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

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Through isotope analysis on skeletons found in the East Smithfield Black Death burial ground, Redfern discovered that many of the bones belong to people from outside London including Wales, Devon and Cornwall, and the Western Isles of Scotland, with twenty-nine percent classified as Asian, African, or dual heritage. 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. Books like this are vital to start to set the record straight, but there is a question around how that plays to someone who is already on board with the project (and is critical of Great Anyone Theory). I found this very frustrating and disappointing but that’s probably mostly due to my expectations of what I thought this book was going to be. The varied and impressive female characters in this book offer a less prominent but worthwhile perspective on the period, and make for a memorable book.

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. 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.Fascinating look at the Middle Ages through the stories of women who were significant in their time but whose reputations were later obscured, rewritten or lost. The subtitle also suggests there will be more about women in general, rather than focusing solely on the stories of these women who are by definition exceptional. But she chooses her case studies purposefully and manages to tell the story in a way that entertains without violating the principles of sound academia.

Diese patriarchale Sicht auf die mittelalterliche Welt stammt aus der Feder von Historikern, sie wurde Jahrhundertelang in unsere Geschichtsbücher so aufgenommen. As such, queerness, in its broadest sense as that which is eccentric, peculiar, or outside of, is at the heart of Femina.At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Femina has great content and information on the great women in history that were written out for whatever reasons. 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. And it also highlights our collective responsibility to negotiate how we want the future generation to view our timeline in the course of history. Feminist approach: From the beginning I loved Ramírez' aim of telling the story of the middle ages through the notable women of the time.

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 author is a television presenter and you can really, really tell—she spends a long time setting the scene in each chapter, including multi-page “imagine yourself in 7th century Loftus. Ich habe mich sehr auf dieses Buch gefreut und mit großen Erwartungen gelesen, bin aber leider sehr enttäuscht worden.