What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love and be?
In this talk Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages, the era that bridged the ancient world and modern society, to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what’s shifted over time—and what hasn’t.
Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to a blend of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes. For the height of female attractiveness, they chose the mythical Helen of Troy, whose imagined pear shape, small breasts, and golden hair served as beauty’s epitome.
Casting Eve’s shadow over medieval women, they derided them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable and weak. And, unless a nun, a woman was to be the embodiment of perfect motherhood.
In contrast, drawing on accounts of remarkable and subversive medieval women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegard of Bingen, along with others hidden in documents and court cases, Janega shows us how real women of the era lived.
While often mothers, they were industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists and artisans and paved the way for new ideas about women’s nature, intellect and ability.
This talk will unravel the restricting expectations on medieval women and the ones on women today and questions why, if our ideas of women have changed drastically over time, we cannot reimagine them now to create a more equitable future.
About Eleanor Janega:
Eleanor Janega is a medieval historian specialising in sexuality, apocalypticism, propaganda, and the urban experience in the middle ages generally, and in the Holy Roman Empire in particular. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, BBC History, and Time Magazine, among many other publications. She is the co-host of the Gone Medieval and We're Not So Different podcasts, as well as the host of several medieval history televison programmes on the History Hit network. Eleanor also blogs at the popular website going-medival.com.
The Once and Future Sex is her first full-length book for a general audience, and has thus far been translated into four languages. She is also the author of the wide-selling The Middle Ages: A Graphic History.