Femina: The instant Sunday Times bestseller – A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It

Product Information

Trotzdem ist dieses Sachbuch eine Lektüre, für die man viel Zeit und Interesse benötigt und ich glaube nicht, dass es thematisch zu allen passt. And whilst I learnt a lot, and have plenty I want to follow up on (not least Jadwiga), the book didn't feel quite as focused as it could be. Women have always been a part of it, as has the full range of human diversity, but we are only now beginning to see what has been hidden in plain sight. Both a plea for a new way of thinking about history and a commitment to putting women's lives back at the heart of things, I read it in one sitting.

Ramirez’s excellent introductory essay concludes identifying the book’s purpose more honestly: “We need a new relationship with the past, one which we can all feel a part of. At one point, Ramirez leads us into 7th century Loftus with its salt air, Iron Age enclosures and burial mounds but then breaks the spell by describing the enclosure as the size of half a football pitch! One of the most memorable (and timely) figures Ramirez uses is Emily Wilding Davison, a devoted suffragette who threw herself in front of King George V’s horse Anmer at the Epsom Derby on June 4, 1903. Within that Ramirez does a very impressive job of both standing on the shoulders of giants from the last century, and also utilising all of the technology that archaeology and other forms of scientific analysis can give her. Generell war leider nicht viel Quellenkritik zu finden; mir schien es so: wenn die Autorin eine Hypothese fand, die in ihr Narrativ passte, wurde sie wie ein Fakt behandelt und basierend darauf weiter gearbeitet.Vagabonds was very open and matter-of-fact about its attempt to put people back into history, and The Dark Queens pretty much got stuck in to its version of Game Of Thrones. Maybe it's about the quality of writing, and the fact there's always half a knowing eye on the present.

As I've watched a lot of these, not least those presented by Ramirez herself, many of the stories were familiar and I did find myself skimming in places. One is on the Polish female king, Jadwiga, who was later canonized—sadly this chapter read like a detailed Wikipedia entry; I didn’t get any more out of it than that. In the royal collections of Wawel Cathedral is an alms purse that once belonged to Jadwiga of Poland (c. Supported by recent findings, we could see that queerness and heretics did exist in the past and that history contains the other sides of official narratives.

It’s an interesting book, but I think the discourses are too focused on the women in the medieval Europe and shows lack of representation of women from other parts of the world. We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.

I have been a fan of Janina Ramirez for a few years and she (for me) makes history come alive whether on TV or on the page.Read a bit over 100 pages, though non-consecutive—once I realized I wasn’t liking it I skipped ahead to the chapters that interested me most, which ultimately did not change my mind. This is in the way of a summary - certainly the archaeological findings from the Birka Warrior Woman sits differently from the detailed writings of Margery Kemp or the near mythological status of Jadwiga of Poland (a proper woman king). I found every chapter interesting and thought provoking, and liked the way Ramírez used her topics to debunk myths about the Middle Ages and demonstrate how there are more similarities with our modern world than we may like to think. The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings; a patriarchal society that oppressed and excluded women.

The East Smithfield skeleton is an exciting example of science merging with history to literally unearth the buried reality of migration and diversity during the Middle Ages.I felt as if it was fairly sad that such minimal evidences had been found and smaller effort was going towards the belief in, or discovery of, women in history. A main objective of Femina, then, is to reappraise history and re-orient women’s place in it, from the margins into centrality. I wanted to love this but I started to get bored about 1/3 in , and I can't really put my finger on why. But I think that questioning and challenging assumptions is what she would expect her readers to do.