Many modern people think that clothes in the Middle Ages were drab, grey-brown things. Archaeological finds of clothing or textiles, rare as they are, often seem to support this: they all look brown. This brown-ness is deceptive, though. Medieval people enjoyed colours, and dyeing textiles has been done since at least the Bronze Age. Modern methods are getting better and …
Read More »FROM THE ARCHIVE: Women-Only Spaces
Lucy Allen looks at why all the best wombs are wearing misogyny gold this season. I’ve seen several discussions of the medieval birth-chamber as a woman-only space recently, including Helen Castor’s documentary. Castor claims that birth chambers were a space in which women were given extraordinary power in a habitually disempowering society – where midwives had the power to perform …
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