Plate Section
1. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, where Egeria the nun came on pilgrimage in the 380s.
(AFP/Getty Images)
2. The Spitalfields woman – buried in a silk shroud in a bespoke lead coffin, she was a native of the Imperial city.
(Mola.org.uk)
3. A woman of Hawara – a mummy portrait of a fashionable Egyptian woman.
(The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
4. A woman teacher explains geometry to her students – inspired by Hypatia of Alexandria?
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
5. Byzantine wool tapestry depicting Hestia, goddess of hearth and community.
(Dumbarton Oaks / Google Art Project)
6. Woman with distaff and spindle, childminding.
(ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
7. The magnificent bed from the Oseberg ship burial. The Trumpington woman’s bed may have been equally splendid.
(Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway / S. Kojan and M. Krogvold)
8. An Andean ‘tocapu’ tunic – ‘superb examples of weaving… give us a sense of women’s place at the heart of South American culture and at the apex of technical brilliance’.
(Wikimedia Commons)
9. Early twentieth-century sculpture of Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, reimagined by Asmundur Sveinsson.
(Echo Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
10. Mochica ceramic stirrup vessel portraying childbirth – a midwife’s calling card; or a container for medicine?
(Cris Bouroncle / AFP / Getty Images)
11. Women carding, spinning and weaving: the work of the chambres des dames.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
12. ‘Where ?lfgyva and a certain cleric…’ the enigmatic third woman on the Bayeux tapestry.
(Musee de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France / Bridgeman Images)
13. The backstrap loom is still in use in South America, weaving articles for gift and profit.
(Matthew Williams-Ellis / robertharding)
14. Woman at her toilet. In medieval code, the figures of the Luttrell Psalter portray women as sexually provocative and immodest.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
15. June in the Très riches heures: women raking hay are, for once, on the radar of the idle rich.
(R-G Ojeda / RMN)
16. Christine de Pizan as project manager and mason, constructing the City of Ladies with her companions.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman Images)
17.
Somehow the beguinages survived suppression and the dawn of the modern world.(Godong / UIG / Getty Images)
18. Wedding Dance in the Open Air (1566), by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. His Flemish women are ‘no more or less virtuous than their male counterparts.’
(The Holburne Museum, Bath / Bridgeman Images)
19. Detail from The Hay Harvest (1565), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder – peasant women going about their business.
(Lobkowicz Palace, Czech Republic / Bridgeman Images)
20. The ‘first valentine’ – a love letter to John Paston, the ‘ryght welebelovyd Voluntyn’ from Margery Brews. Sometimes love did conquer all.
(© British Library Board / Bridgeman)
21. Malintzin – Companion, lover and translator to Cortes the Conquistador, in a drawing of their 1519 meeting with Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler.
(Wikimedia Commons)
22. Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico – power-base of a matriarchal elite?
(DeAgostini / Getty Images)
23. Artemisia Gentileschi’s brilliant self-portrait of 1638–9 – painting herself painting herself.
(Bridgeman Images)
24. Susannah and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1610 – exposing the moral bankruptcy of her male peers.
(Bridgeman Images)
25. Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated pamphlet of 1680 – turning defence into attack during the Popish Plot.
(Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University)
26. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies – Mary Astell’s manifesto for women’s education: the Third Edition of 1696.
(The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)