Echoing Multiverse

 I generally blame much of the patriarchy in today's society on Abrahamic religion. I recently started reading Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez, and I was struck by the fact that it was largely women who first brought Christianity to the English speaking world, and who were the early adopters. Even before that time, it is widely believed that it was Helena, the mother of Constantine, who convinced her son, the Roman Emperor, to convert to Christianity. Why, ladies? Today's painting shows Helena, now known as Saint Helena, following her travels to the Holy Land where she built the Church of the Nativity, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Church of the Ascension. She's posing with the cross upon which Jesus was crucified, which she located and brought back with her as one of the most sacred relics of Christianity. She has the nails in her outstretched right hand. Helena has been given a position of honor ...

Emily Wilding Davison was a campaigner for women's suffrage in the U.K. She was arrested many times, went on seven hunger strikes and was force fed in prison. She had studied the classics and medieval literature as part of her education and was inspired by the Amazon women in Chaucer's The Knights' Tale. According to a classmate, she took on the name 'Fair Emelye' after reading the Canterbury Tales at school. Emily Wilding Davison In the Knights' Tale, Chaucer describes how Emelye was captured along with her sister Queen Hippolyta when Theseus laid seige to Scythia, home of the powerful Amazon women.  Terracotta lekythos (oil flask) with scenes of a battle of Greeks against Amazons (detail), ca. 420 B.C., Greek, attributed to the Eretria Painter. Terracotta. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1931 In the opening of the tale, the triumphant lord Theseus arrives at the city of Thebes. Rows of ladies clothed in black kneel before him in the stre...