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

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. While the content is undoubtedly relevant and important, my reading experience was somewhat marred by the book's structural and stylistic choices.

It is very factual, not ideal for those who don't know much about medieval times as you will be lost. A main objective of Femina, then, is to reappraise history and re-orient women’s place in it, from the margins into centrality. But by re-examining extraordinary women like Hildegard and Margery, casting a new light on over-written females like Æthelflæd and Jadwiga, and using recent discoveries to reconstruct lost individuals like the Loftus Princess and Birka Warrior Woman, the medieval world has taken on a different complexion.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. I enjoyed the book but did think that, if all the background material, opinions and conjectures had been left out, the material was a little thin. Hier hätte ich mich über eine klassische Einführung mit Begriffsdefinition und Ziel des Textes gefreut. This is a fascinating insight into the lives of women who deserve to be far more well known than they are and it is my sincere hope that this will not be the last book to give such people a voice.

The jury is out on whether she was experiencing post-partum psychosis or spiritual ecstasy (she claimed that all 12 Apostles had turned up for her nuptials with Jesus) but there is no doubting the outrageous originality of her voice.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. The section on the Cathars—the victims of the 13th century Albigensian Crusade in southern France—was a bit better; while again pretty surface-level on the individual women, it compensates for that by including a bunch of them along with addressing the larger issues at play. e. Jagiellonian University in Kraków, which was named after Jagiełło even though it was established by Jadwiga. There is an early attempt to take down the Great Man Theory of history, but - even when the actual identity of her women cannot be identified - there is a sense that she wants to respond with a Great Woman Theory. Others chose a life of religious contemplation and wielded the influence and power that comes from being God's representative on earth.

Femina brings together what we know and how we know it about key (mainly western European) women from the Medieval period. Ook is in de loop van de geschiedenis de vrouw naar het achterplan verdwenen, onzichtbaar en ondergeschikt geworden, terwijl enkel de geschiedenis van de machtigen en de heersers werd bewaard. Careful to underline that she is not re-writing history but rather shifting the focus from men to women, Femina’s overarching goal is to use the visible – physical artefacts – to reveal the seemingly invisible – women.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Compassionately reinterpreted here, Jadwiga is revealed as a remarkable woman, who, when placed alongside other women, retells a misunderstood and misremembered medieval past. Historischen Persönlichkeiten Gefühle anzudichten und Worte in den Mund zu legen ist höchst unprofessionell. 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.