Guest post written by The Traitor of Sherwood Forest author Amy S. Kaufman
Amy S. Kaufman is the author of The Traitor of Sherwood Forest, a Robin Hood retelling based on the medieval ballads (Penguin Books, 2025). Amy holds a PhD in medieval literature and has written about the Middle Ages for both academic journals and popular websites, including The Washington Post. She is co-author of The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020).
A former English professor, Amy now writes full time from Vancouver, where she can’t stop taking pictures of the mountains. The Traitor of Sherwood Forest is her debut novel.
About The Traitor of Sherwood Forest: An immersive, sultry, heart-pounding historical reimagining of the Robin Hood ballads, told through the piercing eyes of one of his spies.
I grew up in the 1980s, and back then, we didn’t have a lot of female action. Women in my favorite movies and books were usually stuck being love interests or villains. So when Xena, Warrior Princess came along in the ‘90s, she was a revelation to me. Finally, a woman in a starring role who was super powerful, complex, and interesting, and who wasn’t just there to prop up the heroism of some guy! Post-Xena entertainment was a world full of riches for a young woman like me, as female heroes flooded the big and small screens and poured into video games and books.
All this is to say that no one likes to watch or read about women with exceptional skill and power more than I do. And yet.
There’s another category of women’s experiences and female strength that’s largely ignored, especially in medieval settings. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to exceptional women in medieval historical fiction and fantasy: princesses and queens, women with supernatural powers, and women who reject the trappings of femininity, casting aside their weaving and cooking and marriage arrangements for horses and swords. But what about the women who aren’t born special, who aren’t nobles and who aren’t fighters, who can’t predict the future or cast magical spells? These women usually show up as nameless, faceless figures: the women who do the drudge work. They’re considered unimportant at best, or perpetual victims at worst, trapped by a patriarchal world in a lifetime of suffering, unable to contribute anything to society.
This is the gap in historical fiction that I wanted to fill when I wrote The Traitor of Sherwood Forest from the point of view of Jane Crowe, a peasant woman who joins up with Robin Hood’s gang.
Part of the reason modern stories celebrate extraordinary women and erase the ordinary is that we have a lot of misconceptions about women’s roles in the Middle Ages. We imagine the life of a 1950s American housewife, but with shabbier clothes and no washing machine—women who are forced into marriage and then immediately lose their value when they lose their virginity. The medieval era is often used to prove that women’s subservience is somehow natural, that they belong at home, focusing only on family, because that’s “how it was” back then.
But that vision is way off the mark. If you actually look medieval history, you’ll see that women have always contributed to society, to the economy, and to politics and war, education and medicine, and even to writing their own stories.
You’ll find plenty of working women in The Traitor of Sherwood Forest because there were plenty of them in the medieval world. There has never been an era in which men were the only ones who worked, especially among ordinary people. My heroine, Jane, has been selling conserves to help support her family when she takes up Robin Hood’s offer for work in the kitchens at King’s Houses. In exchange for the job, she’ll have to spy on the nobles for him, and he asks her, “Why serve ladies and lords and sleep in a lonely bed, passing us secrets in the dark, when you ought to marry a decent man who will spare you this kind of work?”
Jane replies, “Begging your pardon, m’lord, but there will always be work, husband or none. More so once I wed.”
Women like Jane made the entire medieval world move, not just their individual households. They worked as weavers, healers, farmers, servants, and brewers. (If they were upper-class women, they could be scholars and translators, poets and writers, and even run abbeys and priories—but that’s not who we’re talking about today.) And women often married and remarried. They were especially desirable if they’d had children, because that suggested they could have more.
Obviously, the medieval world was not a utopia for women or for peasants. It was patriarchal and hierarchical, violent (although arguably not more violent than the modern world), and oppressive. But that doesn’t mean peasant women had dull lives of endless suffering. They had agency, and laughter, and love, and hopes and fears. They have plenty of stories to tell.
It’s important to keep telling extraordinary women’s stories. They’re inspirational! They inspired me, after all. But it’s also important not to erase ordinary women’s lives—especially now, when there’s a renewed campaign to shove women back into silence, to roll back our influence and power. We don’t want to live in a world where only wealthy women’s lives have value, where celebrities and elites get to tell all the stories and tell us how to live our lives.
Oppressed people always wish to break out of their oppression, and they don’t always do it with violence or swords or by riding away on their horses. Sometimes—and this is especially the case with women throughout history—staying under the radar and turning what little you have to your advantage can be a way to carve out your own space in the world, to have agency, influence, and power. They did this even when authorities didn’t want them to do it, even when they were forbidden or restricted by law. And they did it by ordinary means. They didn’t have to be extraordinary, exceptional, or magical to live rich, fulfilling, important lives. And that is a story worth telling.
