697 Roman Catholic priests prohibit Irish women and children from
appearing on contested battlefields. This institutes a cultural change, for in
pre-Christian times, Irish women and children had often accompanied Irish
men into battle.
About 890 Beowulf is written. A villain of the piece is a homicidal
crone called Grendel’s mother. Meanwhile, in “Judith,” a much shorter
poem written about the same time as Beowulf,the poet praises a God-fear-
ing woman who gets a lustful feudal lord drunk and then beheads him with
his own sword. Although such a woman was unusual (medieval heroines
were usually martyrs rather than killers), the author obviously knew some-
thing about beheadings, as Judith, a handsome Hebrew woman, requires
two mighty blows to sever the demonic lecher’s head from its neck-rings.
About 970 According to a twelfth-century writer named Zhang Bangji,
Chinese palace dancers began binding their feet to make themselves more
sexually attractive to men. The crippling practice was widespread through-
out southern China by the fourteenth century, and throughout all of China
by the seventeenth, and is remarked because foot binding prevented well-
bred Han females from effectively practicing boxing or swordsmanship un-
til the twentieth century. (Some were noted archers, though, generally with
crossbows.) Still, into the 1360s, Hong Fu, Hong Xian, Thirteenth Sister,
and other Chinese martial heroines (xia) were sometimes portrayed by
women on Chinese stages, and there was a seventeenth-century reference to
a fourteenth-century woman named Yang who was said to be peerless in the
fighting art of “pear-blossom spear.” But in general such activity ended with
the spread of foot binding, and from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries
specially trained men played female roles in Chinese theatricals.
About 1020 The Iranian poet Firdawsi describes polo as a favorite
sport of Turkish aristocrats. According to the thirteenth-century poet
Nizami, aristocratic Turkish women also played polo, which was the Cen-
tral Asian equivalent of jousting.
1049–1052 A female general named Akkadevi becomes a heroine of
west-central Indian resistance to southern Indian aggression.
About 1106 Troubadours popularize pre-Christian legends about an
Ulster hero called Cû Chulainn who was so much man that by the age of 7
he already required the sight of naked women to distract him from wanton
killing. Further, as he got older, Cû Chulainn became notorious for con-
quering matristic societies by rape. Evidently Christian patrilinealism was
being imposed on Ireland, and the victors were describing how it was be-
ing done, as in the earliest forms of the story, Cû Chulainn’s martial art in-
structors included a woman known as Scathach (Shadowy).
1146 Eleanor of Aquitaine, the self-willed, 24-year-old wife of Louis
VII of France (and future wife of Henry II of England), joins the Second
Women in the Martial Arts 667