'A fascinating book about four women - it tells us so much about their world, and about our own… What jumps off the page is the liveliness of the women, their passion, their courage and their own way of being...****' PHILIPPA GREGORY, author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Normal Women**'Brilliantly revealing' Observer'A celebration of female ambition and endeavour... enormo...

Bloomsbury presents Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women by Hetta Howes, read by Amy Noble'A welcome addition to medieval history, giving us a window into the lives of women that many people only know by name, if at all.' PHILIPPA GREGORY, author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Normal WomenA spectacular, vivid, groundbreaking work of history which takes us into the minds and li...

An invaluable reassessment of what we think we know about the daily lives of women in medieval Europe.Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife charts the lives and times of four medieval women writers—Marie de France, a poet; Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchoress; Christine de Pizan, a widow and court writer; and Margery Kempe, a no-good wife—who all bucked convention and forged their own paths. Largely forgotten by modern readers, these women have an astonishing amo...

Women are frequently depicted as unpredictable, difficult to categorise and prone to transformation in medieval religious writings. Water is equally elusive: rivers, wells and seas slip and slide out of the readers' grasp as they alter in metaphorical meaning.This book considers a large span of watery images in a small cluster of late-medieval devotional writings by and for women, in order to explore the association between women and water in the medieval religious imagination. Usi...