Book Review: "Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It"
In her new book, Janina Ramirez shines much-needed light on some of the forgotten women of the Middle Ages.
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Despite the work of generations of historians, when you say the words “Middle Ages” today, many people will no doubt think of an era mired in misogyny, religious devotion, and grime, an era in which kings and knights ruled from castles and everyone else labored below. As Janina Ramirez points out in her new book, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, however, this is very much an outdated and limiting way of looking at this pivotal period in European history. In particular, she argues that it is high time that we shine much-needed attention on the many women who actually rose to prominence but whose lives and deeds have been largely ignored.
Ramirez is wide-ranging in her analysis, and she uses evidence from a wide range of fields, including textual analysis, DNA testing, and archaeology. Where she can, of course, she uses the women’s own words, and we are fortunate that, despite the preponderance of male voices and points of view in the historical record there are still enough medieval women whose words were recorded that we can gain a nuanced portrait of their lives, desires, and deeds. This is particularly true of figures like Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Hildegard of Bingen, all of whom occupy pride of place.
Even when words are not available, however, Ramirez still exercises the historian’s skill of reading between the lines. This is true, for example, of the women of the Cathars, most of whose voices and perspectives we can only glean from the records of those who persecuted them in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. It is also true of the warrior women of the Vikings, who left behind tantalizing hints about their possible roles in their societies. Ramirez excels at sifting clues and providing hypotheses, even as she is also open about the fact that there are, quite simply, some things that we can never really know for certain. The best that we can do in such circumstances is interpret the evidence with as much rigor as we can, and in this Ramirez more than succeeds.
While Ramirez certainly dwells on the biographical details of these women when she can, she also allows us to see them as vital parts of a vibrant and colorful medieval world, one sharply at odds with the rather monochromatic view with which far too many people still view the period. Each chapter spends some time introducing us to the cities and countries in which these women lived and loved and died. As a result, we understand them not just as discrete individuals but also as part of a social fabric and a larger world.
Ramirez deserves a great deal of credit for focusing on women who have received significantly less attention than, say, Eleanor of Aquitaine or her fellow queens (though some royals do indeed appear in these pages). Historians have long tended to focus on those women who occupied the upper echelons of political power, but Femina reminds us that there were many other women of various social orders who called medieval Europe home. Their viewpoints and lives may not have had quite as much influence on events as their upper-class counterparts, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve as much recognition and understanding.
In her conclusion, Ramirez draws our attention to issues of identity. As she rightly points out, it would be misleading to apply our current terms to the past and those who lived there, even as we need to also pay attention to those who existed on the margins of such society. She draws particular attention to a woman of potential African descent and a person who we might identify as transgender, demonstrating how the medieval world and its categories of difference were both similar to and different from our own.
What I particularly appreciated about this volume was its ability to be both intellectually rigorous while also being accessible. Like a good historian, she frequently turns to the sources, allowing these women to speak for themselves, inviting us into his strange yet oddly beautiful world. I was particularly entranced by Ramirez’s inclusion of Hildegard, arguably one of the most accomplished polymaths of the Middle Ages, someone who didn’t let her gender or her lack of formal training get in the way of her educated ruminations on almost every aspect of the world around her.
Though much of Femina rightly focuses on the women of the Middle Ages, Ramirez begins each chapter with a noteworthy moment in the modern era, showing how the works and people of the past were discovered by those in the present. Some of these discoverers were themselves women of formidable agency and intellect, including Margarete Kühn, who managed to sneak a bound copy of Hildegard’s works out of the custody of the Soviets. In weaving together the past and the present, Ramirez demonstrates the extent to which it is still vital to continue scouring the past for new traces of the women who lived there, in order to give them their due.
Ramirez rightly points out that all historians are biased in one way or another. For centuries, the women of the Middle Ages have been largely written out of the period, shunted and confined to the margins. This has not only done a disservice to the medieval era–helping to cement in the popular imagination as a time both unimaginably distant and hopelessly backward–but also to these women themselves. Their manifold and extraordinary accomplishments have been deliberately overlooked in favor of men, robbing far too many people of a more nuanced and textured understanding of the past.
Ultimately, as Ramirez herself acknowledges, Femina is not the end of a journey to understanding the medieval past but instead as a beginning. As interest in the period continues to grow–thanks to both popular histories like those of Ramirez and the enduring popularity of the quasi-medieval Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon–hopefully more people will examine the past and the extraordinary women who lived there.