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

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US writer Julie Otsuka wins Femina foreign novel prize". France24. 6 November 2012 . Retrieved 6 November 2012. Some women who are described in this book are quite popular in their native countries and countless scholarly research is already written about them. For example, Jadwiga who married Jagiełło in the Union of Krevo that established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is widely celebrated in Poland, especially during the era of the partition of Poland by the neighbouring Russia, Austria and Prussia in the 19th century, as she was seen as a symbol of Poland’s enduring history. Yet Janina’s research adds more values to Jadwiga’s role in Poland, particularly when compared with her husband Jagiełło in terms of their contribution in negotiating Poland’s position in the medieval Europe and the establishment of the first university in Poland, i.e. Jagiellonian University in Kraków, which was named after Jagiełło even though it was established by Jadwiga. Gripping, incisive, brilliant, Janina Ramirez opens a door into hidden worlds, the secrets of women's lives. She is a detective and guide on this, an eye-opening, wonderful journey into the power, beauty and reality of early women's experiences Kate Williams, author of England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton 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. 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.

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. One of my favourite genres is books centering forgotten female stories and figures, and this is exactly what Ramírez has written in Femina. 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: Trois romancières rejoignent le jury du Prix Femina". LEFIGARO (in French). 2 June 2021 . Retrieved 8 March 2022. 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.Ramirez’s essay style of an introduction to each chapter’s subject by reference to a relatively contemporary event (for example the 1997 canonisation of the fourteenth century Jadwiga, “King” of the Poles in chapter 7), followed by an imaginative verbal recreation of an event in the individual’s life and then an exploration of their wider historical significance is a good approach. But it does become repetitive and underlines the discontinuity of the essays. 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 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! Erst einmal war die Einführung sehr seltsam, weil es um eine Suffragette in den 1920er Jahren ging. Es wurde zwar irgendwie eine Parallele zu Frauen im Mittelalter gezogen, die ich aber nicht nachvollziehen konnte und deplatziert gewirkt hat. Hier hätte ich mich über eine klassische Einführung mit Begriffsdefinition und Ziel des Textes gefreut.

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. US author wins top French literary prize". France24. 6 November 2013. Archived from the original on 9 November 2013 . Retrieved 8 November 2013. Spellbinding, passionate, gripping and magnificently fresh in tone, boldly wide in range, elegantly written, deeply researched, Femina is a ground-breaking history of the Middle Ages. It brings the world to life with women at its very heart, centre stage where they belong. What a delight. Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography 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 .

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.

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. Revelatory... Ramirez shows again and again that dark age Europe was a far more various place than we like to believe Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian Writing: From start to finish this almost didn't feel like non-fiction. Ramírez' prose made it feel like I was being spoon-fed with delightful history, loving every single bite. This book has done more for women’s history than almost any other. Rather than continuing to fetishise the murderer, Hallie presents the victims’ stories. By immersing readers in the social conditions the women experienced, the five have contexts other than being written off as “prostitutes”. This book has also affected the true crime genre, where more writers are focusing on victims rather than perpetrators. I am not a fan of essays. The reading of them is perceived by me as being fragmentary. This is my only real complaint. The preface and introduction were too long.

Le Femina 2016 pour Marcus Malte, Rabih Alameddine et Ghislaine Dunant". livreshebdo.fr. 25 October 2016 . Retrieved 26 October 2016. The Prix Femina is sometimes spelled Prix Fémina, but it is officially spelled without an accent, even in French.

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). Dat uitgangspunt over de vrouwen in de geschiedenis en later ook even van andere minderheden, is dus prachtig. Janina Ramírez is well known for bringing her interdisciplinary approach and boundless enthusiasm to her TV programmes and this book bears the same hallmarks. Ramírez draws her evidence from art and architecture as well as written texts to add context to her narrative, and joyfully gives life to the subjects of her chapters with quirky details.Jean Birnbaum (5 November 2018). "Le prix Femina pour Philippe Lançon et son livre " Le Lambeau " ". Le Monde . Retrieved 13 February 2019. Dupuy, Éric (7 November 2022). "Claudie Hunzinger, Rachel Cusk et Annette Wieviorka primées au Femina 2022". Livres Hebdo (in French) . Retrieved 8 November 2022.

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