Immediately makes me think of all the great women who carried one day or another:

Joan of Arc
Eleanor Roosevelt
Thatcher (?)
Florence Nightingale
Medea (?)
Cleopatra
on and on …

Re the question of other women, I’m assuming these marriages were largely/wholly for political purposes given Etheldreda’s father was a King. So probably there were other “arrangements.” There’s a note that Ecgfrith married a second wife, Eormenburg in 678. Let’s hope he got to consummate that one :)

Was inspired by your thread on (male) heroes and wanted to do something similar for women. After a bit of thought I decided to avoid the terminology issues of “hero” and go with “women who carried the day” (the word “hero” is particularly vexed in Aust). Still formulating it, but I’m thinking of those women who were at the centre of events, who made things happen that weren’t going to happen otherwise.

Re her being a virgin, I assumed it was because of her piety. Though I think there may have been political associations with virginity too. For example, I read a line that said, “Virginity at that time was highly prized” and then stopped there. Made me laugh and tantalised me. And remember that even 1000 years later with the reign of Elizabeth I her reclaimed “virgin” status had political/power connotations.

Where are you planning (if you have a plan) to take this “Women who carried the day” tag? Possibly a thread on “heroines”? Or just women in history who seem remarkable?

BTW, did she ever say WHY she wanted to remain a virgin? Was it a Christian revulsion thing? Clearly, she also decided to forgoe reproduction that way. I’ve always considered this a higher form of suicide.

Etheldreda would appear to have had the knack of picking exactly the right sort of man to marry. Even today, how many men, upon marrying, would agree to his wife remaining a virgin?

Can we assume that Tondberct and Ecgfrith, being denied the wifely charms of Etheldreda, would have found other women to satisfy their, like, needs?.

Whenever I’ve visited monasteries and cathedrals built 500, 1000, years ago, I’m always amazed at the enormous amount of expertise, money and manpower which must have gone into their construction, given that 90%, or even more, of the people lived and died in poverty.

Etheldreda’s very young age when marrying both times, and her death at only 43, reminds us that people then didn’t live long. Almost no-one knew their grandparents, and almost no-one ever knew their grandchildren. In the times of Henry VIII, there were epidemics each year of the “sweating sickness”, which killed many thousands in London alone.

Thomas Cromwell, for instance, lost his wife and two children to the “sweating sickness”. Henry VIII, himself, each summer escaped London for the countryside to escape the “sweating sickness”. There was no running water, no flush toilets. The streets were filled with human and animal waste. People hardly ever washed, and therefore, by our contemporary standards, stank.

Despite the primitivity of life then, cathedrals and monasteries were built, which we, even today, would have trouble building.