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

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Also, there have always been books about powerful women, what can this book contribute re-assessment of history as it only reviews the findings of other archeologist and historians? I suppose that is where the book didn't work for me - its so keen to prove the point that there were exceptional women succeeding beyond the strictures of their time that it seems to ignore most women, who were an important part of history just by living and contributing albeit though perhaps making no mark officially. e. through abstaining from sexual intercourse and meat, which encourages the women to not be constrained by their traditional roles as they were less likely to die from childbirth and could have the luxury to pursue other vocations in their lives. As for why Jadwiga was “king” rather than “queen,” this apparently was a question of semantics: her father, king of Poland and Hungary, had no sons and wanted his daughters to inherit in their own right, and this seems to have been a way of getting around rules against women ruling. The introduction tricks you up talking about suffragettes and medical women, so you think "wow this is so new and interesting!

She gained a degree in English literature, specialising in Old and Middle English, from St Anne's College, Oxford, before completing her postgraduate studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York. A compelling and breathtaking account of the women whose stories have been lost, ignored, or silenced in history. A joyous read ― Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Silk Roads --This text refers to the paperback edition.The Evening Standard, which in 1934 was mostly preoccupied with Hitler’s unsanctioned expansions, found something oddly apt about the fact that Kempe had waited 600 years before revealing herself to the world from the back of someone’s junk cupboard, describing her as “certainly queer, even for a queer age”.

In fact they exemplify Ramirez’s argument that the medieval era was a time as rich in human diversity as today. Indeed, no sooner had the news of Bj 581’s misgendering flashed around the world than its effects started to register in popular culture. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting.At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Her diet there had been good, and her bones showed none of the signs of malnutrition that were a feature of the rickety English, Scots and Welsh bodies buried alongside her.

Particular attention is drawn to the skeleton of a Black African woman whose teeth, essential for isotope analysis, lack the enamel pitting caused by the Great Famine of 1315-1322 that affected much of Northern Europe. Queerness, in its broadest sense of a point of view or set of behaviours running at a slant to received ideas, remains the key to Femina. But hopefully, someday, a silent or secret history can be written completely with unknown or erased figures, a possibility FEMINA has enticingly introduced.

If you're more of a contemporary historian or just fancy a nice history book, this is not your book. And the times she does speak about viking and medieval woman being more Liberal than we think is already known facts. The medieval period is often seen as a period heavily influenced by the clergy, with religions taking a central role in people’s daily lives as well as the men who took a central position in it. While the content is undoubtedly relevant and important, my reading experience was somewhat marred by the book's structural and stylistic choices. Another chapter begins with a fourteenth century journal found in a dusty closet of a country mansion and was almost trashed when it was rescued serendipitously by a visiting museum curator.