Lessons Of History - The Suppression Of Women Healers 1

I am a historian by training and I use history to give a reality to my books. I deliberately don’t fix the books in a specific time or place, but the subject matter and the details are influenced by my knowledge of and research into events in history. In this blog I intend sharing with you some of those “lessons of history.”

In Girl in the Glass my heroine Judith is warned about the dangers of becoming a healer. In the second book in the trilogy Love of Shadows (which I am writing now) she pursues her calling and puts her life at risk. The subject of the suppression of women healers over the centuries is a fascinating one.

Up to the 13thcentury women traditional healers (wisewomen) were practising their arts throughout Europe relatively without hindrance. Their medicines were born of traditions handed down through the generations and tested by use. In addition they were midwives and bonesetters. They were the only medical help available to most people and they had status in their communities as a result.

Then in the 14thcentury things changed. A new medical practitioner was being created – the university-trained physicians – one whose services were more expensive and elitist. Not better. The university medical training at that time was based on Galen’s concepts of the humours and governed by Christian doctrine. It did not have the empirical approach of the women healers and was mostly mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless the new male (nearly all universities were closed to women) physicians, supported by the Church, pushed for and got laws forbidding the practice of medicine by non-university trained healers. Suddenly women could not legally practice medicine. Of course given the low numbers of university medical students, these laws were unenforceable across the board, but they could be applied selectively.

The first targets were not the peasant women healers, but literate urban women healers who were in direct competition for the male physicians. In 1322 Jacoba Felice was put on trial in Paris – her crime practising medicine illegally. No matter that she produced witnesses verifying that she had cured them where the university physicians had failed, her competence was evidence of guilt.

The court found that: “Her plea that she cured many sick persons whom the aforesaid masters could not cure, ought not to stand and is frivolous, since it is certain that a man approved in the aforesaid art could cure the sick better than any woman

1. Perhaps the true reason for her prosecution and other women like her can be found in
2. Her accuser was a university-trained male physician.

One witness Jean St Omer stated that Jacoba had visited him repeatedly throughout a grave illness, never asking for payment prior to a cure. He affirmed that she had done more for him, and with far less demand on his purse, than any licensed physician. As her punishment Jacoba was excommunicated and fined. Nothing more is known of her. In some ways she was lucky, from then on the suppression of women healers started to a more deadly turn. More of that in a future post.

Notes From A Story Editor - Background

When I started to write novels I was encouraged to do so by a close friend. And not just any friend: Hannah Kodicek was one of the best story editors in the business. Hannah had had a varied and successful career as an actress, director, writer and latterly story editor in the film industry. She was story editor on the Oscar-winning Counterfeiters and occasionally advised friends with their novels – including Danny Scheinmann (Random Acts of Heroic Love) and of course me. 

Hannah was considered such an expert that she lectured on story structure and other aspects of story-making to people in the business on the EU funded ARISTA and MAIA programmes. Many writers will know of The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler – a book which is film industry required reading – which sets out in easily accessible form the mythic form of stories. Fewer will have read the works of Carl Jung and his followers, specifically The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell on which Vogler based his book. Hannah had gone direct to the source, studying myths and fairytales and Jung, Campbell, Von Franz and other Jungian writers. Her lectures therefore had an authority that few others in the business could muster. They also had a practicality and realism, that were important features of my friend.

She was moreover a wonderful educator, which made her work as a story editor all the more powerful. I never sat in one of her lectures, but I had my own private tutorials. We had wonderful sessions talking about story structure and what is more I asked her to read and feedback about my novels. I could tell that at first she was nervous, worrying that I might be sensitive about my babies and that it might impact on our friendship. She needn’t have worried, I loved out sessions. She had a way of not telling me what to do, but rather, like all great teachers, asking questions that made me think. She would send me off spinning unforeseen possibilities. She in turn enjoyed seeing what I then came up with. I was, she told me, the best of all her clients. 

Sadly Hannah died of cancer last year. I was writing Girl In The Shadows at the time and although we discussed it, Hannah never got to read the novel. “Don’t worry,” she said, “You don’t need me anymore, you’ve learned everything.” I’m not sure about that, but I have her notes and my memories of our conversations. Once it became apparent that she was dying, we talked about whether her notes could be made into the book she had always wanted to produce or maybe a website, so that future writers could learn as I did from what she had to say. Again she ran out of time. So I have decided to share with you some of what I learned as a tribute to a great story editor in this series of posts Notes From A Story Editor.  

A few weeks ago I agreed to do a guest post on The Indie Exchange – advice to other indie writers was the brief – the content was obvious, Hannah’s advice on the basics of storytelling.

Fool's Paradise

The illustrations for my poetry book Fool’s Paradise are prints by my friend and mentor Hannah Kodicek. Hannah produced a whole series of prints in response to my writing and it was always our plan to publish a special edition of the poem and the prints. We did not have in mind an ebook, but rather a beautifully produced limited edition paper book. But one thing stopped us: when Hannah moved back to Prague she mislaid the first quality prints (the ones I have used in the ebook being her second or third choices) and never found them again. Her death last year almost certainly means that they will never be found.

Nevertheless the ones I have chosen for the ebook do her justice. They were created by painting on a sheet of glass, often I think with her fingers, and then placing the paper on top.

Problems or opportunties in plotting

One of the things I love about writing is the way solving logistical problems in a novel can open up creative opportunities.

The underlying story of the Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows and the, as yet unnamed, last book in the trilogy is how Anya/Judith follows in her dead mother’s footsteps to become a healer and a wisewoman. But from the word go I had a problem. Of necessity Anya’s mother is dead when the first book opens, so how does she learn the healer’s art?

a) how does she learn about gardening and propagating plants?
b) who gives her the first book on healing?
c) how does she learn to tend wounds and set bones?
d) how does she learn to distill medicines and make creams?
e) how does she learn to read and have access to medicine and herbal books?
f) what triggers her to become a healer?

The answers to each of these crucial questions are:
a) she works with the gardener in her Aunt’s garden
b) the housekeeper Marta gives her the book
c) there’s an earthquake and she works in a dressing station with the wounded
d) she works for a perfumer Elma and so learns to distil and make creams and other beauty products
e) Elma sponsors her use of the library, ostensibly to learn about perfumes,
f) Elma develops cancer and they cannot afford the medicine.

Each solution moves the story forward, often in ways I hadn’t foreseen, opening the plot and characters to more twists and depth. In my next post I will talk more about the decision to make Judith a perfumer  and its consequences.

The Gypsy Hunts

For the last two days I have been working on the third draft of my novel Mother of Wolves It’s an alternative history novel. The alternative history being that of the Romanies.

The idea for the novel first came to me when I visited a castle in the Czech Republic. As is often the case in the Czech Republic the only way to visit the castle was on a guided tour. I was the only English speaker and stood at the back of the group of listening Czechs, reading a couple of sheets of A4 that was meant to be a translation of the tour. As the tour took an hour and I read the sheets in five minutes I spent a lot of time looking in cabinets and at prints.

In one room as the guide droned on in Czech and some annoying person kept asking questions I found myself examining three folk art pictures on the wall. They were not listed in the translation nor did they have any label. The guide did not refer to them and the rest of the party ignored them. They had no significance. But as I looked I was increasingly shocked by the subject matter. They were primitive but graphic pictures of the persecution of gypsies from, I guess, the 18th century.

It is two years since I saw the pictures, but I still remember them in detail. In one a man is hanging from a branch, while in the foreground a gypsy woman (perhaps his wife) is holding a babe while blood pours from her head where her ear has been cut off. As a historian I had known that the gypsies had been the victims of persecution through the centuries and that they too had been the subject of Hitler’s extermination programme. In the Great Devouring as they called the holocaust the numbers of Romany victims varies but it seems that it was at least half a million. But as I investigated further I was shocked by the untold history of persecution over centuries. Gypsy hunts occurred in many European countries. Very simply gypsies were hunted as vermin, no different than foxes. In Jutland in 1835 a hunt “brought in a bag of over 260 men, women and children.” A Rheinland hunter recorded in his list of game for the day “Item: A Gypsy woman with her sucking babe.”

It is a sad fact that no matter how horrific a story one can devise, that reality can always exceed its horror. The tragedy of the Romany people has in some ways always been overshadowed by that of the Jews. They were/are rural, often illiterate, and poor. They also do not have and never had a state or a leadership to speak for them. But what if there had been such a leader…

A name of my own

It’s taken me several years to bite the bullet and seriously consider putting my writing back in to the public arena. When I was younger I didn’t have that problem. I happily sent my work out to publishers. I was of course disappointed when I got rejected, but enough said yes to make up for this. Even when I had a run of rejections I brushed them off and sent out the next batch of letters. I defined myself by my writing.  Had you asked what I was, I would have answered “I’m a poet.” It was that simple: Zoe Brooks was a poet. She was other things of course – a daughter, a student, an Oxford graduate, an arts manager, but above all she was a poet.

That stopped as my other roles took over – mother, wife, heritage professional and then, for the last twenty years, inner city regeneration professional. The only person who still introduced me as Zoe Brooks the poet was my friend Hannah Kodicek. I thought it quaint of her and even a little perverse. I felt sometimes she wasn’t valuing me properly. Then about three years ago I started writing once more.

“Will you publish it?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe I’d use a pseudonym.”

 “Mmm,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yes, I don’t think I could do it any other way. I thought maybe Elizabeth Rivers – Elizabeth is my second name and as for Rivers – Brooks/Rivers.”

She laughed. “That sounds like a cop out, it’s not a real pen-name.”

I’ve thought about it a lot since that conversation. She was right, she usually was. What was I ashamed of? Why was I trying to hide? I decided I would not be ready to publish until I was prepared to use my real name. It’s taken me months to start this blog, but I’ve done it. In a few days I plan to publish my first novel as Zoe Brooks

A room of one's own

When I was younger (in my teens and 20’s) I used to write, a lot. I didn’t just write: I was published in poetry anthologies and magazines, but then I stopped. I was too busy with working and being a mum. Maybe the writing abandoned me rather than the other way round. Maybe as Virginia Woolf put it “Every woman needs a room of her own.”, not just physically but psychologically – a creative space.And I didn’t have one.

I’d always made up stories and composed poetry, even before I was taught how to write them down. And not having a room of my own didn’t stop that process, I just didn’t write anything down. Somehow it wasn’t important enough. I needed to get away. About seven years ago I bought a farmhouse in the Czech Republic. I had intended to buy a little hut, somewhere that didn’t need lots doing to it, where I could live in nature for a while and write. Instead I bought a ruined farmhouse, one which would need lots of TLC and work. Talk about sabotaging one’s best intentions!

But the Czech house brought one great benefit – I started to blog about my experiences in “Adventures in the Czech Republic.” And I loved blogging, the feedback was great and I got to know some really lovely, interesting people in cyberspace.

A few years ago the house, although not finished (I had run out of money), was ready to be used for my original purpose. I took a deep breath and sat down with my hands resting on a computer keyboard and a blank screen in front of me.