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

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In her final thoughts, Ramirez says : “Like so many others, I have been led by generations of historians before me, their contemporary agendas often presented in the guise of empirical truths. To compare, the 2021 London census reported around sixty percent of the population as white and the remaining forty percent as Asian, Black, mixed, and other, encouraging a re-evaluation of London’s medieval streets as similarly cosmopolitan and diverse. Sie erzählt unter anderen von Æthelflæd, der Herrscherin von Mercia, von Emma von der Normandie, Königin von England, von Hildegard von Bingen, Äbtissin, Dichterin, Komponistin und bedeutender natur- und heilkundiger Universalgelehrten und von Jadwiga von Polen, die zum König Polens ernannt wurde. The stories show medieval women who were not monolithic nor do they always fit the mold of the stereotypical patriarchal medieval culture.

I understand that it’s about the wider female experience or their lives but like I say, I think I expected more on specific women. 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. 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. By telling us of the archeologists, who uncovered the gender of the Birka warrioress or when the writings of Margery Kemp were found, Ramírez gives us an insight into the invaluable work of those people, who first brought the women's stories to life and gives credit were credit is (over)due.

While the enslaved or free status of this woman is unclear, her skeleton’s rotator cuff disease and spinal degeneration coincide with the skeletal damage found throughout the East Smithfield excavation. While Ramirez’s clunky prose doesn’t always serve her particularly well, there is no disguising her excitement as she sets these revelatory scenes before us. We all know WHO rewrote history (men) and WHAT they rewrote (anything featuring a powerful woman) but why? die Auswahl kann man definitiv streiten; ich hätte keine weiteren Ausführungen über Hildegard von Bingen gebraucht, über die gefühlt schon alles geschrieben worden ist.

Rotator cuff disease and spinal degeneration told of a life spent in brutal manual labour, probably coerced. About half the book focuses on England, which has really been done to death in popular history, but I was curious about a couple of the non-England chapters.For a non-medievalist audience, Femina is eye-opening and thrilling, a testament to women’s significance throughout history. Meaghan Allen is a Third Year PhD at the University of Manchester interested in the intersections of the medieval and the modern, especially violence towards women. But apart from that, Janina does not only talk about women but also about the ‘now and then’ situation.

And it also highlights our collective responsibility to negotiate how we want the future generation to view our timeline in the course of history. The narrative occasionally loses its thread, describing extensive historical context before circling back to the main subject.The conclusion must be that she had been trafficked to Britain along the same trade routes that delivered barrels of spices and bales of silk from the ports of the southern Mediterranean to the chilly north. For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. But first, we need to reassess history to gain more objective views about those written out of it, i. 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.