The British Library’s immense and absorbing exhibition on the lives of medieval women offers some eye-widening ironies as well as surprises. The curators aim to ‘upend conventional assumptions’ about the limitations on women’s lives, roles and influence in the period between roughly 1100 and 1500, and the result is a slightly dizzying range of exhibits – manuscript and printed texts, precious artefacts, paintings, sculpture, jewellery, textiles, letters and documents – as well as some charming interactive things to play with (and listen to and smell). We even have the skull of a lion, possibly the animal brought to England by Margaret of Anjou on her marriage to Henry VI.

The material is organised into three overlapping sections that cover private, public and spiritual lives, and visitors move through what at first seems a bewildering array of objects from different places and times. ‘Private Lives’ includes the domestic sphere, and pays great attention to women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, although in a depressing reflection of the imperatives imposed by medieval marriage, there is much less material illuminating women’s experiences of motherhood and their relationships with their children.

A selection of medical and surgical texts includes a diagrammatic illustration labelled ‘disease woman’ – a carefully annotated anatomical drawing showing all the ways the female body can go horribly wrong – but also a wealth of practical gynaecological works: meticulously illustrated guides to the dangerous positions a baby can