Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife

A fascinating book about four women - it tells us so much about their world, and about our own… What jumps off the page is the liveliness of the women, their passion, their courage, and their own way of being...

PHILIPPA GREGORY, author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Normal Women

Brilliantly revealing Observer

A celebration of female ambition and endeavour... enormous fun The Sunday Times

A spectacular, vivid, groundbreaking work of history which takes us into the minds and lives of medieval women.

What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death, and God? Could they live independent lives? And how can we hear their stories?

Few women had the luxury of writing down their thoughts and feelings during medieval times. But remarkably, there are at least four extraordinary women who did. Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a "no-good wife". In their own ways, these four very different writers pushed back against the misogyny of the period. Each broke new ground in women’s writing and left us incredible insights into the world of medieval life and politics.

Hetta Howes has spent her working life uncovering these women’s stories to give us a valuable and unique historical biography of their lives that challenges what we think we know about medieval women in Europe. Women did earn money, they could live independent lives, and they thought, loved, fought, and suffered just as we do today.

This mesmerising book is an unforgettably lively and immersive journey into the everyday lives of medieval women through the stories of these four iconic women writers, some of which are retold here for general readers for the first time.

Full of surprises and packed with thrilling details, this is an important, eye-opening book. ALICE LOXTON, author of Eighteen and Uproar!

This meticulously researched book makes visible so much that popular models of medieval life have found inconvenient or uninteresting to accommodate NOREEN MASUD, author of A Flat Place - shortlisted for Women's Prize

Hetta Howes unflinchingly explores the trials medieval women faced and, importantly, how they fought back. TABITHA STANMORE, author of Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic

Vivid, deeply researched, and addictively readable IRINA DUMITRESCU, Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and co-host of Medieval LOLs

Spirited, sparky ANTHONY BALE, author of A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages