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

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This is a thought provoking book, which is successful in that it has made me further question popular history books for the general reader, and it is well written and engaging. 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.

Gripping, incisive, brilliant, Janina Ramirez opens a door into hidden worlds, the secrets of women's lives. s from me, I want to read more on this topic, but next time something a little more of a deep dive rather than a surface insight. 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. 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. 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.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. An example of this would be the Cathars who practised a Christian dualist movement in 12th century southern France and were considered heretics by their contemporaries. The stories show medieval women who were not monolithic nor do they always fit the mold of the stereotypical patriarchal medieval culture.

I wish there was more specific focus on them and more detail to be uncovered and shared in this book. Das Kapitel über die Katharer war völlig überflüssig, von Frauen war kaum die Rede und am Ende erzählt die Autorin krude Theorien von Nazis und dem Heiligen Gral, wobei sie mich völlig verloren hat. I was looking forward to reading and learning about the women whose stories had always been overlooked in history. 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. An ambitious project, Ramirez orients each chapter around a particular theme and figure placing the past and present beside one another using modern scientific discoveries and cultural artefacts to provide contextual information for the subject she is discussing.Femina brings together what we know and how we know it about key (mainly western European) women from the Medieval period. Compassionately reinterpreted here, Jadwiga is revealed as a remarkable woman, who, when placed alongside other women, retells a misunderstood and misremembered medieval past. 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. There is only a limited amount of information about these women, it just seems to me that it's how it's dressed up which makes all the difference.

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 access you ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. And its interesting reading forewords and the authorial voice in these projects to see the degree to which they see themselves fighting against orthodoxy (and where they come from). Ramírez is currently the course director on the Certificate in History of Art at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education.The middle ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings: a patriarchal society which oppressed and excluded women. Ich liebe Serien wie "Vikings: Valhalla" oder auch "The Last Kingdom", weshalb ich einige Frauenfiguren aus Dr.

She discusses ways in which medieval women’s stories have been overlooked, rewritten, or even deliberately silenced because of stereotypes and biases. Briskly informing her husband, with whom she had 14 children, that she would rather see him beheaded than have sex with him again, she set off on a series of highly idiosyncratic pilgrimages which took her as far as Jerusalem.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.