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.