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4 hours ago
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What does hell smell like? At the British Library last week, I opened a small wooden door and inhaled a scent that was bitter and vegetal: a combination of sulphur and something that I didn’t dare to think about for too long so soon after breakfast. Ugh. To spend eternity breathing in this! Happily, though, a counter-stink was on hand. Before the devil had a chance to appear, I closed the door and opened another next to it. This time, my nose filled with the sweetness of honey. It wasn’t precisely heavenly; to be worldly just for a moment, I think you need Chanel or Guerlain for truly celestial perfumes. But it did make me smile. The things museum curators get up to when they’re trying to encourage time travel.
The horrible smell was inspired by the saintly Julian of Norwich’s 16th and final vision, in which she claimed to have encountered a very whiffy Old Nick, while the nicer, more sugary odour was designed to conjure the “marriage” of the mystic Margery Kempe to Christ (angels, apparently, are pleasantly fragrant). Both may be sniffed in the spiritual lives section of the exhibition Medieval Women, where they sit beside, among other things, the Cleopatra manuscript of Ancrene Wisse, an early 13th-century guide written by a priest for three sisters who wished to become anchoresses.
An anchoress was, of course, a woman who chose to be walled up in a cell by a church in order to devote herself utterly to the contemplation of God, and the inclusion here of Ancrene Wisse, with its strictures about pets (only one cat allowed) and the regulation of one’s interior life, gives you a better sense by far of the British Library’s exhibition than the olfactory experiences it offers. This is an ascetic show, not a sensual one, and all the more wonderful for it. The mind-bending strangeness you find in the murky half-light of the gallery is as bracing as a freezing cold shower.
Covering the period between 1100 and 1500, it roams across Europe and includes among its star treasures a letter sent by Joan of Arc to the citizens of Riom, a city whose assistance she required in order to besiege the town of La-Charité-sur-Loire (this was dictated because Joan was illiterate, but the signature is hers, and the earliest of only three surviving examples of it); several of the deliciously vivid letters that were written by the Paston family of Norfolk between 1402 and 1509 (one, sent by Margery Brews to her fiance, John Paston III, in February 1477, is the oldest surviving Valentine’s Day letter in the English language); and a copy of The Book of the Queen by Christine de Pizan (1364-c1430), the Venetian writer of the French court who is often credited as the first professional female author. The edition in question, a collection of 30 of her works, was made for Isabeau of Bavaria, the queen of France, and has a jewel-bright frontispiece in which a kneeling De Pizan, in lapis blue, can be seen presenting it to her.
Naturally, it’s thrilling to see with your own eyes the manuscript of a Paston letter, as opposed to one merely reprinted in an Oxford Classics paperback; an intimacy springs up, a thread of gold that bridges the centuries. But gossipy as these notes often are, don’t make the mistake of imagining that their authors’ preoccupations were little different from our own. In 1448, after all, Margaret Paston wrote to her husband, John, asking him to send “crossbows, arrows, poleaxes, and armour for the servants”, their manor house having been seized by enemies. In this exhibition, the strangeness is all around, quotidian to those who lived it but entirely alien to us.
The section devoted to childbirth, for instance, includes not only a 14th-century Latin translation of an 11th-century Arabic treatise that comes illuminated with fearsome gynaecological instruments (pray God you’ll never be faced with a speculum that looks like this), but also an early 15th-century parchment girdle that was designed to offer protection to the woman who wore it. Such belts were covered with prayers and charms; this one includes a life-sized representation of Christ’s side-wound, through which, according to medieval interpretations, he gave birth to the church.
Objects such as this, meshing faith and superstition, make the curators’ occasional talk of “sex workers” and “the gender pay gap” seem very silly and wilful, though thankfully they don’t – explicitly, at least – try too hard to make feminist heroines of their women as well. Female power in this period is allotted in the main only to queens (Matilda of England, Isabella of France, Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV) and prioresses, who get to read, to build new side chapels, and to boss other women around.
How to breathe? How to move through the world? If the age’s tendency towards mysticism is born of profound and ubiquitous belief, it’s also a God-given licence to transform – a numinous excuse for a certain kind of shamelessness. Margery Kempe was always crying and wailing in public, and the more people were embarrassed by this, the more she seems to have enjoyed it. In the show, we learn that The Book of Margery Kempe, a volume generally considered to be the first autobiography in English, was dictated to a “reluctant” priest. My guess is that even if he wanted to quarrel with Kempe, he didn’t dare argue with God.
I came late to this show, which opened a while ago. But it’s just the thing for the new year, an antidote to diets and regimes, but also suitably abstemious, being full of self-discipline. In medieval times, vanity was sinful. Those who gazed too long in the mirror could expect to see the devil looking over their shoulder. One of the most beautiful pieces here is an Italian comb (1360-80) carved of ivory. How its luxuriantly long teeth survived the centuries I can’t imagine, but to me it speaks of innocence as well as pride, the simple pleasure it offers – a tingling scalp, shiny hair – standing in stark contrast to the warfare that then constantly beset the female body.
Disease Woman is a medical diagram from Germany of about 1420 in which a woman’s internal organs are all exposed, each one named and labelled with illnesses associated with it. To a 21st-century eye, the peculiar arrangement of her guts looks like a map of a small town, streets radiating outward from a public square – an image that strikes me as somehow quite perfect. The public and the private, the known and the unknown. What a completely marvellous exhibition, and what a mysterious one.
