Welcome to the first episode of the History of the Women of England, HOWE for short.
Each podcast after this first will be a \"life\" of a women, her friends, relatives, rivals and colleagues, building up a picture of women's lives through the ages, starting in early modern times, although I'm hoping to cycle back to \"the beginning\" one day..
But this is an introductory episode: I explain my motivation and approach, which is largely picking up the high volumes of research into women's history that sits in academia and seeking to make it more available.
It's an explicitly feminist project - women are half of history, but in most accounts they have only bit parts. But it isn't - particularly - connected to my other life as a Green Party member of the House of Lords (although I may be unable to resist the occasional topical reference).
This is, in some way, giving those women immortality, a chance to live on again in human memory. And offering models and ideas for the women of today, reassurance that women have ignored social restraints, busted through social norms, and led exciting, productive, transgressive lives in even the most apparently unpromising times.
Each episode will also include two ventures outside English history.
In this episode it is Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century by Jane Stevenson.
In this episode: Sarolt, Queen of the Magyars
Aemelia Lanyer - 16th-century poet (and author of my choice of poem about the countryside in 2015)
Amy Kleeman and Myrtle Jenkyn - from 20th-century Australia, child on a Murray river paddleboat and farmer and housewife at Boree Creek
George Ballard, 18th-century author of Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain: Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writings Or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences
Gerda Lerner - pioneering 20th-century feminist historian
Giovanni Boccaccio - 14th-century author of On Famous Women.
Isabella Whitney - Elizabethan-era poet, was an inspiration for the project and subject of a future episode
Mary Lady Broughton - 17th-century Keeper of the Gatehouse Prison in London
Mary Sidney - sometimes proposed as the \"real Shakespeare\", which I don't believe for a second, but an important writer in her own right
(If you're going to buy one, please use an independent bookseller - Hive is a good one in the UK, not the Great Parasite that is Amazon!)
The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England, Pamela Joseph Benson, 1992.
The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, Norma Clarke, 2004.
The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, Richard Fletcher, 1997
New York Times Review of the Folger Shakespeare's Sister exhibition
And Our Foremothers: My Hopes as a Biographer, Journalist, and Blogger, by yours truly in the Third Space journal.