The best new books on iconoclastic women who’ve been forgotten, misunderstood, or hidden from history

The traditional view of the Middle Ages classifies the era as the “Dark Ages.” The Oxford historian, Janina Ramirez, provides a compelling counter-narrative in her fascinating new book. Drawing on interdisciplinary sources to shift perspectives, she documents medieval women’s extensive contributions to every aspect of their societies, from the arts to zealous political leadership.

Among the many women who shaped medieval society but either were erased from or underrepresented in recorded history are such influential women as Hild, the Abbess of Whitby, who established her own monastery in England’s north and led a major religious Synod in 664 A.D.; the encyclopedic scholar, Hildegard of Bingen; and Jadwiga, the ruling monarch of 14th century Poland.

In Ramirez’s revised account of their life and times, we’re introduced to a medieval world much more accommodating to women’s participation in a broader range of endeavors than the “Dark Ages” moniker or the idea of progress suggests. 

Readers may be familiar with The Arabian Nights, the source material behind this fascinating novel. Yet, what distinguishes Jamila Ahmed’s retelling is her focus on the famed storyteller, Shaherazade, whose exposure of the Seljuk king’s wife’s infidelity sets in motion a violent chain of events in twelfth-century Persia.

In lush, sensuous prose, Ahmed fills this vividly imagined, action-packed novel with compelling characters and labyrinthine tales within tales populated with mythical adventurers and creatures with magical powers.

The elaborate, psychologically complex portrait of Shaherazade at the heart of the novel celebrates the power of storytelling while paying homage to the agency of the storyteller.

Today’s book-banning efforts replicate the dynamics of past political and religious upheavals when books were destroyed, including thousands of medieval manuscripts, many written by women.

Among those that survived were two mystical treatises: The Book of Margery Kempe discovered by chance in the 1930s in a dusty cupboard on an English country estate, and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, given its first complete printing in 1901.

Victoria MacKenzie’s delicate, meditative novel evokes the lives of the two female mystics who authored these texts. In exquisite, spare prose, she conjures the distinctive voices of Margery and Julian, two souls seeking solace from the crushing orthodoxy threatening to envelop them.

Read this book slowly, in a quiet place.

In seventeenth-century Rome, a talented young woman artist, Artemesia Gentileschi, is put on trial for accusing her painting instructor of rape. Unwilling to bow to convention, Artemesia pours her rage into her art, inventing an aesthetic against the voyeurism and female submissiveness found in traditional artistic representations of women.

Fremantle heightens the drama and contemporary relevance of Artemisia’s life and art by telling her story in the present tense. Drawing subtle connections between women’s struggles for autonomy and dignity in the past and those in the present, this page-turner of a novel is a searing, nuanced portrait of a woman’s passion for art, determination to right being wronged, and steadfast resolve to be recognized as a great artist. 

Move over Eve; make room for Lilith, the first woman, a revolutionary defender of the earth and its bounty against the forces of exploitation and greed. A warrior woman for all time.

Drawing on extensive research into ancient Western and Eastern creation narratives, Nikki Marmery invents an alternative cosmogony and a radical religion eschewing conquest and domination in favor of cooperation.

Written in a poetic voice, at once ancient and modern, this timely novel conjures a feminist counter-narrative, an ecological manifesto to cherish this earth as a gift and each other as equals.