Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society How Did People Smell in Medieval Times? About this episode Accessing stories from the past can be difficult, but how do we access smells from the past?
In today's episode, Kate is joined by Eleanor Jackson, curator of a new British Library exhibition, Mediaeval Women In Their Own Words https://medievalwomen.seetickets.com/timeslots/filter/medieval-women-in-their-own-words, which features original texts about, and by, women from this period.
Whether that's Joan of Arc's signature or a welsh poet who wrote “Lovely bush you are blessed by God above” in her 'Poem to the Vagina'.
Kate's also joined by Tasha Marks https://www.avmcuriosities.com/, an artist who creates sensory experiences, who has brought to life smells such as medieval hair perfumes to life as part of the exhibition.
This episode was edited by Matt Peaty and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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2:40 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Bertwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Bertwixter Sheets, so I hope you're 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 and an adulty way of 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!
3:12 Kate Lister? You might know this by now, Bertwixters, but I am a lover, a aficionado, if you will, of the scented world. Alright, fine, no one's ever called me that, but I call myself that. I like perfumes. I do! I'm a proper perfume girlie. 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
3:55 Kate Lister? 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!
4:17 Speaker 04 What do you look for in a man?
4:18 Speaker 05 Oh, money, of course.
4:20 Speaker 04 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
4:22 Speaker 05 I make perfect copies of whatever my body needs by just turning the knob and pushing the button.
4:34 Speaker 04 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
4:37 Speaker 05 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.
4:45 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in 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 Marx. 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 signature there that she wrote herself, crying out loud. How cool is that?
5:28 Kate Lister? And we're also joined by Tasha Marx, 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.
5:52 Speaker 05 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 Marx 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.
6:21 Kate Lister? 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.
6:42 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Elna Jackson and Tasha Marx. How are you both doing?
6:50 Speaker 06 Very well, thanks. Thanks so much for having us on.
6:54 Kate Lister? I'm so excited to have the both of you here because, Elna, 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 with senses, but in this exhibition you're working primarily with the sense of scent, which seems very difficult to do. And I'm fascinated to hear more about this. But before we get to smells, which sounds incredible, Elna, can you tell us a bit about what this exhibition is about and how it came to fruition?
7:30 Speaker 06 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 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.
8:06 Kate Lister? How 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?
8:32 Speaker 06 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.
9:17 Speaker 06 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.
10:02 Speaker 06 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 freedoms. 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 recognise 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.
10:45 Kate Lister? 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? 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.
11:07 Speaker 05 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 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 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, multi-sensory history.
11:51 Speaker 05 And so presenting it as a smell was really joyful to do.
11:55 Kate Lister? How do you do that? So I'm just trying to like picture what the exhibition looks like. So with like the woman who is petitioning about her own enslavement.
12:03 Speaker 05 Maria Moriana.
12:04 Kate Lister? Thank you. How would you go about capturing that smell? So if you've got like the document there that this is what she petitioned, how do you work with that? I mean, is it like a bottle of perfume that someone can smell or like what, what is it?
12:17 Speaker 05 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 decades. I'm very experienced with working within these delicate collections. So I tend to go for like much more low-fi approach. You're not going to have like a, some big machine or an atomizer that's going to like spray things into the environment. That's just not going to be okay. 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 table. So you sort of arrive at the table, there's a medieval comb, which is a natural historical example.
13:01 Speaker 05 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 sort of very lightly emanates from them. So as.
13:13 Kate Lister? You sort of put your nose over the opening of those vessels, you can smell a twelfth 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.
13:26 Speaker 06 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 twelfth century and it contains all these incredible recipes for you know, makeup, perfume, cleansing products. I think there's a bit of a perception that in the Middle Ages, people had poor hygiene, people didn't wash.
13:56 Kate Lister? People think that and it's not true, is it? Tell us what is in this book.
14:01 Speaker 06 It is not true. We really wanted to kind of change people's misconceptions about medieval women in 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 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.
14:46 Kate Lister? And when you're looking at a book like that, and is that the di or natus miriam?
14:53 Speaker 06 Muriarum.
14:54 Kate Lister? Fluent Latin, like a, like a native Kate, well done. When you're like 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 Tasha to say, do something with it? Because there's loads in there.
15:11 Speaker 06 In that particular case, I went through it and pulled out recipes that I thought seemed particularly smelly, shall we say. So not, 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?
15:38 Speaker 05 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 use my experience and guess the measurements and balance of a lot of these ingredients.
16:11 Kate Lister? I have an image of you like a mad scientist in a lab, just with like, with, with some notes and you're just trying to see what works and what smells good. Is it a bit like that?
16:22 Speaker 05 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, 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 between the curator and the fragrance producers or the perfumers to really get exactly what we want.
17:05 Kate Lister? 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, people might not have heard that so much. But Elna, can you tell us a little bit about who this woman was?
17:30 Speaker 06 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 a very prolific, very successful author. And the other thing she's known for
18:13 Speaker 06 is as a kind of proto feminist. So she writes about 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.
18:27 Kate Lister? 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.
18:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely.
18:49 Kate Lister? Tasha, how'd you go about capturing a smell for somebody like Christine de Pizan?
18:54 Speaker 05 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.
19:01 Kate Lister? What she smelled like? Fury? Rage, I think?
19:05 Speaker 06 I think she'd smell quite nice.
19:07 Kate Lister? I think she'd smell nice.
19:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a really, really important manuscript of the works of Christine de Pizan at the British Library. Library, which is on display in the exhibition, which was made under Christine's own personal supervision for presentation to Isabelle of Bavaria, Queen of France. So it's really unusual to have a medieval manuscript that actually comes directly from the author, usually there are 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 that because she basically ordered it to be made, we know that that's
19:53 Speaker 06 how she wanted to be seen by the world.
19:55 Kate Lister? 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.
20:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
20:17 Kate Lister? We love Marjorie.
20:17 Speaker 06 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 Kings Lynn. And so she was someone who, she came from a kind of middle class background. She got married, she had fourteen children, but she also had spiritual visions. And when she was about forty, 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.
20:55 Kate Lister? It's a nice way of putting it, Eleanor.
20:58 Speaker 06 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. And it only was discovered in the nineteen thirties when a family in an English country house were looking for some ping pong balls.
21:36 Speaker 06 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 I thought, this is a load of rubbish. Let's throw it on the bonfire. 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.
21:57 Speaker 05 And we did do a Marjorie Kemp smell.
21:59 Speaker 06 We did.
22:00 Kate Lister? 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?
22:16 Speaker 05 Well, also, as well as, you know, her enthusiastic visions, she often described them as being quite multi-sensory. So. She 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.
22:59 Speaker 05 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.
23:05 Kate Lister? Did you go for vanilla? That's what I would have gone for.
23:08 Speaker 05 There's some sort of vanilla notes in there, but also like it is quite strawberry, synthetic strawberry smell.
23:15 Speaker 06 It reminds me of like the smell of scented gel pens from the nineties.
23:20 Speaker 05 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 the three D 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 the 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.
23:48 Kate Lister? Did Margery write about that, the smell of hell, or was she strictly limited to heavenly smells?
23:53 Speaker 05 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.
24:16 Kate Lister? 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 odor and a bit of brimstone and a bit of sulf- like, that's vile. How do you not have people screaming out of the room, just retching?
24:31 Speaker 05 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.
24:51 Kate Lister? Okay.
24:51 Speaker 05 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.
25:00 Kate Lister? We touched on Julian of Norwich there. She's another one that, I don't know if her and Margery ever met and hung out, that would be an interesting conversation.
25:08 Speaker 06 They absolutely did.
25:09 Kate Lister? Oh, they did? Okay, tell me about Julian of Norwich.
25:13 Speaker 06 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 thirty, she became extremely ill. She thought she was going to die and whilst she was ill, she experienced a series of spiritual visions.
25:38 Speaker 06 And 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 um 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 twenty 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.
26:22 Speaker 06 In the exhibition, we have the only surviving copy of the short version. The long version only survives in four seventeenth and eighteenth century manuscripts that were copied by English nuns in France um from a medieval manuscript that is now lost. And we have one of those uh 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.
27:05 Speaker 06 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 visualize and also capture the multisensory nature of the spiritual visions they experienced.
27:29 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Eleanor and Tasha after this short break.
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31:04 Kate Lister? I wonder what's going on with these visions. Like, I've heard lots of different theories about them, that it's like 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?
31:18 Speaker 06 Well, there's a real tendency, I think nowadays, to try and 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.
32:01 Kate Lister? It's not just religious visionaries and holy women that are in this exhibition, although they are all incredible and amazing. You've also managed to find sort of the voices of everyday women, working women, like is it the Luttrell Salter? Can you tell me about that?
32:19 Speaker 06 Yeah, so the Luttrell 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. 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. Because they kind of show rural life in medieval England. And they include this series of agricultural scenes.
33:04 Speaker 06 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 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 farmer's account roll from Stabbing in Essex.
33:49 Speaker 06 Because obviously the Luttrell Salter, 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 that farm in the fifteenth 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 labour.
34:28 Kate Lister? I mean, that's just incredible, isn't it? Because 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.
34:57 Speaker 06 Right.
34:58 Kate Lister? But they have a surprising amount of agency.
35:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's 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.
35:41 Speaker 06 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.
35:59 Kate Lister? Was that something that played into how you wanted to capture this in your work, Tasha? This idea that. The exhibition is, is it's 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.
36:23 Speaker 05 Definitely with the two cosmetics, what was interesting about our final selection is that the hair perfume smells quite contemporary. You'd be surprised that.
36:31 Kate Lister? What does it smell like? Tell me, I'm a proper perfume girlie. So tell me, what does it smell like?
36:36 Speaker 05 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. And most people, if they like that kind of scent, would buy that today.
36:54 Speaker 06 I would.
36:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think the whole staff really liked it.
36:58 Kate Lister? Would you wear that? Like go out and just, you'd be happy to smell like that, just out and about?
37:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, for sure. I've smelled that scent and I think it's gorgeous. I'd wear that definitely.
37:08 Speaker 05 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.
37:54 Speaker 06 Hmm. Cause we always think of breath freshener as a minty scent nowadays, right?
37:59 Kate Lister? Yeah. If someone said, I've got a musk harvested from the gland of a deer to freshen your breath, I think I'd be like, you're all right, actually. I'm fine.
38:06 Speaker 05 Yeah. 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, um.
38:14 Kate Lister? Was it something that was sort of sexual thing of like before?
38:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's.
38:17 Kate Lister? It says put it under her tongue before bad breath is perceived in her before anything happens.
38:22 Speaker 06 Well, yeah, it's quite the twigs the sheets appropriate because that particular recipe for the breath freshener, it actually says, um, 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.
39:08 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Eleanor and Tasha after this short break.
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40:38 Kate Lister? Can we talk about one of my most favourite medieval women, Gwerfyl MacCain from Wales?
40:44 Speaker 06 Yes.
40:45 Kate Lister? I just would love to go for a pint with her. Can you tell us a bit about who this woman is and what she was doing?
40:52 Speaker 06 Gwerfyl MacCain 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. So medieval Wales had a very strong tradition of poetry. Mostly it was quite male dominated. Gwerfyl MacCain is the only medieval Welsh female poet for whom a substantial body of work survives. She was working in the 15th century. She 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,
41:37 Speaker 06 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 realise how kind of earthy medieval literature can be.
41:55 Kate Lister? It can be incredibly earthy. I mean, there's like the French body tradition. They'll tell you stories that will honestly strip you and I'm all from your teeth when you listen to me like, my God. Gwerfyl, she stands out. I'm not aware of any other medieval woman who was writing. And 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, it's like a telling off to poets, isn't it? To male poets.
42:30 Speaker 06 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. And then she goes on to counter that omission by waxing lyrical about the vagina.
42:48 Kate Lister? And she finishes it by saying lovely bush, God bless it, or words to that effect, which is just hilarious.
42:54 Speaker 06 Yes, there's a fantastic modern translation by Katie Grammich, which I would recommend you to check out.
43:00 Kate Lister? But Tasha, you didn't have to do a scent for this one, did you?
43:02 Speaker 05 I didn't, but it sounds fun.
43:07 Kate Lister? She's incredible because she kind of punches that prudish notion of medieval women. You have got some very high born women in your exhibition, of course you do, like queens. Isabella of France, who I can't imagine would be reading such smut that Gwerfle Meckin was producing, or maybe she was. But tell us a bit about Isabella of France.
43:28 Speaker 06 She was a French princess who married Edward the Second, 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 favour Hugh Spencer towards the latter end of his reign, he and Isabella became completely estranged and 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.
44:07 Speaker 06 She then was able to raise enough funds through marrying her son, the heir to the kingdom, to Philippa of Hanau, so Princess from the Lowlands. And she was able to then invade England and depose her husband.
44:26 Kate Lister? As you do.
44:26 Speaker 06 Along with her lover, Roger Mortimer. And she then sets up her son as the new king and basically 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.
44:52 Speaker 06 Which are made by her enemies, making fun of her during the period when she was effectively ruling England.
44:58 Kate Lister? God, they're brave, aren't they? I wouldn't have made fun of Isabella, my god.
45:02 Speaker 06 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 steering England out of control, that's making an allusion to her affair with Roger Mortimer.
45:39 Kate Lister? 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.
45:46 Speaker 06 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.
46:02 Kate Lister? 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 the 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 exhibition 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?
46:35 Speaker 05 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, 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 like to see. See a book like that and to really get to interact with it in a multi-sensory 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, yeah, really excited that it exists.
47:15 Kate Lister? Did it surprise you at all, like some of the ingredients or scents or things that they were using?
47:20 Speaker 05 I mean, I was familiar with some of it, but it's just to have a resource like that where you've got this first-hand knowledge. And to see it written down is incredible. And actually, one of the smells that didn't make in this exhibition was a face whitening cream. And that was an interesting one to have in there, but it would, 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. I was like, I love that, yeah.
47:53 Kate Lister? I know, they probably didn't. That's amazing. Eleanor, if you've got to choose one as your baby, which one are you going for?
48:01 Speaker 06 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 Riom 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 Riom, since it was sent to the citizens of Riom 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.
48:46 Speaker 06 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.
49:01 Kate Lister? Have you touched it? As the curator, are you allowed to touch it?
49:04 Speaker 06 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 Riom and our technicians at the British Library and to see that was a real privilege.
49:19 Kate Lister? God, 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?
49:32 Speaker 06 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, at BLMedieval 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.
49:55 Kate Lister? And do you guys have a social media presence? Because I've no doubt people want to look you guys up as well.
50:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, you can find me at AVMCuriosities on Instagram and Twitter, X, all that lot.
50:07 Kate Lister? Guys, thank you so much for taking the time away from exhibition to talk to us today. You've both been fascinating and it sounds incredible.
50:14 Speaker 06 Thank you for having us on. It's been a pleasure.
50:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, loved it.
50:21 Kate Lister? 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, whatever 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 [email protected] . We've got episodes on the sixth and final instalment of our limited series, The Secret Lives of the Six Wives, with none other than Catherine Power herself. This podcast was edited by Matt Peaty and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt, the Sheik of the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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