Mary Wellesley

Mary Wellesley’s The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts was published in 2021. She is working on a book about women burned at the stake. (March 2024)

Her Infinite Variety

A joyously broad, often hilarious look at the treatment and agency of women in the Middle Ages.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society

by Eleanor Janega

March 7, 2024 issue

Lice and Licentiousness

Hair in the medieval period was a marker of identity, a symbol of power, and a focus of erotic interest, freighted with religious significance.

A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages

edited by Roberta Milliken

October 20, 2022 issue

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100

by Diane Watt

October 22, 2020 issue

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