Laurie Voss#OneThousandYearsOfWomen has been stalled for *checks notes* 3 months because I read bios of all six of Henry 8's wives and they were so fucking depressing that I couldn't bear writing about all of them. So rather than halt the project entirely we're going to get them out of the way by covering all six at once, which is fine because they overlapped substantially and were quite depressingly similar. This is going to be short and sad.
#OneThousandYearsOfWomen continues today with Juana, Queen of Castile, often called (both rudely and incorrectly) Juana La Loca (the mad). Her life is pretty bereft of fun facts: she was born a political pawn, cruelly used, abused and endlessly gaslit by her husband, her father and her son, branded mentally ill for the convenience of others, and died without having experienced any real agency over her affairs in her entire life.
Today's entry in #OneThousandYearsOfWomen is Margery Kempe, an extremely Christian woman who went gunning for sainthood by going on pilgrimages and demonstrating what she considered to be a variety of miraculous abilities. She then wrote what is considered to be the first autobiography in the English language about her adventures, giving us great insight into her life and times and the fact that she was just absolutely hands-down the worst travel companion you could ever possibly imagine.
Today's entry in #OneThousandYearsOfWomen is Christine de Pizan, the first professional female writer in Europe, and it's going to be very brief because the biography I found was very brief, and also she was born in 1364 and we don't have tons of sources about her. It is a mark of how special she was that we know anything about her at all, in fact.
(If you are new to #OneThousandYearsOfWomen, it is a series of mastodon-length biographies of famous historical women. The entire series is listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11GsNsB_sdGkmsnvjr0hiI0D2ynLfTU9mVoAt33LFb7M/edit#gid=0 and this is technically entry #2, after Hildegard of Bingen, whom I did as part of an earlier project on Twitter: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1277328781435301888)
Today's entry in #OneThousandYearsOfWomen is Héloïse, born 1100, a French nun who was also a gifted writer, philosopher, scholar and proto-feminist. She is known primarily for (and from) an exchange of letters with Peter Abelard, a similarly accomplished philosopher and scholar who was her lover and then her husband until they were tragically separated and forced to become a nun and a monk, respectively, after which they wrote each other challenging moral and philosophical questions.
I think I'm happy enough with my #OneThousandYearsOfWomen list that I'm ready to share the spreadsheet ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11GsNsB_sdGkmsnvjr0hiI0D2ynLfTU9mVoAt33LFb7M/edit#gid=0 ) and start the project in earnest. I've included the threads of women already covered in #EuropeanBios so it's "only" 29 bios, many of which I've already read while slowly putting the timeline together, so this might take "only" a year! :-P
jimkennedyThis is the kind of content I've been missing since moving from the other place.
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https://alpaca.gold/@seldo/109787218505528694
[email protected] - Well! It has been a while since I did a historical bio thread. Project #EuropeanBios is over and so is Twitter. The successor is a new medium, Mastodon, and a new project, #OneThousandYearsOfWomen, historically important women from approximately 1000CE to present. Here is Empress Matilda, born 1102, who spent decades trying to become queen of England ...
Laurie Voss (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Well! It has been a while since I did a historical bio thread. Project #EuropeanBios is over and so is Twitter. The successor is a new medium, Mastodon, and a new project, #OneThousandYearsOfWomen, historically important women from approximately 1000CE to present. Here is Empress Matilda, born 1102, who spent decades trying to become queen of England and failed, and had to accept as consolation seeing her son become king and being direct ancestor to all British royalty right up to today.
Well! It has been a while since I did a historical bio thread. Project #EuropeanBios is over and so is Twitter. The successor is a new medium, Mastodon, and a new project, #OneThousandYearsOfWomen, historically important women from approximately 1000CE to present. Here is Empress Matilda, born 1102, who spent decades trying to become queen of England and failed, and had to accept as consolation seeing her son become king and being direct ancestor to all British royalty right up to today.
The #EuropeanBios threads have been rescued from the sinking ship of Twitter and are currently being cleaned up and edited into at least a website, possibly a book. #OneThousandYearsOfWomen doesn't have a primary list or a website or anything yet, so this is the first one but may not end up being first chronologically. Forgive me, this isn't my full time job or anything.