Medieval girl power

Women who can — however tenuously — be described as ‘rebel girls’ are big in publishing now. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls sold 3.5 million copies in hardback, reflecting a huge cultural push to discover and venerate women in history who kicked over the traces. To publishers, real-life rebel princesses have cool hard-cash value. In this context we come to this book, a scholarly work effortfully seeking out the ‘you-go-girl’ moments of the notoriously woke 13th century.

Kelcey Wilson-Lee, who has a doctorate in medieval history from Royal Holloway and works in the development office at Cambridge University overseeing regional philanthropy, has an underlying agenda. But she also has the academic chops to execute it carefully, brushing off apocrypha and relying on contemporary records: wardrobe accounts, psalters, letters and seals. She imagines the  experiences of the sisters who are the subject of Daughters of Chivalry with empathy and patience,as they jolt through endless wet horseback journeys while pregnant or recline on cushions in coaches, and ably manages to coax the few sparks of evidence into flames of personality.

To start with the book’s subtitle: yes, the children of Edward I are largely forgotten, but one is reminded of their mother, Eleanor of Castile, every time one takes a train from Charing Cross. (Her son Edward II comes to mind every time one pokes a fire, but that’s for later.) The Victorians rebuilt Eleanor’s monument because as well as having a passion for Gothic revivalism they were moved by the love story of uxorious Edward and his pious Eleanor, who had 16 children and went on two failed Crusades together. With her interest in playing chess and a personal team of scribes, she seems to have managed to construct a family setting in which her daughters had a real — if sometimes Lear-like — relationship with their father.