When the dead show up in my dreams they are always silent. Present, but unable to speak—there are sometimes smiles, but it feels like there are ways to communicate through that dream-haunting that are unconnected to speech. I’m always surprised by their notable presence.
The etymology of silence includes a hint of this—a root that means, as a plural noun in latin, that the silent are the dead, the no longer living. The Victorians also ascribed that association. Silent as the grave seems a bit gratuitous when you think that it is essentially saying that one will be as dead as those that are, well, dead.
I’ve written previously how women become ghosts—houses and spaces haunted by women who must remain silent, who have no agency to be a part of the spoken world. Their stories so often hidden in gothic hauntings, when and if they took up pen to write. As if to commune with others who feel markedly present but unable to speak.
Some scholars believe that there are hints of an earlier world in fairy tales, small tokens of speech that are of a time when women held knowledge of the plants and natural world. Words that may have been incantations that timed the hours it took to bake bread, to make a healing ointment, in eras before there were clocks that could measure the minutes ticking by. Many medieval leech books—collections of remedies—include directions to say four hail marys, and is similarly not so much a reflection of religious devotional power, but also to time the duration of the work—words contributing to the alchemy of a fermented brew, for example. Similar to how in the beginning of the pandemic, people in the UK were advised to sing two ‘happy birthdays’ while washing their hands, to ensure there had been two minutes at least of serious scrubbing.
Women have had to be secret about their knowledge and experience too often in a world that wishes them silent. Gossips were women friends, attendants, healers during birth—women with knowledge of the woman giving birth and of the process of birth—and often death—that can accompany. Gossips were women who knew what to do in times of crisis. Like the hints left in fairytales and in claims of witchcraft, gossip was later used to classify women who speak together in public, something to be derided and feared. Something we are still told to avoid as a shameful practice.
Suppressing gossip meant that it was only virtuous for women to be silent. Made into ghosts, living among well-spoken men. Keeper of secrets, slanted poetry, euphemisms told in rhyme. Confining the speech of women to a whisper network—secret conversations, runes and poems and spells that held wisdom and knowledge.
In the etymology of rune there is a root that means secret, mystery, a dark mysterious statement, a (secret) council. A spell, a curse, a coven.
A woman named Euphemia Maclean1, during the Scottish witchcraft panic of the 17th century, cried out to her midwife for pain relief during her birth. She cried aloud and accepted pain relief from her midwife—also accused of witchcraft—because Euphemia refused to suffer in silence. In the era of James VI of Scotland, pain in delivery was considered ‘natural’ while anything that interferes with that pain—Eve’s fault—would be considered ‘unnaural’ and of the devil. As a result, both Euphemia and her midwife, Agnes Sampson, became targets due to Sampson’s knowledge of the ‘great female mystery’ that come with the magic of healing powers.
Euphemia was later burned at the stake for her bold act of speaking aloud in pain. The name, Euphemia, means literally “well-spoken,” so undoubtedly, she believed in the truth of her name. Only to be silenced.
Euphemia is a name that is also in the work of a french Arthurian romance of the 13th century. Only discovered in an english manor house in a box labeled “old papers—no value,” the manuscript was re-discovered in 1911 alongside some letters of Henry VIII, whose words were presumably of more interest, as the romance was still ignored and only saw publication in 1972.
The name of the work is Silence. It tells of a medieval king who flippantly makes it the law of the land that women cannot inherit their family’s estates. So in order to work around this law, the king’s nephew and his wife tell their courtiers that their newborn is a son who will inherit. They name the boy Silence, but in fact she was born a girl.
Silence’s mother’s name is Euphemie—’well-spoken’—because she gives birth to Silence.
Silence is raised as a boy in every possible way in the forest by a kinswoman who has sworn an oath not to reveal the truth of her ward’s gender. As Silence nears adolescence, he is approached by Nature who is upset at what Nurture has done to her original work in creating Silence as a girl. Silence is almost convinced that he has been wrong to learn and act like a boy, but Reason then intervenes:
…citing examples as to why, if she abandoned her nurture to take up the habits of nature, it would be almost as bad as killing herself…. …then [Silence] began to consider ...all female customs against his current way of life, and saw, in short, that a man’s life was much better than that of a woman. ‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘it would be too bad to step down when I’m on top. If I’m on top, why should I step down? Now I am honored and valiant. No I’m not, upon my word—I'm a disgrace if I want to be one of the women…. I don’t want to lose my high position; I don’t want to exchange it for a lesser, …I will never betray the secret!’
Silence remains silent about his identity. He remains steadfast to his chosen gender by becoming a great knight, better than most men, vanquishing foes in battle, heroically coming to the rescue of the king’s army, among adventures also spent as a skilled minstrel.
Through complications of plot, the king’s wife is also named Eufeme—who is called so ironically as she is pointedly less well-spoken when she uses her voice to accuse Silence of rape when he refuses her advances. The king is skeptical of the queen’s claims, and sets a task of loyalty to Silence in response—a quest to find Merlin—who can only be found by a woman, and thus, is a seemingly impossible task. Yet Silence of course succeeds, at which point Merlin literally has the last laugh, to reveal to everyone at court that Silence is a woman—at which point the less well-spoken Eufeme is cast off and killed, while Silence is rewarded by having to marry the old king. By remaining silent, Silence becomes true to their name, in having to beceom a wife and produce male heirs, with no further claim to speech of her own.
I wonder if Silence thought of the spells she could have spoken instead to remain on top of the world, rather than forced into marriage?
English law defined a scold as “a troublesome angry woman who, by her brawling and wrangling among her neighbors, doth break the public peace, and beget, cherish and increase public discord.” — Jane Brox
Women’s speech was overtly policed, with torturous public shamings. Scolds were bound with iron rings around their heads, with studded iron bits that would injure her should she choose to speak. Women were dunked in an early form of waterboarding, with dunking stools erected for the purpose in village squares. I’ve seen relics from this practice of shaming women who speak, and felt a chill haunting of both the physical and psychological impact it would have on any woman treated or threatened in such a way.
In the etymology of scold it notes that it is used “especially for a shrewish woman.” But within the roots of the word is the Old Norse skald—meaning a poet. It further notes that the relationship of the two words hint at a sense that Germanic and Celtic poets were “famously feared for their ability to lampoon and mock.”
Secrets, runes, poems—angry prayers that also serve as curses.
Elizabeth Stiles—a woman executed for witchcraft in the time of Elizabeth I—was publicly feared for her anger. For her curses and threats, and an ability to inspire fear in her neighbors. It is said that people feared her anger, and yet at the same time, paid her to curse others. Her anger was powerful, and while it led to her destruction—as an outspoken woman unsurprisingly—for a time, it was what gave her life.
Reading Silence, I keep returning to the voice of Reason that arrives as Nature and Nurture battle over Silence’s gender, of Silence exclaiming:
why would I step down when I’m on top? I will never betray the secret!
It reminds me of Charlotte Brontë, writing under her masculine pen name to her publisher George Lewes in 1849:
I wish you did not think me a woman. I wish all reviewers believed “Currer Bell” to be a man: they would be more just to him.
I believe in ghosts because there have been too many who were silenced. Cultures dismissed because their stories do not exist on the page, but on millennia of winds, in rocks, in the generations of storytellers who hold the knowledge and wisdom of ancestors.
Women who knew the science and lore of the past, but whose voices were physically extinguished—through flame, through threat, and through exhaustion.
I’ve been haunted by the ghost mother in this story, and this one. Of how these silences are a horror, secrets and truths that still need to be told and heard. How many more silenced ghosts there will now be haunting future generations who refuse to acknowledge women’s agency, or transgender people, under the false panic of ‘erasing women.’
How many more curses it will take to get people to listen. How uncivil do we all have to be in order to refuse a minority rule that seeks to silence so many?
I was first introduced to this story by the fantastic memorable book The Witch of Eye, by Kathryn Nuernberger, which I canno recommend enough. Grateful to learn of the many stories of women who were silenced by accusations of witchcraft in her lyric writing.
Just reading now lost time somewhere but so fascinating this research and the ghosts that show up for you write down the Witch of Eye will look for it thank you
I haven't read something as enlightening as this about the medieval witch-hunt, so many archetypes and tropes spun with your mastery over folklore analysis. The haunted house trope and the idea of Banshee is also indicative that a screaming or loud woman is dangerous, not as harmless as the our regular silent poltergeist.
This sparks another idea, what happens when the dead starts to speak in morbid tongues, the truths about their suffering, their violated souls, the anger they swallowed. What happens when that anger is purged. It inadvertently reminds me of the Hindu goddess Kaali, the goddess of death, who finally breaks her silence to destroy the evil and the myth goes that when she awakens everything in the creations bows to her fury.