Rietlanden Women's Office

MsHeresies 6 publishes an edited chapter from Caren Beilin’s forthcoming novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). It is typeset together with reworked material from the archive of the Neapolitan feminist artist collective Le Nemesiache, active between 1969 and 1995.

This fifth issue of MsHeresies republishes a selection of texts from Lola Olufemi’s book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021). The texts are typeset within a collage of material from the archive of Mukti (1983–7), a publication made by the London-based South Asian feminist collective of the same name. Interviews with Mukti members Chila Kumari Burman and Amina Patel are typeset on the centre spread.

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

Dedicated to the incredible – and incredibly beautiful – publication Triple Jeopardy (1971–75, by the Third World Women’s Alliance), as well as the ideas in Sophie Lewis’s book Full Surrogacy Now! – Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019). Ms Heresies 3 is reprinting the book’s final chapter, the essay *Amniotechnics.*

Each spread weaves edited material from Triple Jeopardy with Sophie Lewis’s essay. These intuitive and meticulous compositions are the outcome of looking at Triple Jeopardy through the lens of collaborative graphic design. Reading, typesetting, collaging, painting, and ornamenting became a way of designing together while attempting an homage, a re-reading, and a cross-publication friendship.

The second issue of MsHeresies includes collages, paintings, and hommages to the work of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose collaboration defied preconceived ideas of both text/image hierarchies, as well as rivalry at the cost of sisterhood. This visual essay is published alongside William Morris’s lecture Useful Work versus Useless Toil from 1884 which introduces the idea of the ornamental and its relationship to work and rest.

The ornamental can only come about under certain conditions: enough rest, agency, and variation of work. The ornamental is never an outcome or product of these conditions; but something intrinsically intertwined therein.