%0 Journal Article
%T Medieval Women: Voices and Visions, British Library exhibition review
%A Kierri Price
%D 2025
%V 
%N Spring 2025
%K British Library
%K Exhibition review
%K medieval women
%K medievalism
%X Dr Kierri Price reviews the Medieval Women: In Their Own Words exhibition at the British Library, with interjections from four fellow medievalists to reflect the excitement of the exhibition. Dr Price’s interlocutors include Dr Diane Heath (medievalist and a guest editor of this issue of the journal), Professor Louise Wilkinson from the University of Lincoln (who was on the advisory panel for the exhibition), Dr Harriet Kersey (expert in noblewomen of the thirteenth century), and Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh (Principal Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Centre for Kent History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University).
    
    
        
            
        
    
%Z Lead Curator Eleanor Jackson interviewed by Helen Castor in the Medieval Women – the Curators’ Lunchtime Lecture 8 November 2024.
%Z Eleanor Jackson, the curator of the Medieval Women exhibition, commented that the first audience focus group thought such an exhibition would probably only show items about ‘cooking, linen clothing, witch trials, housewives, basket-weaving and modesty’.
%Z The four ‘upside-down lightbulbs’ at the top of the folio indicate the positions of the foetus in the womb. See Rachel Wertheim’s blog.
%Z The round seal is unusual because that is the standard shape of a man’s seal; women’s seals were mostly pointed oval in shape.
%Z Christine famously argued against the misogyny of this book with male courtiers, in what was known as the Querelle du Roman de la Rose (the Debate on the Romance of the Rose).
%Z For more on Queen Matilda and the Anarchy see: Matilda - an Empress in the Thames Valley | Reading Museum and on the seal, see M A F Borrie, ‘A Sealed Charter of the Empress Matilda’, The British Museum Quarterly 34, no. 3/4 (1970): 104–7.
%Z A recording of Kierri Price’s talk about birthing girdles at the Wellcome Collection is available here: Girding the loins | Wellcome Collection (accessed April 2025). 
%Z See the British Library blog on the incident by Rowan Wilson, The arrest of Eleanor Rykener – Medieval manuscripts blog. 
%Z Professor Sweetinburgh investigates medieval Kent society from below using a micro-history approach, drawing on the array of archival sources for the county of Kent, and especially Canterbury and the Cinque Ports. Her recent works include:  Sweetinburgh, S, 2021, ‘“Ready for to go to the sea”: maintaining fishing families in Late Medieval Hythe’, in Edwards, E, Bligh, S and Sweetinburgh, S (eds), Maritime Kent Through The Ages, Woodbridge Boydell Press; and Sweetinburgh, S, 2018, ‘Religious women in the landscape: their roles in medieval Canterbury and its hinterland’, in Blud, V, Heath, D and Klafter, J (eds), Gender: Places, Spaces and Thresholds, London Institute of Historical Research, pp 8–18. 
%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/medieval-women-voices-and-visions-british-library-exhibition-review/
%J Science Museum Group Journal