Alice Loxton and Hetta Howes

Two of the UK’s brightest young historians, Alice Loxton and Dr Hetta Howes, discuss the lives of medieval women, including those of England’s forgotten but formidable queen Eleanor and four ordinary women doing extraordinary things.

Loxton is a regular presenter of documentaries on History Hit, Channel Four and the BBC and author of Uproar: Scandal, Satire and Printmakers in Georgian London. She has pioneered the use of social media to attract new audiences to history and has almost three million followers across Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. Her latest book is Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen. Loxton recounts how she walked the 200 miles between Lincoln and London taken by Eleanor’s funeral cortege in 1290. To mark the places where the cortege stopped, her heartbroken husband Edward 1 commissioned 12 Eleanor crosses. Loxton says Eleanor was a formidable character, and the story of her life helps to reveal a hidden history of Britain.

Howes is a lecturer in medieval and early modern literature at City, University of London, and a BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker. She contributes to broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and writes for The Times Literary Supplement and BBC History Extra. In her new book, Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women, she takes the reader into the minds of four medieval women, Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe. Howes asks what life was like for them and what they thought about things including sex, death and God. She says these lives show that women did earn money, could lead independent lives, and they thought, loved, fought and suffered as we do today.