Hetta Howes - Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: the Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women | Wednesday 6 November, 6.30pm

Come along for a unique insight into the lives of medieval women through the words of four extraordinary writers - an incredible window onto the minds and lives of women living at that time.

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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 the stories of women from this period? 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.

Those women were: 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 of them 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 hold to be common knowledge 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.

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Dr Hetta Howes is a Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at City, University of London, and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She regularly contributes to broadcasts on BBC Radios 3 and 4, as well as writing for publications such as The Times Literary Supplement and BBC History Extra. She has a BA and MPhil from Cambridge University and a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. At this event, Hetta will be talking about her book with Dr Venetia Bridges, Associate Professor of Medieval Literature at Durham University.