but smell just adds a different dimension to that reality. And I'm really excited to find out more about some extraordinary medieval women and the smells that accompanied them. Let's crack on.

What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful times. Goodness has nothing to do with it, do you?

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. It's always worth reiterating that finding women's stories in history is a tall order. We know that there were women there, there must have been women there, but they just seem to escape the records.

which is why it is extra specially exciting to speak to today's guests, Eleanor Jackson and Tasha Marks. Eleanor is the curator of the new British Library exhibition, Medieval Women in Their Own Words, which features original texts about and by women from this period. I mean, they've got Joan of Arc's actual

actual signature there that she wrote herself, crying out loud. How cool is that? And we're also joined by Tasha Marks, an artist who creates sensory experiences, mainly with smells, and she's brought to life some of the smells of that period in this exhibition.

which, by the way, is on until the 2nd of March 2025, so do sniff it out if you can. This episode came in part from a listener as well, so over to Janet all the way in Los Angeles to tell us more. Hi everyone. Hi Kate.

I'm Janet from Los Angeles, California. I'm a huge fan of this podcast. I love it. I read an article about Tasha Marks and I thought of this show. Since memory is so strongly associated with a sense of smell, it brings us closer to history. I have a strong sense of smell and I can appreciate that. I also love the idea of a sensory transportation into history and beliefs. Enjoy.

Well, Janet, I couldn't agree more with you. Smell is an amazing way to travel through history. I'm still holding out for sponsorship by one of the big perfume houses as well. But I'm also fascinated to find out more with today's guests. So without further ado, let's get sniffing.

Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Eleanor Jackson and Tasha Marks. How are you both doing? Very well, thanks. Thanks so much for having us on. I'm so excited to have the both of you here because, Eleanor, you are the curator of the British Library's new exhibition, Medieval Women in Their Own Words. And Tasha, you are an artist who works on

with senses, but in this exhibition you're working primarily with the sense of scent. Yes. Which seems...

very difficult to do and I'm fascinated to hear more about this but before we get to smells which sounds incredible Eleanor can you tell us a bit about what this exhibition is about and how it came to fruition? Yeah so we're so excited for people to come and see our exhibition at the British Library so it's about medieval women's lives in Europe between about 1100 and 1500 it's exploring the

their achievements, the challenges they faced and their everyday lives right across society. And it's called Medieval Women in Their Own Words. So we have this real emphasis on women's own testimonies because so much throughout history, women's voices have been silenced. So it was super important for us to be able to kind of put those women's voices at the centre.

do you even go about doing that because as a historian who studies gender and sexuality almost every project I do I start by going I'm going to put women's voices into it or I'm going to put sex worker voices into it I'm going to do that and then I go back to the records I'm like no I'm not no I'm not it's just it's not there they've been written out so what kind of

texts or exhibits or sources are you guys working with? Well, we basically started by doing a lot of research in the library's collections. Actually, the genesis of this exhibition was a digitisation project that we did a few years ago on medieval and Renaissance women, because we realised that we had these

fascinating histories in our collection, which, you know, we hadn't actually done that much with in the past. And we wanted to make them more accessible to people. And as part of that, we did loads of scoping in the collections, just going through old catalogue records, going through the storage areas to find all these things,

some of them well known, but some of them incredibly obscure that we wanted to highlight. And as we were doing that, we realised just how rich those sources are. And we realised that it absolutely deserved an exhibition. But you're right that it is really hard to find women's testimonies, and especially the lower down the social scale you go, we really wanted it to be an exhibition that showed women's lives right across society. But kind of the

more those women were discriminated against, then the harder it was to find their testimonies. So it was a real challenge, but I think we've managed it. You know, it was really exciting to come across all these little known documents. I mean, for example, one fascinating document is the petition of Maria Moriana, which we have on

loan from the National Archives. So this is a petition by probably a woman of colour in London in the 15th century. And you know, if you ask some people, they will say that medieval Europe was really white and there weren't women of colour in medieval England. But

there were, and this document shows it. And what's amazing is she's actually petitioning for her freedom. So her master, who was an Italian merchant working in England, was trying to sell her, and she was refusing to be sold. And she was actually right, because English law did not recognize slavery at this time. Not only was she refusing to be sold, but she knew her rights, and she was standing up for them.

So you can find these rare little glimpses of these women's lives and their voices if you look for them. The whole thing looks incredible. Tasha...

How did you get involved in this project? And what is it about scent and smell that you have brought to this? And how on earth? I mean, I've just said that like finding women's voices is hard. Finding the smell of women's voices must be nigh on impossible. I think I've always thought about history in a sort of multi-sensory way. So for me, telling people stories through smell or taste or sound is,

It's sort of how I like to communicate the past. And so when I was approached about this project, I mean, as I said, like the amazing resources that you guys had provided and gone through. And like I was able to come in, you know, relatively late in the game and be given these amazing inspirational texts and background and information that

that had sort of been gone through and gathered as part of this project. So I had an excellent medieval sort of cosmetics manuscript to take inspiration from and all these sort of olfactory notions from these medieval saints. So it's actually a really rich, multisensory history. And so presenting it as a smell was really joyful to do.

How do you do that? So I'm just trying to picture what the exhibition looks like. So with like the woman who is petitioning about her own enslavement. Maria Moriana. Thank you. How would you go about capturing that smell? So if you've got like the document there that this is what she's petitioning, how do you work with that? I mean, is it like a bottle of perfume that someone can smell or like what is it?

So obviously we're working with a very sensitive collection as well. So a lot of these conversations also involve conservation and what they were happy to put in the space. So I've worked with scent in heritage spaces for the last decade. So I'm very experienced with working within these delicate collections.

So I tend to go for like much more lo-fi approach. You're not going to have like some big machine or an atomizer that's going to like spray things into the environment. That's just not going to be OK. Instead, it's quite a sculptural approach, thinking how can we make this scent visible? How can we make it interactive? So for the section on private lives where we have the two medieval cosmetics,

You've got this sort of stylized medieval cosmetics tables. You sort of arrive at the table. There's a medieval comb, which is a natural historical example. You've got a mirror, which has been sort of recreated to sort of have that aesthetic. And then you have two 3D printed vessels. And within those vessels, the smell very likely emanates from them.

So as you sort of put your nose over the opening of those vessels, you can smell a 12th century hair perfume and a medieval breath freshener. So you're having a really intimate, you know, up close and personal experience. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So that particular scent display that Tasha was talking about,

that is based on a manuscript of medieval women's cosmetics that we have on display in the exhibition. It originates in southern Italy in about the 12th century, and it contains all these incredible recipes for makeup, perfume, cleansing products. I think there's a bit of a perception that in the Middle Ages, people had poor hygiene. Yes, there is.

People think that and it's not true, is it? Tell us what is in this book. It is not true. We really wanted to kind of change people's misconceptions about medieval women and the Middle Ages more broadly. So yeah, this is a fascinating book of all these incredible cosmetic recipes for women. So one of the challenges we had when we were interpreting these kind of objects is that there's such rich stories inside them, but when it's a manuscript that's

that is in a language people don't understand. This one's in Latin and a script that people can't read, most people. How do you bring out those stories? Which is why we went to Tasha, because using something like scent is a way to really bring that to life for people and kind of make it immersive. So we were so excited and lucky to be able to work with Tasha on that.

And when you're looking at a book like that, and is that the D or not to Miriam? Miriam. Fluent Latin, like a native Kate. Well done. When you're looking at a script like that, a text like that, as the curator, how do you go about deciding which part of that you want to pull out and give to

to Tasha to say do something with it because there's loads in there. In that particular case, I went through it and pulled out recipes that I thought seemed particularly smelly, shall we say? Yeah.

So not all of them necessarily suggested strong scent. So I just came up with a sort of long list of smelly recipes and sent it to Tasha and let her decide what she thought would work best. And you came up with some options for us, didn't you? We had a guided smelling session where we all discussed our sort of favourites and which ones felt the most evocative and

Also, my background's in food history. So similarly to any kind of recipe that you'd get for a dish, if you get recipe for a scent, obviously these older books, there's no measurements. There's no indication of how much of each thing you should put in. So they were written for a knowledgeable audience or recorded for an audience that would be familiar with this sort of thing. I equally have to sort of

my experience and guess the measurements and balance of a lot of these ingredients. I have an image of you like a mad scientist in a lab just with some notes and you're just trying to see what works and what smells good. Is it a bit like that? Well,

It's half and half. So I partnered for this project also with a couple of different fragrance producers. So I work a lot with a very large fragrance company called CPL Aromas and another company called Aroma Prime. And I basically have access to their materials and their library. So I get all these materials at my disposal, whereas my home is a bit more like a little crazy lab, as you say. It's a little cabinet of curiosity that I work from at home sort of thing to do the first notes and to sort of write the scent brief to figure out actually what story we want to tell.

That's a lot of what I do really in my role is that, you know, I am a scent designer, but I'm also a historian by background. So my job is really to translate things

between the curator and the fragrance producers or the perfumers to really get exactly what we want. Let's talk about some of the women that are featured in your exhibition, because some of them, people might recognise their names and there are others that they may have never heard of before. And there are some that their fame is kind of limited to hardcore academic circles, like Christine de Pizan, for example. She is a name that is often used.

And people might not have heard that so much. But Eleanor, can you tell us a little bit about who this woman was? Yeah, so we have all kinds of women in the exhibition, as you say, some who are quite well known, some who are incredibly obscure. And Christine de Pizan is one of our heroes. She is known as the first professional woman author in Europe, which is to say she made her living through writing books.

So there were many other women authors in Europe, but most of them were writing for different reasons. They weren't necessarily making a living from it. Christine was able to do that because she was able to get patronage from the French royal court in the early 15th century to allow her to write for a living. She was very prolific, very successful author. And the other thing she's known for is as a kind of proto-feminist. So she writes about women

women's issues and she really argues for women's moral and intellectual equality with men, which was not necessarily the mainstream view at the time. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. And one of her pieces of writing that I thought was really interesting, she challenges this

quite surprising medieval narrative that women were more highly sexed than men that women were the horny slutty ones and she's writing about it going no that's not true it's men they're all just wastrels and scallywags and I was reading it going yeah you go Christine you go yeah absolutely Tasha how do you go about capturing a smell for somebody like Christine de Pizan she wasn't the one that made the shortlist unfortunately so we'll have to do that in the next one to figure out what she smelled like what she smelled like

Fury, rage, I think. I think she'd smell quite nice. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a really, really important manuscript of the works of Christine de Pizan at the British Library, which is on display in the exhibition, which was made under Christine's own personal supervision for presentation to Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France. So it's really unusual work.

to have a medieval manuscript that actually comes directly from the author. Usually they're copies of copies and so on. So this one we know Christine actually held it in her hands. She directed its entire production. It's beautifully illuminated with pictures of Christine in the book. And we know that because she basically ordered it to be made, we know that that's how she wanted to be seen by the world. You must just have like complete...

nerd outs all the time I wouldn't be able to work around this stuff and keeping myself composed and together and be like right this is the actual book this woman worked on and I have to try and somehow keep my cool and go about this like that would just blow my mind another one

you've got in your collection that I was hugely impressed with is the work of Marjorie Kemp. Yeah. We love Marjorie. We do. Yeah, so that's another incredible British Library treasure. So the book of Marjorie Kemp, the earliest autobiography in English by the mystic Marjorie Kemp from King's Lynn.

And so she was someone who, she came from a kind of middle-class background. She got married. She had 14 children, but she also had spiritual visions. And when she was about 40, she decided to devote her life to religion. And she spent the rest of her life going on pilgrimages all over Europe to the Holy Land. And she is known for her kind of emotional outbursts. She burst into tears. It's a nice way of putting it, Helena. Yeah.

She's very outspoken. She gets into a lot of trouble wherever she goes. And she was absolutely determined to record her life because she was illiterate, so she couldn't write herself. So she needed a scribe to write it down for her. And she went around various scribes trying to get them to write her life. And, you know, she's turned down multiple times, but she persisted. And the result was the book of Marjorie Kemp. And it survives in only one manuscript, which is at the British Library. One.

And it only was discovered in the 1930s when a family in an English country house were looking for some ping pong balls. And they looked in the back of an old cupboard and there were no ping pong balls, but there were a load of dusty old books. And they thought, this is a load of rubbish. Let's throw it on the bonfire.

fire. But luckily, someone said, no, wait, let's get it checked out. And it turned out to be the only surviving copy of the book of Marjorie Kemp. So yeah, that's such a special item. We came so close to losing it. And we did do a Marjorie Kemp smell. We did. Hit me with it. What would you go for for Marjorie Kemp? Because as Eleanor said, she was known for her outbursts. She was known for screaming hysterically and people getting very like, oh my God, what is happening with this?

How do you even approach that from a scent point of view? Well, also, as well as, you know, her enthusiastic visions, she often described them as being quite multisensory. So she describes smells and, you know, during her spiritual encounters. So actually Marjorie Kemp was the one who sort of inspired our sort of heaven smell in the spiritual section. Because she talks about this intensely sweet smell, like sweeter smell than anything earthly that she'd ever smelt before.

And I found that quite interesting as a sort of a view of heaven that is sort of otherworldly and strange was quite interesting, which you get from her text. So the smell of heaven and the smell that Marjorie Kemp inspired is this very sweet, sickly smell. It's almost artificial and synthetic, which people might not think of when they think of heaven. But I think when you think about that in relation to her vision, it's like, well, that's a really interesting story to tell. Did you go for vanilla? That's what I would have gone for.

There's some sort of vanilla notes in there, but also like it is quite strawberry, synthetic strawberry smell. It reminds me of like the smell of scented gel pens from the 90s. And also that's in the spiritual section of the exhibition. And it's in this amazing display that the exhibition designers sort of worked with me and Dan to create.

the 3D designers to create where when you open the hatch to sort of smell the smell it triggers a series of projections through this sort of medieval window so when you open this sort of heavenly smell there's sort of water and bright light and it's quite ethereal and then when you open the hell smell there's sort of smoke and brimstone and eyes and it's all quite threatening.

Did Marjorie write about that, the smell of hell, or was she strictly limited to heavenly smells? Yeah, that one came from Julian of Norwich, actually. So she talks about this sort of experience of greeting the devil and his fetid breath and hands around her neck and the smoky smell. So we've gone for this quite bodily, quite dark, mushy sort of smell there. It's quite fire and brimstone, but not too sulfurous, quite like...

bodily, let's say. How do you contain a smell like that in the exhibition? Because if you've gone for, right, the smell of hell is going to be body odour and a bit of brimstone and a bit of sulphur, like that's vile. How do you not have people screaming out of the room just retching?

Yeah, that was one of the things definitely during our early smell sessions I said to the team, I was like, we've got to make it bad, but not so bad that people are retching. You know, there's a fine line there, but also it's next to the heaven smell. So you don't want a smell that's really going to fill the space or be too overpowering. So the methods that we use are a dry diffusion method. So it doesn't go too far.

And we've got the hatches. So everything about the design is made to be really impactful and really audience focused, but also thinking about we don't want this to spread around the exhibition. We touched on Julian of Norwich there. She's another one that I don't know if her and Marjorie ever met and hung out. That would be an interesting conversation. They did. They absolutely did. Oh, they did? Yeah.

Okay, tell me about Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich is another of our medieval visionaries and another really important set of manuscripts to do with her in the exhibition. So Julian of Norwich also came from Norfolk and when she was about 30, she became extremely ill. She thought she was going to die and whilst she was ill, she experienced a series of spiritual visions that

She then got better and she wrote down her visions. And that is a text called The Revelations of Divine Love. It is the first work in English that we know to be authored by a woman. She then became an anchoress. So that is someone who locks themselves in a cell attached to a church to spend the rest of their life contemplating God.

While she was in her cell, she spent her time meditating on her visions. And after about 20 years, she wrote a revised version of the Revelations of Divine Love, in which she goes into much more detail about their spiritual meaning. These two versions, the first one is called the short version, the second one is called the long version. In the exhibition, we have the only surviving copy of the short version. Wow.

The long version only survives in four 17th and 18th century manuscripts that were copied by English nuns in France from a medieval manuscript that is now lost.

And we have one of those later copies in the exhibition as well. So again, this is a text that came so, so close to being completely lost to us. Yeah, so we have these amazing visionaries in the exhibition, but again, these are manuscripts that are not necessarily visually striking. They have amazing stories, but they look quite ordinary just to look at them. So we really wanted to find a way to bring out those stories

and to show just how rich these women's visions were, which is why, again, we kind of went to Tasha because we wanted to visualise and also capture the multisensory nature of the spiritual visions they experienced. I'll be back with Eleanor and Tasha after this short break.

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and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by to find out just how we got here. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit. I wonder what's going on with these visions. I've heard lots of different theories about them, that it's some kind of manic episode or it's a breakdown or like what do you think is going on for these women with these stories? Well, there's a real tendency, I think,

nowadays to try and like pathologize these women and there's all kinds of theories about like oh yeah Marjorie Kemp was psychotic and all this kind of thing which you know maybe there was something medical going on but I'm kind of reluctant to diagnose people from the past based on literary texts

And in a way, I think it's better to kind of take them on their own terms, look at them the way they look at themselves and the way they present themselves. And they absolutely believe that their visions are from God. They believe they've got this holy calling. And I'm happy to kind of take them at their own word. It's not just religious visionaries and holy women that are in this exhibition, although they are all incredible and amazing. Right.

You've also managed to find the voices of everyday women, working women. Is it The Literal Salter? Can you tell me about that? Yeah, so The Literal Salter is an incredible manuscript. It is a beautiful illuminated manuscript. It is quite famous for its marginalia. So if you follow any medieval accounts on Twitter, you have probably seen... I love a bit of marginalia.

Yeah, you've probably seen some of the quite wacky marginalia from the Luttrell Salter. So it's kind of famous for two things. One are these marginal images of everyday life, which is shown in really very vivid detail. And the other are for these really whimsical, wacky monsters. In the case of Medieval Women exhibition, it's in for the scenes of everyday life. Yeah.

because they kind of show rural life in medieval England and they include this series of agricultural scenes and it's really striking that these scenes

So many of them, there are women agricultural workers at the centre of all the activities. So the page we have it open on in the exhibition shows the harvest, bringing in the harvest, which was the absolute most important time of the agricultural year. And we have three women who are shown reaping barley and harvesting.

It's very vivid. You have one of them who's kind of rubbing her back like you can see that her back is aching from the labour. And it's this amazing attestation of medieval female agricultural labour. And we actually paired it with a photo.

farmer's account roll from Stebbing in Essex, because obviously the Luttrell Sorter, it's an artistic representation and you can kind of say, oh, to what extent does it really represent the reality of medieval life? But this farmer's account roll backs up the picture that it presents us with because it records the names of the workers who were paid to bring in the harvest on

on that farm in the 15th century. And about a third of the workers are women. And it also records the wages they were paid. And it's really striking to see that there was already a gender pay gap. So the men get paid four pence a day and the women get paid three pence a day for doing the exact same labor. I mean, that's just incredible, isn't it? Because when

When we think about the medieval period, and I say think, like when we have like a cursing thought about it, people seem to assume that everyone in the medieval period smelled terrible. Not true. And the other thing is that we tend to assume that women were all fainting damsels locked away in a tower somewhere waiting for a knight to rescue them. That isn't true. And this exhibition really reveals that women...

I want to be careful, I don't want to say they had more agency because it's still the medieval period, it's not great. Right. But they have a surprising amount of agency. Yeah, that was something we really wanted to show because we did audience research when we were working on this exhibition and it came through really clearly that when we asked people what they imagined medieval women's lives were like, it was all about basically drudgery and oppression and housework and cooking and it was like a very bleak,

picture. So we really wanted to kind of turn that notion on its head. And absolutely medieval women faced a lot of challenges. And we cover a lot of those in the exhibition. But we also really wanted to show how many diverse roles medieval women were able to take in the Middle Ages, which actually, in some ways, it was a better time for women than the early modern period in terms of

some of the different professions they could get involved with and also to show their creativity as authors, as artists, their power in politics, their involvement in just about every area of society. Was that something that played into how you wanted to capture this in your work, Tasha, this idea that

The exhibition is not just about showcasing, it's also about surprising people, perhaps, with the agency of this woman. Is that something that you wanted to play with in your work? Well, certainly playing around or trying to investigate medieval notions of women versus contemporary notions because...

Definitely with the two cosmetics, what was interesting about our final selection is that the hair perfume smells quite contemporary. You'd be surprised. What does it smell like? Tell me. I'm a proper perfume girlie. So tell me, what does it smell like? You've got rose and clove and nutmeg. There's also some wild card things in there like watercress and galangal and musk.

So it's very floral and deep and spiced. It's very, I mean, incredibly pleasant for a start. Most people, if they like that kind of scent,

would buy that today. I would. Yeah, I think the host half really liked it. Would you wear that? Like go out and just, you'd be happy to smell like that just out and about. Yeah, for sure. I've smelled that scent and I think it's gorgeous. I'd wear that definitely. Yeah, people really, really like that smell. And then the breath freshener is a little bit different. So that has laurel leaves and musk

So you've got this quite herbal... Obviously, musk is from the musk land of a deer, so you've got this very animalistic note. We don't use that anymore. We use a synthetic version as well for a start. We're thinking about interpretations of history. We're not trying to tell a literal retelling because we don't have the same ingredients, we don't know the exact measurements, but what we're trying to do is take an impression of history. So I think having the hair perfume, which...

was quite familiar and very pleasant and then having the breath freshener next to it which is maybe a little bit more challenging and a little bit more out there I think that was also part of why we chose those two to have side by side as well.

Because we always think of breath freshener as a minty scent nowadays, right? Yeah. If someone said I've got a musk harvested from the gland of a deer to freshen the breath, I think I'd be like, you're all right, actually. I'm fine. The text that went with that was about putting it under your tongue as well. So you wouldn't say brush your teeth with it. And it was quite...

Was it something that was sort of sexual thing of like before? Yeah, it's... It says put it under her tongue before bad breath is perceived in her, before anything happens. Well, yeah, it's quite betwixt the sheets appropriate because that particular recipe for the breath freshener, it actually says you should put this under your tongue before you have to have sexual intercourse. And that is the phrasing they use.

So one of the interesting things about this set of cosmetic recipes is it came from southern Italy in the 12th century. And that was a time when there were a lot of Muslim populations living in Sicily and elsewhere in southern Europe. And there's a lot of that influence that you can see in these recipes. So that particular recipe says that they learned that recipe from a Muslim woman who had used it to help many different people. ♪

I'll be back with Eleanor and Tasha after this short break. Enjoying your podcast? We'll be brief. If you're looking for the perfect holiday gift, gift scratchers from the California Lottery. With so many to choose from, you're sure to find the right gift for anyone on your list. Now that your holiday shopping list is figured out, enjoy this bird singing jingle bells.

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In case you haven't heard, in the U.S., it's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of, this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American History Hit, we're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman, twice a week, where we look to the past to understand the United States of today with the help of some amazing guests. Let us introduce you to the founding fathers, guide you through the West Wing of the White House, and guide you through the United States of today.

and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by to find out just how we got here. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit. Can we talk about one of my most favorite medieval women, Gwethal McCain from Wales? Yes. I just would love to go for a pint.

Can you tell us a bit about who this woman is and what she was doing? Gwethul Mechan was actually one of the medieval women in the exhibition who I had not heard of before researching this exhibition. And I was absolutely delighted to learn about. So she was a medieval Welsh poet, sculptor,

So medieval Wales had a very strong tradition of poetry. Mostly it was quite male dominated. Gwerthel Mechyn is the only medieval Welsh female poet for whom a substantial body of work survives. She was working in the 15th century. She died.

wrote about a whole number of topics, but her most famous poem, and which we have on display in the exhibition, is her poem to the vagina, which is this incredible kind of sex positive, female body positive poem

fun, humorous poem, An Ode to the Vagina. And it's quite surprising. I think often we see the Middle Ages through a kind of Victorian lens of prudishness. And I think many people will be surprised to realize how kind of earthy medieval literature can be. It can be incredibly earthy. I mean, there's like the French body tradition. They'll tell you stories that will honestly strip the enamel from your teeth when you listen to me like my God.

She stands out. I'm not aware of any other medieval woman who was writing. She wasn't just erotic verses, we should say. If she was here today, she'd probably be saying, I wrote other stuff too. But that's the one she's most remembered for. But I think she's the only woman who writes about this and also writes about it, as you say, in a very positive. Her poem about the vagina is like a telling off to poets, isn't it? To male poets.

Right, so she kind of starts by saying these male poets, they write these poems about women in which they talk about all the parts of their body, but they don't talk about the most important one. And then she goes on to counter that omission by waxing lyrical about the vagina. Yeah.

And she finishes it by saying, lovely bush, God bless it, or words to that effect, which is just hilarious. Yes, there's a fantastic modern translation by Katie Grammich, which I would recommend you to check out. Tasha, you didn't have to do a cent for this one, did you? I didn't, but it sounds fun.

She's incredible because she kind of punches that prudish notion of medieval women. You have got some very highborn women in your exhibition. Of course you do. Like Queens, Isabella of France, who I can't imagine would be reading such smut that Goerfel Mecken was producing. Or maybe she was.

But tell us a bit about Isabella of France. She was a French princess who married Edward II, King of England, which was very unfortunate for her. They did not have a very happy marriage. He was known for having his favourites

possible lovers. And when he started to favor Hugh Dispenser towards the latter end of his reign, he and Isabella became completely estranged and distraught.

She left him, she went to France and she there mustered support. There were a lot of people who were very unhappy with Edward's reign. He was not a popular king. She then was able to raise enough funds through trade

marrying her son, the heir to the kingdom, to Philippa of Hainaut, so a princess from the lowlands. And she was able to then invade England and depose her husband, along with her lover, Roger Mortimer. And she then sets up her son as the new king and

rules with him as a puppet king for the next few years. Unfortunately, she was not a very popular ruler either. And in the exhibition, we have a variety of items relating to her, including some wonderful satirical badges from the British Museum that we have on loan, which are made by her enemies, making fun of her during the period when she was effectively ruling England. God, they're brave, aren't they? I wouldn't have made fun of Isabella, my God.

But they're wonderfully kind of...

smutty badges, but also, I mean, they're kind of funny, but they're also kind of poignant in that they show you just kind of what women were up against when they were trying to claim political authority in this period. So one of them shows her on a boat with the helm of the boat is like a phallus and she's got another phallus on her arm. So it's kind of presenting her as just this kind of sex obsessed woman who's kind of smugly

steering England out of control that's making an allusion to her affair with Roger Mortimer. Typical. It's so lazy that, isn't it? But that's been the go-to insult since day dot as far as I can work out. It's like, oh, she's a massive slag. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it just, some of these stories, they really,

resonate today, like the kinds of challenges that women in politics face and the kind of personal attacks they have to put up with, you know, nothing has changed. Actually, when you look at it and then the narrative threading through, yeah, women are still judged much, much more harshly. Honestly, I could just sit here and just keep listing off medieval women for both of you to talk about, but I'm not allowed to do that because you're both very busy people and you've got to get back to this exhibition. But as a final question,

And I'm going to ask you one. I bet you've been asked it before and you hate it, but I'm going to do it anyway. What's your favourite either woman or...

that you've got in this collection? I know it's a bit, you know, like making you choose a child, but just the both of you, what was, do you have a favourite, something that really spoke to you? Yeah, I'm going to pick the medieval cosmetics manuscript that I was given because it just felt, it's such a special thing that, A, that sort of information was given such credence to be written down in Latin and put in such a marvellous object. Yeah.

But that, you know, we can have access to that so many years later, it really felt like an amazing insight to the past. I felt very privileged to also see that in real life. I love the tact, not that I touched it, but to see a book like that and to really get to interact with it in a multisensory way, both in terms of what I got to make from it, but also to see it as an object. It just has such an allure to it. And I'm really, really excited that it exists.

Did it surprise you at all, like some of the ingredients or scents or things that they were using? I mean, I was familiar with some of it, but it's just to have a resource like that where you've got this firsthand knowledge and to see it written down is incredible.

And actually one of the smells it didn't make into the exhibition was a face whitening cream. And that was an interesting one to have in there. But the tone of it was too similar to the hair perfume, which is why it didn't make the final cut. But getting to recreate some of those recipes from history, to discuss it as a team, to really engage with the past in that way from having that resource. I mean, the people who wrote that down probably never thought that was what it would lead to. So I kind of love that. No, they probably didn't. That's amazing.

Eleanor, if you've got to choose one as your baby, which one are you going for? Very difficult choice, but I just love the letter of Joan of Arc. So yeah, we have this amazing loan from the town archives of Rion in France of an original letter of Joan of Arc. And it's the first time it's left...

France, and indeed the first time it's left Rion, since it was sent to the citizens of Rion by Joan herself in the 15th century. In this letter, she's asking them to send her military aid. It's while she's still on her military campaign, she's going to besiege a town and she wants extra supplies of gunpowder and men.

She was illiterate. She came from a peasant background, so she couldn't write. So she had to dictate this letter to a scribe. But she did learn to sign her own signature. And this letter contains the earliest instance of Joan of Arc's signature. I mean, she's just such an inspirational person. And to kind of have that immediate physical link to her is just, yeah, it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Have you touched it as the curator? Are you allowed to?

I did not touch it, but I did see it coming out of its box and being placed on the wall by the curator from Rion and our technicians at the British Library. And to see that was a real privilege. That's mind blowing, isn't it? Joan of Arc's signature. Oh my God.

You have both been fascinating to talk to. And if people want to go to this exhibition, where can they find information? How long is it running for? It's Medieval Women in Their Own Words. It's on at the British Library in St Pancras until the 2nd of March 2025. You can find more information on the British Library website and on our Twitter, now X-Library.

at BL Medieval and on the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog as well. We've also got a great events programme, so you should check that out too. And do you guys have a social media presence? Because I've no doubt people want to look you guys up as well. Yeah, you can find me at AVM Curiosities on...

Instagram and Twitter, Excel, all that lot. Guys, thank you so much for taking the time away from the exhibition to talk to us today. You've both been fascinating and it sounds incredible. Thank you for having us on. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, loved it.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Eleanor and Tasha for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, or if you are one of the major perfumers and want to sponsor me or just send me free perfume, then you can contact us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on the sixth and final installment of our limited series, The Secret Lives of the Six Wives, with none other than Catherine Parr herself. This is the sixth installment of our limited series,

This podcast was edited by Matt Peaty and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again between the sheets of the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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