Hello friends and potential future friends, and welcome to LATE NIGHT FEMINIST FRIDAY: SEMI-DIRTY EDITION!

I'm Kerry and I'm subbing in for Alex while she's on "holiday". I've just wrapped up an MA and am not yet finished rattling on about it so this week you will have the DELIGHT of hearing about female characters in 15^th-century English manuscripts and printed books. Ooh yeah!

My favourite at the moment (= all time??) is the Biblical (Apocryphal) character Judith.

Judith was a rich, beautiful widow whose town was under siege by the Assyrians (bad guys those Assyrians!). She dressed up, packed a kosher picnic basket with some wine, went down with her maid/sidekick to the enemy camp, and convinced the Assyrians they wanted to switch sides. The general, Holofernes, had his soldiers bring Judith to COUGH drink with him in his COUGH COUGH tent; she waited for him to get bladdered, called in her maid to hold him down, and took his sword off the wall and cut his head off. Hooray, victory against expansionist imperialists and dodgy creeper men alike!

You may recognize her from many paintings of her cutting a man's head off and/or with a man's head she has just cut off.

Judith looking smug (with the head of a man she has just cut off)

Judith looking glam (with the head of a man she has just cut off)

Judith with her norks out

Judith with her norks WELL out (and MORE, click through)

The norks-out theme started fairly suddenly in Italy in the 1450s and then carried on for hundreds of years, because when men figure out they can put norks into art HOO BOY YOU TRY TO PUT THEM BACK AWAY.

However my favourite Judiths are the ones in 13th-14th century bibles, mostly because the logistics of book production mean the illuminators had to paint teeny tiny blood spurts.

this is like four inches high! so wee!!

Obviously many parts of the Bible are shall we say not ideal for feminism, but it is mildly annoying to me when people try to argue there is 0 feminism. Lots of women in the 15^th and 16^th centuries used Judith as an excuse to say basically, "I do what I want": Joan of Arc used her as a legal precedent in her trial (not to make a point about her military activity, but to argue that it was OK to dress like a man because Judith had also dressed unusually, i.e. mega sexy), and feminist poet Christine de Pizan also used Judith as an example to illustrate why men need to shut up and butt out of women's business (I paraphrase). Mary Tudor called herself a "Judith" after ordering the beheading of one of her major political opponents, John Dudley, duke of Northumberland. Eat it, Dudders!! Elizabeth also called herself Judith after ordering the death of Mary Queen of Scots. (Hmm, is that feminist? It's complicated I guess!)

Basically I think we can all agree that, in terms of feminism, there are few simple pleasures like women getting together to murder a creepy possessive guy - norks out or norks in.

Yours in sisterhood,

Kerry