Monstrous tales
Woman’s Lore by Sarah Clegg Head of Zeus, 368 pages, £27.99
This fascinating study is ambitious in scope, guiding the reader across millennia of cultural history by focusing on the near-ubiquitous phenomenon of the demonic or monstrous female with supernatural powers. She has taken myriad forms, adopting features from dogs, snakes, birds and fish, oscillating between the hideous and the incomparably lovely. But every culture that author Sarah Clegg discusses has included some version of her. Many of her names begin with the letter L: the Mesopotamian Lamashtu, the Jewish Lilith, and the Greek Lamia, often drifting constantly between ethnic, cultural and linguistic communities.
An outstanding feature of this book is the insistence on cultural interpenetration that women – who, in most patriarchal societies, move between households and communities when they marry – have historically spearheaded. Clegg’s overarching argument is that such demonic females originally functioned in ‘woman’s lore’ – stories handed down between generations of women – to explain the horrors of pregnancy, childbirth and all-too-frequent perinatal deaths of both babies and mothers. Unlike Christian patriarchs, who blamed such obstetric disasters on women’s misdemeanours, female childbirth demons helped women externalise the loss of babies, transferring blame onto these envious spirits who were incapable themselves of bearing children that survived.
Over time, male priests and philosophers co-opted such demonic females, sexualised them, and turned them into seductive Edenic serpents, sirens and succubi who threatened men by undermining their virtue. By Victorian times, in Britain, pre-Raphaelite painters represented the demonic feminine as posing a fundamental threat to masculine potency.
Yet, in the 21st century, women have recently reasserted their claim to this archetype; feminists and LGBTQ+ advocates have adopted Lilith, Lamia and Medusa as symbols of female unruliness and resistance to patriarchal ideals of feminine conformity.
Clegg deftly fuses scholarly rigour, control of literary and archaeological sources, an accessible, entertaining style, wonderful illustrations and a warm-hearted sympathy with women’s plight across the centuries in this unusual and beautiful book.