Eleanor Barraclough

“It’s extraordinary to think that so little survives of the very process that enables societies, cultures and histories to continue at all. Throughout human history, women–from the highest to the lowest social standing, under all sorts of circumstances, in all sorts of locations–have been pregnant and given birth, often in mind-boggling amounts of pain, always with the very real possibility of death or serious injury hanging over them. Yet so little remains that might serve as a witness to that experience. And so many who fell between the cracks of history are not only the ones who were physically pregnant and gave birth, but also the many others who helped them get through labour, helped raise the children, helped pass on the knowledge and the stories and the values that would be transmitted to the next generation. The people, in other words, who were responsible for the fact that there is any history to talk about in the first place.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

“Sometimes these traces tell us a lot about what their lives were like, at other times they give us only the briefest glimpse. Clothes, toys and gaming pieces, combs, trash and treasure, love notes and obscenities carved into slivers of wood: the sort of intimate ephemera that connect us to the people of the past. These are the ‘embers of the hands’ of this book title: the glowing remnants that survive when the bright flame of a life has vanished.”
― Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age