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Olga of Kiev: Brutal Saint and Revenge-Seeker
I recently finished listening to an audiobook version of Lars Brownworth’s The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings. Ever since I fell in love with Uhtred of Bebbanburg (to the point where I made a pilgrimage to Bamburgh in Northumberland, which is the inspiration for Bebbanburg) I’ve wanted to learn more about the Viking age. Lars Brownworth has some great medieval-era podcasts, and when I saw the book pop on up Scribd, I suspected it would be a good short history. And it didn’t disappoint. One of the characters I learned about, though, was Olga of Kiev (890-969). This woman showed that brutality during this period wasn’t just a…
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Not nuns but close…
I’ve often thought that the life of an average medieval woman would have been really awful. Legally being the property of first your father then your husband, no reliable birth control, dying in childbirth, and all the hard work in between. No thanks. But I recently came across a group of women who actually did have agency in their lives, and choices to marry or not. In his book “Edge of the World, a cultural history of the North Sea and the transformation of Europe,” Michael Pyle has a chapter devoted to the Beguines. Beguines lived in semi-monastic communities, but did not take any kind of religious vows. They promised…
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Olga of Kiev: Brutal Saint and Revenge-Seeker
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Stargazing: Cassiopeia
We live out in the countryside here in Spain, on the side of a hill that overlooks a long shallow valley. And we have a huge sky. I can easily see everything from west, to north, to east clearly. South gets a little bit obscured by the lights from town, but other than that, it’s all clear. And one of the things I’ve really fallen in love with the past few years is getting to know all of these stars who have been watching down on us for millennia. I often think about who else stood here where I am now, and looked up at those same stars, and wondered…
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#FeministFriday, Women who rock my world: Julian of Norwich.
I’ve had several signs pointing me to the writings of Julian of Norwich lately. She was a fourteenth century anchoress and Christian mystic, who, when she was 29 years old, fell deathly ill. While on her sickbed, she had sixteen visions of Christ, starting when she saw the garland wreath in her room literally bleed, the way Christ’s crown of thorns would have made Him bleed. After she had her visions – and survived her illness – she wrote about them, and was the first woman to publish a book in the English language, right around the same time as Chaucer, Revelations of Divine Love. She also devoted her life…
