ExtraMedieval: Episode 1
Women, Beauty, the Data Gap, and St. Pat
In this first episode of my new podcast, ExtraMedieval, I’m happy to dive into some of my favourite texts and subjects. Given that it’s Women’s History Month, it’s the perfect time to talk about the roles of women in the Middle Ages, and I chose the perfect person to help guide us into the subject on Episode 190 of The Medieval Podcast: The Once and Future Sex with (everyone’s favourite guest) Eleanor Janega.
One of the things Eleanor and I talked about on The Medieval Podcast was the Aristotelian idea of man as the default human, with women being malformed men. It might seem strange, but this concept that really informed medieval ideas about womanhood.
Believe it or not, the idea of man-as-default continues to affect us today, creating gaps in how we collect information. In this episode of ExtraMedieval, I’ll introduce you to the work of Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men*, and her research on why the same Aristotelian thinking that plagued the medieval world makes simple things like driving cars more dangerous for women, and why we need to close the data gap before AI becomes more powerful.
I’ll also tell you about a new article by Patricia Skinner called “Marking the Face, Curing the Soul? Reading the Disfigurement of Women in the Later Middle Ages” (in Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture*) on the way women’s faces were valued in the medieval world, why some saints opted to disfigure themselves, and why they were discouraged from doing so (the answer might just surprise you!).
St. Patrick preaches to Irish kings. Andreas F. Borchert, Wikimedia Commons
Finally, I’ll tell you the medieval story of St. Patrick, one of the most celebrated saints in the world, and why his feelings about Ireland were (shall we say) a wee bit complicated.
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