Mary Wellesley’s Hidden Hands was published in 2021.
We walked in the darkness beneath beeches and hornbeams until, suddenly, we heard the sound of birdsong, an ethereal noise, a sound associated with daytime. What bird would sing the song of day two hours after dusk? Only a creature of myth, a night-singer, the nihtegala – from the Old English nihte and galan, to sing, call, enchant.
For thousands of years this night-singer’s song...
When my daughter began to talk about her body and the bodies of others, I wondered what word we should use for female genitals. I had been taught the term ‘front-bottom’ as a child. Very little needs to be said here about how stupid this is. My husband and I opted instead for ‘vulva’. It’s functional, but it does sound strange in certain contexts. My daughter...
Detail of Botticelli’s ‘St Francis with Angels’
While travelling between Cannara and Bevagna, around the year 1200, St Francis saw a ‘great multitude’ of birds in the trees at the side of the road. He told his companions to wait while he went to ‘preach the good news to my little sisters, the birds, over there’. On hearing his sermon, the birds...
The poster image for the British Museum’s Feminine Power exhibition (until 25 September) is a bronze sculpture, Lilith (1994), by the American artist Kiki Smith. Cast from the body of a real woman, this Lilith is a rich, dark bronze, with disarming, pale blue glass eyes. She is crouched on all fours, her head turned to one side, and positioned high up on the gallery wall. Her anatomy...
The first uses of the verb crave in English are in legal and quasi-legal contexts – to crave was to demand a thing, or to issue a summons, requiring the presence of a person at a tribunal. Pregnancy cravings are a summons issued by the mind. Expecting my second child, I find myself thinking, over the course of an hour’s car journey, about the salty tang of tuna and capers, or the crunch of toast laden with a buttered ooze of marmite, topped with a slice of cucumber. As though rolling a boiled sweet around in my mouth, I roll imagined tastes around, sampling them from every angle, first bite, first chew, first swallow.
In the first episode of their new podcast miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime...
In the second episode in their series on medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of the mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first work in English that we...
In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer's sexually voracious professional widow, the Wife of Bath.
In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is thought...
Saint Boniface used a manuscript to shield himself when attacked by robbers; the slashes it suffered make it a relic of his martyrdom. Pages of many books are marred by dirty fingerprints, wine stains...
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