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

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But to anyone familiar with the Middle Ages, some of Ramirez’s strategies feel a touch cliché or expected. 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. American Album: Rare Photographs Collected by the Editors of American Heritage, Abridged, How We Looked and How We Lived in a Vanished U. 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.

Overall, the analysis suggests she travelled to London from Africa and was subject to the same harsh living conditions experienced by many working-class fourteenth-century workers. 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. One of my favourite genres is books centering forgotten female stories and figures, and this is exactly what Ramírez has written in Femina. In her haunting fourth collection, National Poetry Series winner Joan Murray takes the challenge of performing poetry's original and still necessary tasks in the uncertain landscape of a new millennium. The book’s thesis is that (some) women in the medieval world had more agency, influence, and power than the traditional historical narrative has led us to believe.Before her death, Æthelflæd ensured that her crown would go to her daughter, Ælfwynn – the only time rule passed from one woman to another in early medieval England. Ranging from Aethelflaed to Hildegard of Bingen to Jadwiga, crowned king of Poland, this is a fascinating study of these women's lives.

Femina is an important addition to our understanding of a period still - mistakenly - thought to have excluded women from positions of power and significance. The noblemen of the kingdom elected Æthelflæd ruler of Mercia (roughly, the modern-day Midlands) following the deaths of her father and husband – a rare event in early medieval 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 the actual writing and stories wasn’t thrilling… a big focus on items rather than people’s histories… a few standout moments like the early chapter on Vikings and the last chapter on migration, race and sexuality but the middle parts bored me. 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. One is on the Polish female king, Jadwiga, who was later canonized—sadly this chapter read like a detailed Wikipedia entry; I didn’t get any more out of it than that.

This is what an interdisciplinary historian tries to do – bring a period to life by combining all types of evidence.Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting. Ich habe mich sehr auf dieses Buch gefreut und mit großen Erwartungen gelesen, bin aber leider sehr enttäuscht worden. From medieval queens, to Viking warriors, Ramírez truly does shine a light into the inner workings of the pre modern ages. The book is well illustrated with photos of artefacts, artistic reconstructions and useful maps, but for me there appears to be an idiosyncratic choice of historical figures, some well known, others unknown (the Loftus “Princess”), although each essay is engaging and full of interesting stories.

As ancient DNA genome sequencing and forensic analysis classify this woman as coming from African heritage, Redfern and Ramirez conclude she spent her early years in fourteenth-century Africa. Ramírez' prose made it feel like I was being spoon-fed with delightful history, loving every single bite. Wie zijn de vrouwen uit de geschiedenis van de middeleeuwen die uit onze parate kennis verdwenen zijn.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. Hier hätte ich mich über eine klassische Einführung mit Begriffsdefinition und Ziel des Textes gefreut. And it also highlights our collective responsibility to negotiate how we want the future generation to view our timeline in the course of history. My overall impression is of the book trying to make a larger argument (thesis) from a collection of engaging essays about medieval women who were influential in their time.