About

Welcome to Medieval Herstory, a dumping ground for all of my overly excited rantings about medieval women. My research largely centers around royal women in England and France, although I also read and write about saints, nuns, and common women (when I feel like I have enough evidence).

Why the medieval period?

Um, because it’s fascinating.

Why only women?

I started this journey because I wanted to know more about a specific 11th century queen. Unfortunately, most of the scholarship was centered around her husbands and sons, despite the fact that the primary sources from the period tell us quite a bit about who she was and what she was doing. That pissed me off. What began as a brief capstone project for my BA has progressed to a PhD dissertation and an obsession with understanding how this particular queen was either erased or distorted by chroniclers after her death. Along the way I’ve learned about many other women who suffered the same fate in the records, and here we are.

What the fuck’s a she-wolf?

She-Wolf is an insult used to describe at least two English queens, Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou. It was meant to denigrate women who stepped outside of their expected roles and acted in ways that were unacceptable to the men (and some women) of their time. That’s pretty much every woman in history that I’m interested in, so in a sense, they’re all she-wolves, and that makes them awesome.

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