Time Traveling in the British Library

Because it’s Autumn and because I’m feeling sophisticated, this week I took myself for a very cultured lunch break at the British Library’s Medieval Women Exhibition, which opened last week. The exhibition is a collection of 140 works written and created by women of medieval Europe, including The Book of the Queen, by Christine de Pizan, the first professional woman author in Europe; the only surviving first copy of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, the first book in English definitely to have been written by a woman; and On Women’s Cosmetics, a book from 12th Century Italy containing recipes for hair dye remover, face creams and breath freshener. There are astrology books, wills, silk textiles made in Islamic Spain, ledgers documenting the gender pay gap, and, my favourite, a warning to women tempted to spend too much time on their appearance, illustrated by a drawing of a woman who, lost in her own reflection, does not see that she is being moonied by Satan.

This collection of works is really extraordinary, not least because it presents these women from seven, eight hundred years ago as an eclectic, autonomous, creative, thinking and feeling group of people. Far from homogenous, far from powerless, these are lives lived and recorded in voices that feel in places very modern. When I was studying for my degree in English, I had dreaded the paper in medieval literature because I assumed it would be alien and overly moralistic. I could not imagine having anything in common with, for example, Julian of Norwich, who lived as an anchoress in a small cell attached to St Julian’s Church in Norwich so that she could spend her life thinking in solitude about God. But medieval literature is very funny, often bawdy (see, for example, The Miller’s Tale) and filled with flawed and fascinating characters concerned with the same themes that still puzzle and preoccupy the most interesting writers, hundreds of years later.

In Revelations of Divine Love, Julian records a series of visions, in perhaps the most famous of which she sees a hazelnut, which she holds in her palm. The hazelnut, she realises, contains ‘all that is made.’ She sees in the hazelnut the power of creation and divine love, both delicate and infinite. What I love about this image, about standing across from the page upon which it was originally written, is the fact that it has survived and that it is still true. Still, hundreds of years later, a nut represents both the fragility of all life including human life as equally as it represents endless possibility, just as it did for Shakespeare, whose Hamlet professed he could be ‘bounded in a nutshell… a king of infinite space’, were it not for his dreams.

The image persists, and the writer’s words have persisted, surviving plagues and wars and revolutions and all kinds of violent societal collapse and transformation. This is the great comfort of history and its cycles, particularly in an era when technology and our over-saturation in information has complicated our ability to locate ourselves in its long arc. But there is still a clear thread from there to now, and sometimes all that its required is a single artefact or a single image to get from here to there, and it feels very wonderful, to be transported back in time, and to find that many of the preoccupations and fears and desires and longings are really just the same.

Love Rosie xxx