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

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Trois romancières rejoignent le jury du Prix Femina". LEFIGARO (in French). 2 June 2021 . Retrieved 8 March 2022. The amount of male figures who simply wouldn't, or even didn't, accomplish what they've been credited without a woman's intervention for was ridiculous. It seems absurd that these powerful icons could just be forgotten. We wouldn’t consider describing what it’s like to be alive today based purely on news stories. We would personalise and fill our account with music, film, food, fashion and more. This is what an interdisciplinary historian tries to do – bring a period to life by combining all types of evidence. Valkyrie includes Old Norse poetry alongside archaeological finds and painted runestones to show how the lived experiences of women in the Viking world were varied and fascinating. Archaeology has always looked for the many rather than the few, so it is the natural bedfellow for more inclusive historical approaches. It is easy to assume that everyone in the middle ages, particularly women, lived and died within sight of their local parish church. But many travelled vast distances and engaged with cultures thousands of miles away, as this book reveals. Overall, I did like it, and I did hear about some new-to-me ladies from history, but the context of the women wasn't always the focus, and what I really learned is how much has been suppressed or changed or just not uncovered as yet. 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 wish there was more specific focus on them and more detail to be uncovered and shared in this book.

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. Instead the book reads like a collection of case studies with which to make the argument that the role of historically significant medieval women has been downplayed when histories of the medieval period were being being written in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. This is “topped and tailed” with essays outlining Ramirez’s argument, that the histories of the medieval period need to be expanded to reflect the simplification and distortion of women’s roles, and this book provides some examples of historically significant medieval women.

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Le Femina 2016 pour Marcus Malte, Rabih Alameddine et Ghislaine Dunant". livreshebdo.fr. 25 October 2016 . Retrieved 26 October 2016. The really wide variety of evidence cited - historical, material, archaeological, written, artistic, architectural Beautifully written, wonderfully free-ranging and gloriously original, Femina makes us look into the mists of history in new, exciting and provocative ways. A joyous read Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Silk Roads There are currently four categories: Prix Femina, Prix Femina essai, Prix Femina étranger (foreign novels), and Prix Femina des lycéens.

The Prix Femina [1] is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse (today known as Femina). The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury. They reward French-language works written in prose or verse, by both women and men. The winner is announced on the first Wednesday of November each year.Generell war leider nicht viel Quellenkritik zu finden; mir schien es so: wenn die Autorin eine Hypothese fand, die in ihr Narrativ passte, wurde sie wie ein Fakt behandelt und basierend darauf weiter gearbeitet. Vor allem im Kapitel über Hildegard von Bingen ist mir das aufgefallen.

Femina examines case studies of women from throughout the early ages by analysing artifacts, providing contextual information and interspersing the text with vivid descriptions to bring the ancient women to life. In 9 chapters, Ramírez expertedly weaves an astounding narrative firmly explaining how, if not wrong, but distorted modern history truly is. As both writer and broadcaster, Dr Janina Ramirez radiates tremendous passion for her subject. To spend time in her company is to soon find yourself intoxicated by the vast drama of human history, with all its far-off wonders, frustrating mysteries, and tantalising echoes that still resonate in our modern world Greg Jenner, author of Ask a Historian and Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity 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. And yet, the Lady of the Mercians is little known. Ramirez writes that her brother Edward, who succeeded Alfred as king of Wessex, “actively suppressed her reputation” out of fear that her power might rival his, and removed Ælfwynn from the throne she had inherited. 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. 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. As for why Jadwiga was “king” rather than “queen,” this apparently was a question of semantics: her father, king of Poland and Hungary, had no sons and wanted his daughters to inherit in their own right, and this seems to have been a way of getting around rules against women ruling. Both were declared kings while still young girls, but married off to older men on top of the usual control by advisors that any young rulers face. Both also died young.

A second reason for this is Femina gives a reason for this revisionist history we learn today. We all know WHO rewrote history (men) and WHAT they rewrote (anything featuring a powerful woman) but why? And how? Femina examines this point carefully. One of my favourite genres is books centering forgotten female stories and figures, and this is exactly what Ramírez has written in Femina.

The book consists of a series of essays. An assortment of early, middle and late medieval women are presented. Examples are a female Viking warrior, the embroiderers who created the Bayeux Tapestry, the female monarchial King Jadwiga of Poland, the musician and composer Hildegard of Bingen and a woman who travelled and saw to it that her own life history was written. Through her we see an ordinary woman like you and me. The variety of the women we meet is wide. That which is made evident is that the women of the Middle Ages have many similarities with women of our own time. You are in for some surprises! Sommige hoofdstukken boeiden me ook meer dan anderen, bvb dat over het tapijt van Bayeux of Hildegard von Bingen. Zo zijn er nog wel een paar. Dat komt omdat ik hier al een kapstok van kennis had waar ik dan de gelezen gegevens gemakkelijk kon aanhangen en driftig ging googelen.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. This is in the way of a summary - certainly the archaeological findings from the Birka Warrior Woman sits differently from the detailed writings of Margery Kemp or the near mythological status of Jadwiga of Poland (a proper woman king). 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). In de kijker staan een aantal vrouwen, en 1 keer een ding, waar telkens een hoofdstuk aan gewijd is. Jammer genoeg is de vertaling van dit boek ondermaats en hangt het vertelde aaneen van “wellichts” en “waarschijnlijks”.