If the majority of medieval women were expected to marry sensibly, raise children and toil on the farm, it is nevertheless relatively easy to tap into stories of women whose intrepidity, or determination to follow another calling, took them along a different route.

Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir seems to have shared the broader horizons of her fellow Icelandic countrymen. In Anglo-Saxon England, and elsewhere, we find women practising medicine and the dark arts, while the elite women of the mead hall seem often to have acted as inciters of war and adventure, when they were not making peace among their menfolk. From such disparate sources, a polyphonic choir of unquiet talents is assembled.

More on the topic If the majority of medieval women were expected to marry sensibly, raise children and toil on the farm, it is nevertheless relatively easy to tap into stories of women whose intrepidity, or determination to follow another calling, took them along a different route.: