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A review by lizshayne
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages by Janina Ramírez
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
I've been having a little bit of a medieval history moment in the past year or so and this is obviously another book in that wall. Ramírez tells a number of fascinating histories of the women whose lives in the middle ages were so much richer and more complicated than they are often portrayed as being. She's not trying to be comprehensive, which I appreciate, but to complicate the simplistic narratives that we have been told. She's relatively good at not sugar-coating her main characters, although one would not entirely be faulted if one came away from the book with the impression that things were objectively better for women in the Middle Ages than they were in the centuries between the 17th and 19th, which I think is also a overstatement of the case. (The 19th century remains the bugbear of our understanding of every century that came before it.)
It's also very Christian-centric and I would love the Jewish version of this book, if we knew enough women from before the 16th century to write it. But I still so appreciated both the stories and the way that Ramírez does her best to balance what we can know, what we can only speculate about, and what we owe historical figures when it comes to imaging how they might have experienced their own world rather than purely seeing them through our own eyes.
It's also very Christian-centric and I would love the Jewish version of this book, if we knew enough women from before the 16th century to write it. But I still so appreciated both the stories and the way that Ramírez does her best to balance what we can know, what we can only speculate about, and what we owe historical figures when it comes to imaging how they might have experienced their own world rather than purely seeing them through our own eyes.