Introduction

In London between 1852 and 1871, Edward G. Flight (1803?–71) published multiple editions of a narrative poem entitled The Horse Shoe: The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil. With illustrations by well-known artist George Cruikshank (1792–1879), this text introduced significant innovations into the medieval legend of the English saint Dunstan, a Benedictine monk, Archbishop of Canterbury, and clever opponent of Satan. Flight's Victorian poem uses Dunstan, an important figure of the nation's past, to contain and limit the dangerous potentialities of the trickster Devil by forcing him into a role as “Jim Crow,” who famously sang and danced on American and English stages in the mid-nineteenth century. The ambiguities of both Jim Crow and the Devil are neutralized through Dunstan's torment and containment of his adversary in a “true” account Flight carefully distinguishes from his medieval sources. In The Horse Shoe, Flight aligns the encounter between Dunstan and the Devil with both the complex history of minstrelsy and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, deploying medieval hagiography to navigate rapid socio-economic change and complex racial politics in nineteenth-century Britain.

Like all legends of Dunstan, Flight's account reworks a smorgasbord of folktale types and motifs, including “the smith [who] outwits the Devil,” 330 in the Arne-Thompson-Uther index of tale types. Flight's saint, like the smith of folklore and the Dunstan of the medieval vitae, pretends to cooperate with the Devil and cunningly plots to seize and punish him with his blacksmith's tools. The Devil in Flight's version is also forced to sign a written contract at the end of the poem, a reversal of tale type ATU 756B, “the Devil's contract.” Unlike Dunstan's medieval vitae, Flight's poem, though it ostensibly provides an origin tale for the horseshoe as a talisman against evil, casts the smith-saint himself in the role of a cruel master who forces his captive to dance the “Jim Crow,” integrating Dunstan's legend with racist tropes that persist to the present day. To support this argument, I will first assess Flight's adaptation of Dunstan's legend. Then I will situate Flight's representation of the Devil and his reference to Jim Crow within the context of popular Victorian literature, particularly Richard Harris Barham's The Ingoldsby Legends and the Jim Crow plays and minstrel shows so popular in British theaters between 1830 and 1870.

Women in the Workforce

“I have always wondered […] what [group] is most hated on Flashback? Is it immigrants or women?” The user Merapi asks this exasperated question after yet another heated discussion with anti-feminists on the Swedish online discussion forum Flashback. The site has a reputation for being the home of the populist radical right, represented in the Swedish parliament by the Sweden Democrats. The very existence of Merapi, however, demonstrates that not only radical right-wing anti-feminists use this site. In fact, the forum is widely used in Sweden for a broad variety of reasons. Some seek practical advice on DIY-things; others recommend movies; many more discuss current crimes and politics. But there are also sections dedicated to science and humanities, including one subsection called “History.” Unsurprisingly, the Vikings are among the many topics discussed in this subsection.

The Vikings have long been a topic of scholarly debate and a focus for re-imaginings. In late eighteenth-century Sweden the Vikings were interpreted within the framework of “noble savages,” hostile to modern civilization. During the nineteenth century, an era of intense nationalism, we see an increased use of the Vikings as national symbols. In 1811 the Gothic Society (Gotiska forbundet) was created. This was a patriotic society wherein members recited Eddic poems, drank mead from horns, and gave each other Viking names from the Icelandic Sagas. During this era, historians and authors underlined Sweden as a country balanced between the courageous, adventurous Vikings and the free and proud farmers. Both of these were necessary. Over time, the Vikings became used by and associated with National Socialism and, after the war, with Swedish Neo-Nazis.

In historical scholarship, the traditional view of violent Nordic berserkers went through a revision in the 1960s: the violence of the Vikings was downplayed, and the image of a more peaceful Viking-merchant appeared. While some scholars acknowledged the violent nature of Viking practices, they rejected the previous image of them as particularly brutal. Peter Sawyer, in line with this, claimed that the Vikings were violent in a violent time; they participated in typical Dark Age activities. Both scholarship and media clung to the image of the “trader-not-raider” and so emphasized these more peaceful activities that one historian famously asked whether we now should regard the Vikings as long-haired tourists who just occasionally roughed up the natives.

Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme. In part, that may be owing to the difficulty of knowing when the optimal moment would be for such a collective summation, intervention, and/or foreshadowing. Perhaps no other area of research has expanded as widely, quickly, or fluidly as gender studies, both within and outside of medievalism. Not only scholars but also popularists, journalists, pundits, bloggers, and countless others in medievalism studies and beyond have surpassed the traditional taxonomies of gender to question its very possibility, not to mention its utility.

While there may be widespread, if not universal, agreement that gender is at least in part, and perhaps entirely, a construct, its possible sources are often in dispute, sometimes violently so. The ethics and history of a subject that has for millennia formed the foundation of persecution invite an overtly biased tone and subjective approach that depart from traditional academia's (pretense of) objectivity. Perhaps more than in any other area of the humanities, except perhaps studies of racism, authors assign and assess the motives as well as the nature and intention of sources.

Of course, this approach is also open to such assessments of it, as are those assessments, and as are those assessments, and so forth. In effect, a perception of gender in a medieval source can inaugurate a virtual mise en abyme of layered revelations as to how that instance, and perhaps larger dimensions of gender, have been perceived and operated since the Middle Ages. And since few areas within history and, by extension, academia are more saturated with gender assumptions than the Middle Ages, the invitation to adopt, adapt, question, resist, or reject those assumptions could hardly be richer than it is in medievalism, as suggested by this volume's call for papers:

Among the collections of the Bibliothèques d’Amiens metropole is a single parchment leaf which measures approximately 288 x 249 mm. Across the leaf, in two columns, is inscribed the Latin text of a letter from the First Crusade. The document is addressed to the pope and the people of the West and relates the events of the expedition up to the capture of Jerusalem and the Battle of Ascalon in 1099. An original crusade letter from the end of the eleventh century, that is, the parchment sheet written by the named authors (or, rather, a scribe on their behalf) that changed hands between them and the addressees would be an artefact of the utmost rarity. But the Amiens manuscript is not one of those. It bears the textual accretions of two postscripts added by audiences in Europe who began to rewrite the epistolary corpus very soon after the crusade. These additions denote that it belongs to the third recension of the text, having evolved rapidly through two previous versions in the period immediately after 1099. At some point in its history, this twelfth-century copy became detached from the initial context of its creation: the binding of a medieval book. For the epistle preserved in Amiens represents one of many copies of letters from the First Crusade that were produced in Europe during and – on a much larger scale – after the expedition with the aim of sending its news, contextualising its events, and remembering it.

The Amiens leaf is a relic of the epistolary culture of the crusade. It stands witness to the impulse to record, engage with, and rewrite the event, in a similar vein to the longer Latin narratives which have attracted sustained scholarly attention for centuries. The attempt to ascertain exactly how those texts were composed, compiled and transmitted, together with their extremely complex interrelationships, has revolutionized our understanding of the First Crusade itself and the recording of history in the twelfth century. Yet while scholars have lavished attention on the full-scale narratives, the key texts that have yet to be factored properly into this discussion are the epistles.

I never cared for school I’d rather work than go to school. They used to take us during school vacation if we were fourteen or fifteen. Then at sixteen you’d start steady work. We all expected to work in the mill … My parents did not believe in education.

(Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City in New England (London, 1979), p. 181)

My mother was hostile to ‘modern regulations’ of which compulsory education was one. She thought it unreasonable that other people should have the right to tell parents what to do with their children. On this point my father agreed … three years of school was enough according to my parents and what you had not learnt by the age of ten, you would never learn they repeated … I was not always able to go to school, I had to earn and every school day I missed was a workday with income. In the end my mother was sentenced to 24 days of incarceration because of my absences from school. One day two policemen came and took her to serve her sentence as she had not come of her own accord. This my mother never forgot, how a hardworking woman and good mother could be treated like that. I was so ashamed that I did not dare go out in the street.

(Adelheid Popp in Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), pp. 111–12)

In 1896, more than 60,000 children between the ages of 11 and 14 worked in factories; in 1901 there were still more than 40,000 in this age group, including so-called half-timers. Source: p.p. 1902 XII, pp. 36–43.

The actions of Morgan le Fay initiate and motivate the plot of the anonymous late fourteenth-century English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She orchestrates the Christmas challenge that sets Gawain on his adventures, yet she is not a major player in any of the events of the narrative. She appears only briefly, in the guise of a crone, in Lord Bertilak's castle where Gawain is offered harborage. Likewise, the text diminishes the agency of Lady Bertilak when her husband claims responsibility for having sent her to seduce Gawain. Chivalry thus remains in the domain of the masculine with women afforded only peripheral roles. David Lowery's 2021 film adaptation of this work, The Green Knight, reimagines the narrative to allow Morgan and a host of other female characters integral roles in the action. Morgan not only instigates the game that will enable Gawain's chivalric growth, but she also travels with and attempts to protect him. Lowery preserves the chivalric tests of the original poem, but in an altered form that gives women, particularly Morgan as Gawain's mother, a crucial role in the chivalric development of a future king.

Notable among Lowery's changes to the original poem are the following: the depiction of Gawain, played by Dev Patel, as untried and unknighted; the depiction of Arthur and Guinevere, played respectively by Sean Harris and Kate Dickie, as old rather than young; and the depiction of Morgan le Fay, played by Sarita Choudhury, as Gawain's mother rather than his aunt. These changes emphasize the themes of chivalric maturity, succession, and maternal protection. Choudhury's Morgan is integral to the development of these themes. From her initial appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, Morgan le Fay has assumed various roles. She is most often depicted as a sorceress and troublemaker at Arthur's court. Conventionally, she is Arthur's half-sister. In some works of medievalism, her character is confused or conflated with that of Morgause, mother of Mordred through incest and mother of Gawain.5 The malleability of her character and her conflation with Morgause allow Lowery the creative liberty to reshape the narrative. He engages in the time-honored strategy of combining characters in films to create a singular character who possesses the familiar characteristics of both Morgan (enchantress) and Morgause (mother). Taken together, Lowery's alterations empower Morgan's role in Gawain's adventures.

News of the capture of Jerusalem first reached the West in the form of oral messages and stories and written documents. The only surviving letter is that given by Daibert, archbishop of Pisa, the new papal representative on the crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon (in absentia) and Raymond of St Gilles at Laodicea in September 1099, although we can probably assume that there were others, now lost. The arrival of the news in the West appears to have spread rapidly and sparked correspondence between interested contemporaries who sought not only to distribute it but also to interpret it from a theological perspective and to inspire and recruit further warrior–pilgrims to defend the newly acquired Latin conquests. This chapter examines the six surviving letters written in the aftermath of the crusade – which all appear to be authentic – and examines how contemporaries responded to the news from the East and repackaged it. In so doing, it problematises the consensus on the date at which the news arrived from the East, something which affects our understanding of the final stages of the First Crusade, the ‘crusade of 1100–01’, the transmission and reception of the news, and also makes an intervention in the longstanding debate about the original papal aim of the crusade and whether it was conceived as an expedition to recover Jerusalem.

The letter from Daibert and other crusade leaders to the pope and all Christians

The first surviving epistle to transmit the news of the success of the crusade ranks among the most significant letters for the transmission of crusade narrative. Given at Laodicea (Latakia, modern Syria) in September 1099 by elements of the crusade leadership, this missive is apparently the first known written narrative of the capture of Jerusalem and, indeed, of the entire campaign in Outremer, to have circulated in medieval Christendom. Evidence that contemporaries received it as such is furnished by MS Amiens, LESC. 91 D (5174), where the text is preceded by the heading ‘Itinerarium Hierosolimitarum’ (‘Account of the Jerusalem journey’) in a twelfth-century hand (Fig. 1a).

Trust and mistrust

Complaints received, complaints resolved

Although there had been activity among working women and female unions to achieve the employment of female inspectors, there was not an immediate coming together when the female inspectors commenced their work. There were even instances when the women sided with employers, regarding the inspectors as their enemies. During the early years, in 1896, there was even an example of a woman in Leeds (Annie Michell) taking Adelaide Anderson to court for physical assault, claiming that the Inspector had grabbed and shaken her when she did not answer questions. The outcome was in favour of the Inspector, as the court could clearly see that the small and timid Inspector was unlikely to form a physical threat to a woman the size of her accuser. The case brought bad publicity, however. Adelaide Anderson assessed the situation in the early years as one where the women had become so used to being ignored and misused that they had slid into lethargy, expecting no improvement. Her view was that only through activity and publicising that activity could the inspectors convince the female workers that the situation could change.

As conversations regarding problems were unlikely in the presence of the employer or the foreman, confidential visits in women's homes would create better chances of communication.

It would seem that Anderson was right. When the newspapers reported on prosecutions, as the appearance of the ‘Lady Inspectors’ in court was a novelty, the notion that change was possible did penetrate the awareness of at least some women. There was an increase in the number of complaints by female workers, or their families, received by the female inspectors, doubling in 1896 (to 381) in comparison with the previous year. With an increasing number of complaints also came an increasing number of prosecutions.

The creation of posts fixed to a specific locality cut down on time used for travel and increased the opportunities of contact with the women in the workplaces and outside. In 1913, the women's branch of the inspectorate visited nearly 7000 factories and 4000 workshops, investigated 700 accidents, conducted 373 prosecutions and received 2014 complaints.

Report in the local newspaper Silkeborg Dagblad, 6 June 1910:

Betzy Kjelsberg and contact with workers

Betzy Kjelsberg often gave talks at unions and worker's clubs. This was a way of establishing contacts with those best aware of existing problems. After the intervention to incorporate advice from workers in connection with the installation of new paper machines, her reputation as genuinely interested increased. After having approached the health authorities and local inspectors with no result, the workers association representing loggers turned to Kjelsberg. While she was aware that this was not part of the remit of a factory inspector, she still decided to make a visit.

She personally turned to one of the company directors and wrote to the overseer and begged them to remedy the worst problems instantly and later deal with the others. She was soon told by the workers that many of the problems had been rectified and received a heartfelt thank you for her visit (Magnhild Folkvord, Betzy Kjelsberg: feminist og brubyggjar (Oslo, 2016), pp. 126–7).

In face of considerable opposition and claims that the economy was going to be ruined, Britain introduced the first workplace regulations in 1833 and 1844, followed by France in 1841. It soon became apparent, however, that legislation without control had little impact on the work of children and a system of factory inspection was set up in these countries within a year of the new legislation. The early inspection system left much to be desired: initially, four factory inspectors were deemed sufficient for the whole of Britain. Furthermore, some of the early inspectors were not particularly active, some had tendencies to bond with the factory owners because of recruitment, salaries or ideology.

In 1874, a state-funded system with 15 inspectors overseeing a regional inspectorate was introduced in France and by 1891 no less than 73 departmental inspectors had been engaged. The department of Seine saw the engagement of women in the inspections of schools and welfare institutions already in 1878 and from 1892 the state also appointed women for inspecting factories employing women and children.

Safety and hygiene problems were also raised outside Britain and France during the second half of the nineteenth century by doctors, philanthropists and factory workers. Regulations about accident funds financed not only by workers but also factory owners raised more awareness in relation to dangerous machinery. The state and local governments, which had little desire to take on the economic responsibility for individuals loosing health and limbs in the factories, saw the benefits of an inspection system eliminating obvious dangers. As a result, many countries in Europe and members of the British Commonwealth introduced workplace legislation and inspection by the 1880s.

Feminism, social reform and the discussion about female factory inspectors

The late nineteenth century was the time of the rising specialist. Traditional notions were looked down upon; the urban landscape was transformed not only by the tramway and streetlights but also by piped water, the water closet and the creation of milk and meat inspection offices. Old superstition was to be replaced by new rationality, embodied in the knowledge of technology, chemistry and medicine.

The Right for Women to Vote in National Elections