#women’s history

Institutions failed her completely, yet she did not fail scholarship, says Sabine Schmidtke of Hedwig Klein—a major yet (almost) forgotten Jewish scholar of Islamic Studies. We spoke with Schmidtke about Hedwig Klein’s tragically short but impactful life and the misconceptions that have obscured her legacy for far too long.

For centuries, church history has been told as if only a few voices mattered — and most of them were male. Countless women*’s lives and contributions remain hidden in archives, reduced to footnotes, or overwritten by later interpretations that say more about their interpreters than about them. What happens when we begin to read this history differently and ask not only who is remembered, but who has been made invisible?