Women through history have always bled and this was always viewed as dirty, contaminated and something that should be kept in private. This ideology is still prevalent today, with social media banning images of female bleeding as not ‘part of the social community’ and the capitalisation upon women’s bodies with the #tampontax meaning it financially costs to be a woman.

Christ’s bleeding body was the blue print for medieval society, however, female blood and female bleeding is rarely explored. In the later Middle Ages, we witness a rise in medieval female mystics who drew upon parallels with Christ’s bleeding body and concluding that to purge blood means simply to love. This is evidenced in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe.

Psychedelic Medieval Blood provides an introduction of how blood representations in the later Middle Ages in England was considered and understood by using medieval medical texts, theology and the devotional literature of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

We need to expose and normalise this hidden history so that we can learn to respect and support the long suffering female body.

This book seeks to introduce and challenge how we consider female blood and asks the question, can we learn from the medieval mystical approaches towards female blood and implement this positivity into our modern attitudes?

Cover artist Gareth John Day

Editor Jon Lee

Author Rachael Lee