Women's Voices in the Middle Ages: Knowledge, Mysticism, Poetry, Love, Witchcraft 12th-15th Century

To restore the voice of those whom male censorship tried to silence, to give them back their creativity, their originality, their diversity: this is the ambition of this literary anthology.

This volume gathers the echoes of the voices of women from the Middle Ages, from the 12th to the 15th century. It sheds light on the female condition in a period when women often seem to have been voiceless. Yet their voices transcend time, with astonishing diversity and splendid accents previously little known. Women poets, like troubadours, sing of desire and longing. Mystic women speak of the ineffable, of sacred love, testifying to an unparalleled spiritual experience, full of intensity and often carnal fire. The prolific work of the great abbess Hildegard of Bingen comes alive through her chants, letters, and visions. Marguerite Porete, the beguine burned at the stake, Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose work already dazzled her contemporaries, Douceline, the Occitan saint, whose Life, written by one of her monastic sisters, is rich in ecstasies and miracles, all bear witness to these singular, sometimes painful, experiences. Responding to these great ladies of poetry and spirituality is the first female writer in our literature, Christine de Pizan, who put her knowledge at the service of human society. Fully translated here, three of her works make her voice heard, pleading for harmony and peace.

But these literate, cultivated, and vehement voices hint at the censorship to which women were often subjected. The Évangiles des Quenouilles (Gospel of the Distaffs) depicts, during secret vigils between Christmas and Candlemas, matrons with unique knowledge, whose powers sometimes bordered on witchcraft. And the voices of men, crystallizing the fantasies of a "male Middle Ages" (Georges Duby), allow us to gauge the harshness of which these women were victims and the weight of the constraints they managed to escape, through their access to reading and writing.

The truth of the Middle Ages emerges through these long-suppressed female voices, which break free from their constraints to powerfully unfold up to us.