A wonderful storyteller, Ramirez’s enthusiasm is contagious throughout Femina. Aside from the individuals discussed above, Ramirez also visits well-known extraordinary women like Hildegard of Bingen (1098—1179), the renowned twelfth-century abbess, scholar, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and medical scientist, and the ever-eccentric Christian mystic Margery Kempe (1373—c. 1438). For a non-medievalist audience, Femina is eye-opening and thrilling, a testament to women’s significance throughout history. But to anyone familiar with the Middle Ages, some of Ramirez’s strategies feel a touch cliché or expected. There is an irking sense that these prominent women overshadow the over-written or simply forgotten women that make Femina so wonderful. Regardless, it is a well-researched and accessible (if at times clunky) labour of love. To endeavour writing a history about those who have been silenced is admirable, and maybe it is impossible to ignore those who somehow managed to have a presence and voice in their own times. But hopefully, someday, a silent or secret history can be written completely with unknown or erased figures, a possibility FEMINA has enticingly introduced. Al bij al was dit boek een teleurstelling, wat erg jammer is want het gegeven is erg boeiend. Wie zijn de vrouwen uit de geschiedenis van de middeleeuwen die uit onze parate kennis verdwenen zijn. Dat is het prachtige uitgangspunt van dit boek. Waarom ook zijn ze verdwenen? Vaak was het de tijd gewoon waardoor bronnen verdwenen, of de foute veronderstelling dat, wanneer iemand met veel pracht en praal is begraven, of wapens meekreeg, dit automatisch een man is. DNA-onderzoek leert ons nu dat dit ook vrouwen kunnen zijn. The women of the Middle Ages, so often silent and inconspicuous in our histories, find voice, agency and justice in this brilliant book Alice Roberts, bestselling author of Ancestors:A prehistory of Britain in seven burials

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. These accounts of how discoveries in the 20th and 21st centuries have allowed for the rewriting of ancient women’s lives are easily the best part of Janina Ramirez’s survey of current scholarship. Even when hi-tech methods are not in evidence, the findings still tell us so much about how medieval women’s lives came to be misinterpreted or marginalised in the first place. 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. Surviving law codes show that Viking women could own property, run their own estates and divorce their husbands if improperly treated. At Birka, the weights and scales of traders were found in more female graves than male. The incredibly preserved Oseberg ship, one of two now displayed at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, was found in the burial mound of two high-status women. The Vikings even venerated women as gods: their second most important deity was Freyja, goddess of no less than love, death, sex, beauty and war. Given what we now know of women’s place in Viking society, “the grave at Birka suddenly seems less of an anomaly”, writes the BBC broadcaster and Oxford academic Janina Ramirez in Femina, an interdisciplinary, revisionist history of the women of the Middle Ages. The Prix Femina is sometimes spelled Prix Fémina, but it is officially spelled without an accent, even in French.

Only now, through a careful examination of the artifacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women, such as: As she puts it in the author's note, "I am not here to convince you that it is high time we put women at the centre of history. Many have already done that." And she is correct, because thousands of women have tried and for the most part, begun to succeed. What is necessary, rather, is that these women have their stories told and remembered.

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. It cites numerous examples of women (and groups of women) who prove this thesis - they held some kind of influential role in medieval society. On the island of Björkö, in Lake Mälaren, Sweden, is a curious-looking landscape of gently undulating grassy mounds, from which more than 1,000 burials have been unearthed. This grave field is part of Birka, a Viking settlement that was occupied between 750 and 950 AD. When the skeleton marked as “Bj 581” was first excavated there in the late 19th century, it was assumed to be that of a man because of the axe, sword, spears and quiver of arrows buried alongside it, and was dubbed the “Birka Warrior”. This identification was questioned in the 1970s, as the slender forearm and the wide inlet of the pelvis were commonly female characteristics, but it wasn’t until 2017 that DNA extracted from a tooth showed two X chromosomes. The Birka Warrior was a woman. This is a thought provoking book, which is successful in that it has made me further question popular history books for the general reader, and it is well written and engaging. I’m dissatisfied to the extent that it is (hopefully) making a historically dated argument (I may be optimistic here!) and does so in a disjointed way. Similarly, in 1920 Lady Northcliffe, wife of Alfred Harmsworth, proposed to create a prize for French writers called the Northcliffe prize. Among the winners were Joseph Kessel in 1924, Julien Green in 1928, and Jean Giono in 1931. The last meeting of the jury for this prize was held on 10 April 1940, before the Nazis occupied France during World War II. Feminist approach: From the beginning I loved Ramírez' aim of telling the story of the middle ages through the notable women of the time. Once you start digging, you'll find that there are many more than you originally thought. As a medieval historian specialised in queenship, I'll admit that there were few of the women that I was not already familiar with. But even so, I still absolutely loved this book. I loved the originality of the approach. And I loved how Ramírez didn't try to write out the men from the narrative. And that is a truly feminist approach, where both sexes are allowed to coexist.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. Femina brings together what we know and how we know it about key (mainly western European) women from the Medieval period. It's aimed at a general audience - pitched at the level of a BBC4/PBS documentary. As I've watched a lot of these, not least those presented by Ramirez herself, many of the stories were familiar and I did find myself skimming in places.

Anita fragte neulich, was in letzter Zeit Reinfälle bei Büchern bei uns waren. Ich habe mich sehr auf dieses Buch gefreut und mit großen Erwartungen gelesen, bin aber leider sehr enttäuscht worden. Inventive, informative, surprising - this book is a revelation! Seeing so many remarkable women creating so much powerful history rewrites our entire sense of the medieval past Waldemar Januszczak, Chief Art Critic, Sunday Times

Janina Ramirez is a born storyteller, and in Femina she is at the peak of her powers. This is bravura narrative history underpinned by passionate advocacy for the women whom medieval history has too often ignored or overlooked. Femina is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Middle Ages and its place in the modern mind Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and Powers and Thrones Gabinari, Pauline (6 December 2021). "Ananda Devi, lauréate du Femina des lycéens 2021". Livres Hebdo (in French) . Retrieved 15 January 2022. Jean Birnbaum (5 November 2018). "Le prix Femina pour Philippe Lançon et son livre " Le Lambeau " ". Le Monde . Retrieved 13 February 2019.

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! 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. Le Femina 2016 pour Marcus Malte, Rabih Alameddine et Ghislaine Dunant". livreshebdo.fr. 25 October 2016 . Retrieved 26 October 2016. 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”. Of the monastery’s founder, Hild, Bede writes that “kings and princes sought… her counsel”. In 664 she presided over the consequential Synod of Whitby, at which the church of Northumbria was brought into line with the Catholic church of Rome; five men who trained under her went on to become bishops. “If there were king-makers in the medieval world,” writes Ramirez, “then she was the bishop-maker.”

In Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It , Janina Ramirez reappraises the status of women in the Middle Ages by presenting the lives of several notable women who have been omitted from or underrepresented in histories of the period. Through her engaging storytelling about an eclectic assemblage of women, Ramirez persuades readers to rethink received ideas of women in the Middle Ages as disempowered, insignificant figures, writes Meaghan Allen .