"The Inquisition Invented Peer Review"

That tracks. 

She's an interesting historian our of the University of Chicago, with books on Viking mythology including a series on Ragnarok. She makes a pretty good case that academic feminism improved our understanding of Viking metaphysics. 

COWEN: What is it that women scholars understand better about Viking metaphysics?

PALMER: [laughs] It’s not mainly that women scholars understand it, but it was the entry of women scholars into the field that helped us understand it. For a long time in Viking studies, nobody wanted to touch metaphysics with a 10-foot pole. This was because during World War II, Hitler’s minister of culture was somebody who had done his dissertation on Viking metaphysics, and you couldn’t work on Viking metaphysics without citing him. So, it made it sort of a poisoned field for a while.

However, when, in the late ’60s and ’70s, the advances of feminism meant that more women were entering academia, but still often being sidelined within academia and pushed into corners of research that others didn’t want to touch, a number of them started looking at topics that people hadn’t looked at in a long time, including that one, especially because Viking metaphysics revolves around weaving.

Now, weaving is a feminine-coded, feminine-gendered subject, both in the Viking period and in the period when history took its formation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lots of weaving-related equipment had been found in tombs and excavated here and there and then set aside, as this is women’s work and not of interest except to women.

Women started looking at it and were like, wait a minute, this isn’t a weaving shuttle; this is a staff of sorcery, as described in the sagas that very clearly described these staffs of sorcery that look like weaving shuttles because Viking metaphysics is dominated by ideas of threads of fate, the Norns spinning fate, weaving fate, etc. And it was women who were first willing to look at that stuff in detail.