I can keep the review section on this one incredibly short : all my previous comments apply equally well to this one. It's just as good, albeit with maybe one or two more remarks (and omissions) by the author I find to be just... odd. Likewise, I don't have anything else to offer regarding the art. In short, if you liked the first book, you'd be some kind of moron not to buy this one. 8/10, I guess.
If I have to give a single take-home message, it's that women weren't viewed homogenously, but social roles were strongly gendered. This builds quite nicely on from Matilda* in which women could exercise a surprising amount of power and autonomy but only under socially-acceptable conditions. Within that was a wide variety of views, from the misogynist bigots to the almost liberal.
* Incidentally, both of these books do a far better job than Femina on looking at the role of women in medieval society, despite that book supposedly dedicated to the task at hand.
It's also worth remembering that the lens of fiction is an imperfect one written by the elite of society, who wanted things to conform to their standards of how things should be. Just as the idea of a single male breadwinner has sometimes been true for the middle classes but never for the working poor, so in reality would real life have been very different from its on-page depictions. I mean, it's not as if EastEnders is a documentary, after all.
I think the way I'm going to approach this one is by first summarising some of the major recurring themes, both on gender specifically but also other issues, and then take a look at a few specific stories. Some of them are just too weird and wonderful to reduce them to a broad-brush treatment.
Powers behind and on the throne
Arguably the most interesting social message is that powerful women in fiction weren't that unusual. These could be individuals like the legendary Queen of Sheba (basically a rich lady who visited Solomon once), Candace of Ethiopia (a powerful warrior queen), or mythological figures like the goddess Minerva/Athena (both wise, powerful and extraordinarily multi-talented). They could also be entire groups, such as the Amazons, the Sibyls (immortal prophets) or the Fates. The survival of classical mythology into the Christian era is an interesting topic in itself, but more on that later.
Powerful women could also be villains. The indecisive murderous witch Meda is a prime example. Though in some depictions she acts entirely out of an obsession with Jason, she nevertheless had formidable and incredibly dangerous power (Circe is a similar example). Here Westwell raises the valuable point that the same behaviour in men and women was regarded asymmetrically. While Olympias (mother of Alexander) indeed acted cruelly in her treatment of a female rival, she never raised cities to the ground as her son did – yet her reputation suffered far more than his.
The other highly gendered aspect to this is that women got rewritten. True, fiction in general – and mythology in particular – was routinely adapted and reworked, but what's interesting is the specifics. The Amazons were originally a rival civilisation of power enough to challenge Athens, but later emphasis was on their chastity (not a factor in the Greek myths) and female virtues. Candace of Ethiopia was originally the leader of a vast army, but later became a sexual side-show in the Alexander stories. And Helen of Troy was abducted in earlier versions, but an evil seductress* in later retellings.
* Who, incidentally, owned a bilingual goat, and I feel it's very unfair of Westwell to not elaborate on this point.
I couldn't find out anything muhc more about this. ChatGPT says that this "diglosson arnon" actually means "two-tongued lamb" and is probably a metaphor for being duplicitous rather than owning a talking animal. It also says it's very obscure... and indeed it is, because diglosson arnon is an actual god damn Googlewhack.
Even when women were acknowledged to hold power in their own right, then, they weren't safe from being villainised, romanticised, or neutered. They were, however, at least recognised as generally complex individuals – but not always.
Ornaments – but not always inactive
If fictional women could and were allowed to hold power, they could also fulfill the traditional damsel-in-distress role. I've already covered some examples of these in the various mythology posts here, but the key is that they're very rarely purely objects of desire. Oh, they're desired all right – Homer constantly mentions Helen of Troy's nice tits, others, weirdly, are described with praise for their "slender ankles" – but they almost always do something. Often they possess crucial knowledge for the hero to aid him in his quest, who might fall for them as an unexpected development rather than his main objective, but they very rarely sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for marriage.
Sometimes the most famous "ornamental" female figures turn out to have had more interesting developments than expected. Cleopatra is fairly well-known as actually being, shall we say, rather plain (look up her images on coins), but less common is to hear of the Cyprian variant of Aphrodite : a bearded hermaphrodite (likewise modern versions of Medusa tend to be a sexy snake-woman whereas the earliest tend to be gigantic, hideous, winged guardians).
This is not to say there weren't any stories in which women were reduced largely to sexual desirability. The problem is I found these so dull that I kept very limited notes about them. The story of Elvide, in which two young lovers are murdered by bandits, does have some sociologically-interesting implications (in that such young lovers disobeying their parents always come to a sticky end, says Westwell) and at least the characters do something, but they're bland and boring beyond belief.
Guinevere is at least more interesting. Her portrayals are varied : in the Mabinogion (which Westwell doesn't mention), she's one of the few female characters who doesn't have any real agency or impact, whereas in other cases she's a scheming sorceress or a trophy wife. She's usually described as being unfaithful with Lancelot but some versions have the affair being with Arthur's evil son Mordred*. And like many a femme fatal, she's very much blamed for her own qualities, rather than ascribing the results to male weakness**.
* How evil, you ask ? Well, in some versions Guinevere gets to retire to a convent, but in others, she dies in prison where Mordred eats her.
** Not always though. Sometimes Lancelot's mistakes are recognised as being his own fault, rather than his inescapable, irresistible longing for Arthur's trophy wife.
Not the female seduction is by any means limited purely to physical attractiveness. Cleopatra is one example, the Sirens are another. They're sometimes shown as physically monstrous bird or fish-women with dangerous talons : what they need to work their wily ways is not voluptuousness but their voice. Still, though it might take different forms, and they're by no means always reduced to anything like the pointless love interest so prevalent in modern cinema, fictional female roles do highly revolve around their sexuality, far more so than for men.
Enforcing the status quo
Again, it's by no means a universal standard, but female sexual agency tends to be looked on as almost entirely bad. Eastern images are positively pornographic in comparison to most of those in the West, which usually don't show as much as an ankle (even Eve is sometimes shown dressed as a medieval princess). Western stories are full of women being convinced by monks and saints to give up their whoring ways and become chaste, honest women. Mary Magdalene was depicted as the sinner most deserving of salvation precisely because her "sins" were the worst and therefore her repentance the greatest – God forbid women should actually want sexual activity !
Worst of all is the example of Elvide, explicitly lauded as a heroine for choosing suicide over rape. That's not one I can get my head around at all : the assault on Elvide would have been in no way her fault, but it was her duty to avoid this at all costs. Various other stories are similarly simultaneously boring and enraging in their toxicity, with attitudes that simply make no sense... quite what's supposed to be so virtuous about virginity is never explained, the authors taking it as axiomatic.
Not, I repeat, that this was always true even within Western stories : some do feature sexual escapes in spades. And women could be heroic even within the repressive "morality" of the Church. St Margaret slew the dragon by sheer virtuousness after enduring unimaginable tortures, but the suffering of St Thais was arguably worse : perfectly happy as a whore, she was imprisoned by a monk and left to fester with her own excrement for three years, "forgiven" and released and then died two weeks later.
Fuck you, monks !
At least with the example of St Margaret she gets to do cool stuff like explode a dragon and fight the devil. But some examples of supposedly heroic behaviour are firmly embodied in a moral system that makes very little sense. The role of gender in medieval fiction was nowhere near as simple as the typical modern view of the era, with manly men in armour rescuing lovestruck and incompetent damsels, but it was present – and could, at times, even be considerably worse than our simplistic view of the past.
The afterlife of paganism
As is by now apparent, many of these attempts to preserve Christian virtue drew on earlier, pagan stories from antiquity. This perhaps surprisingly tolerant view of early Christianity is something I've noted before, but some of it is straightforward enough : in general the Church didn't have much of a problem with pagan teachings that aligned with its own, and was happy to simply pretend the gods and goddesses were purely fictitious.
More interesting are the cases where people actually seemed to believe in supernatural pagan entities. Lady Fortune was one, with belief so sincere that she was outlawed by the Church for contradicting free will. The Sibyls were another, accepted because they were said to have foretold the coming of Christ; the Fates also may have been regarded as actual rather than metaphorical figures. In these cases* they were incorporated as agents of God rather than independent deities, which, once again, makes a mockery of any claim of Christianity to monotheism. Add in all of its own angels and saints and demons and any such claim looks to be on extremely shaky ground.
* Westwell also says that the symbol of the owl as one of wisdom comes directly from the tradition of Minerva, but this is in direct contradiction to other authors.
How much debt Christian morality owes to pagan thinking is a vast topic, but I would add just one point here. Westwell mentions the grisly story of Apollo flaying alive the loser in a flue contest. While this is hardly behaviour worthy of emulation, perhaps that's not the point. Perhaps the message is not (as per other suggestions) that the gods are amoral, but only that mortals – men and women alike – shouldn't challenge them. And that's certainly an idea embraced by Christianity.
There is no single story of medieval or Christian views to women. They varied with time, place, the status of the women concerned, and who was writing the story. There are certainly common themes; gender was undoubtedly regarded as important, and social status was intertwined with that. By no means can we prevent a revisionist tale of the medieval era being a hotbed of feminism : it most certainly was not, with even the most progressive of early views still strongly insistent that the roles of men and women should be different. But it is far more complicated than a naive view of warrior men and weaving women, the powerful and the oppressed, the owners and the owned.
I want to end with three stories that don't exactly fit into the categories above but exemplify these complexities. The first is the story of Adam and Eve. This can certainly be read (as it often is) as a simple narrative of "do as you're told, don't question anything, and don't listen to women". But the tale is not singular : in Islam it's Satan who deceives both man and woman together. Even in Christianity, the fact that Adam listens to Eve shows that he is hardly immune from poor judgement, and of course that God gave them a baffling instruction doesn't portray the Almighty in a very competent light either. On the other hand, in some depictions even the serpent is female.
But maybe the reason the story endures is not because of its message of unquestioning obedience, but something deeper. When Adam and Eve gain knowledge, they lose their blissful ignorance and the result is the Expulsion from Paradise. It's an explanatory metaphor not against questioning per se, but in that knowledge alone doesn't always bring salvation. After all, everyone, at some time or other, has found out things they really didn't want to know.
The second is the truly bizarre story of the Queen of Sheba. What began as a simple tale of a rich lady who visited an important man... well, the tale grew in the telling. In later versions Solomon has command over animals and devils and sends the Queen an emissary bird. He also steals her throne and modifies it as a test that... it's really hers, I guess ? Then it gets weirder. He has her walk over a glass floor so he can get a good look at her legs but they're all hairy* and she possibly has hooves. No matter, Solomon gets a genie to shave her legs and she's insulted but responds with riddles which Solomon answers so they all end up worshipping Allah. Oh, and Solomon is too busy to deal with a flying carpet. And, taking a sudden hard turn into ultra-misogyny, the Queen drinks water so Solomon rapes her.
* In some of the images the Ethiopians are shown as naked, hairy, and white.
Righty-ho then. I told you it was weird.
And finally, Melusine. This is a story filled with typical mythological Chekov's Guns : don't do this, say the oddly-specific instructions, so of course that's exactly what the protagonists do. In this case they're not supposed to visit a fairy during childbirth or another during their half-serpent phase which happens every Saturday. Both instances result in serious consequences, the first in the fairy absconding with the king's children and the second in her flying away as a dragon. Why they have to do this is, again in classic mythological fashion, never made clear : it's entirely arbitrary. They appear to leave out of a physical compulsion, not because they're merely grumpy at having been disobeyed.
But perhaps, like the Garden of Eden, that's not the point. Westwell points out that from a female perspective, forbidding visitations during requisite, err, periodic absences becomes far more understandable. Developing a self-consistent logic for the story wouldn't add anything to the morality of the story at all.
Why do I end on this one ? Not for some grand reason of promoting equality, oh no. It's because this is a story which mingles fact with fiction, and one of Melusine's descendents is supposed to have married into the British royal family. So there it is at last : hard proof that the British royals are, after all, lizard people.
