A review by al_mutaghatris
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici

3.0

I was told about this book as being an amazing anecdote to Foucault, someone with a much more historical and material understanding of biopolitics, one that was more firmly grounded in both feminism and Marxism. Reading it is a horror show, as many have mentioned, but the gruesomeness somehow still couldn't dissuade me from the feeling that there was wasn't a lot of actual research going on in the footnotes. The narrative flies all over Europe in such a way, and makes references to other studies so flippantly, that I started to become suspicious that maybe the book, for all of its rhetoric, wasn't a full-fleshed work of historical investigation. And this sounds to be the beef of actual medieval and early historians, like this cool genius on reddit (sunagainstgold)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7szaz1/what_are_historians_main_criticisms_of_silvia/

who really breaks it down. There are serious methodological and factual generalizations and errors in the book, which should make you see it as a controversial introduction to the topic rather than definitive account of what "essentially happened".
But it is still redeemable by the fact that it poses some of the big questions about the emergence of capitalism that we should always keep in mind, and a reason why having a casual interest in medieval history should be a requirement for any serious student of Marxism.