Kim Phillips: Mermaids’ tales

Mermaids, those beautiful, seductive creatures that adorn rocks and lure sailors into wickedness with their magical songs, were a quite different kettle of fish in medieval times.

Professor Kim Phillips, a medieval historian who is head of the School of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts, says that, in fact, they were nothing like the friendly, curious figure depicted in characters like Disney’s Ariel.

“The medieval mermaid, as portrayed in sculptures, carvings and illuminated manuscripts of the time, was originally half woman and half bird, deriving from ancient precedents and called a siren – a fearsome figure associated with danger and sin, rather than beauty and charm.”

Kim specialises in the history of gender, sexuality and women in the medieval period, and has long been fascinated with the changing image of the mermaid over time, and how it continues to be so prominent in our collective imagination.

However, for her next book, she has broadened her focus to not only include mermaids, but also nursemaids, milkmaids and what are often referred to as ‘hags’, a pejorative term these days for an evil old woman, sometimes interchangeable with ‘crone’ or ‘witch’.

“I’m really interested in all of these medieval archetypes, and in particular, the meaning attached to each, especially in relation to the female breast as erotic, or as a source of income – in the case of the wetnurse or nursemaid – and nurturing and healing, and also as subject to disease and ill health.”

Kim says the project has had “a long gestation” because of her discomfort with treating the breast as an object, separate from the woman herself, as it has so often been in our own society.

“So, I’ve taken that focus and widened it to look more generally at the types of women who lived in the Middle Ages and the imagery that surrounded them and has influenced women ever since.”

She says each chapter will start with a well-known archetypal image, familiar to modern audiences, and look backwards from there.

“I’ve chosen Disney’s Ariel for the modern mermaid image, and what she has meant to young girls and women of our age, as a starting-off point; and for the milkmaid, I want to look at Thomas Hardy’s tragic Tess, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, with all that imagery of purity and corruption often combined in the image of the milkmaid … milk being a pure product that quickly goes off.”

And for the nursemaid archetype, she’s decided on Shakespeare’s nurse in Romeo and Juliet, a warm figure who had a strong bond with Juliet and remained important in her life beyond her initial role as a wetnurse.

“I’ve already researched royal families from the 12th to early 16th centuries and discovered 65 to 70 women who worked as wetnurses in royal households, through sources like financial records.

“Kings and princes valued their old nurses highly, so after their services were no longer needed, the royal treasury would pay these retired nurses a pension to live a comfortable life; these royal figures’ relationships with these women were often closer than the one they had with their actual mothers, who were often busy at court, travelling or otherwise unavailable to them.”

As for the archetypal ‘hag’ figure, Kim is yet to decide. “I’m open to ideas on that. I do know that they were usually viewed as undesirable by men, powerful and something to be afraid of.”

The book will be a blend of cultural and social history, drawing on literary and artistic imagery as it existed in the Middle Ages, says Kim.

To find out more about particular women’s lives in medieval times, listen to Kim on the Faculty of Arts podcast Research and Reason, available on Spotify, Amazon, Google, Apple and YouTube.

Julianne Evans