Scan barcode
bookdragon_not_bookworm's review
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
This book showed a side of the dark ages we don't know and showcased the written suppression of powerful women's accomplishments. It was so good, I read the book twice!
vikingllama's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
This is a narrative non-fiction style and not an academic review.
siria's review
2.75
My review of The Dark Queens is probably going to come across a bit like damning with faint praise. As a "narrative non-fiction" account of the lives of two Merovingian queens, Fredegund and Brunhild, written by a non-specialist, it's better than I expected it to be. Shelley Puhak has clearly read the limited primary sources carefully, contextualising them with archaeological evidence and secondary scholarship, and she does try to grapple with the methodological issues of using fragmentary and opinionated sources to do medieval women's history. I could see this working well in the college classroom, not because I agree with all the choices Puhak made in narrating what she imagines of Fredegund and Brunhild's lives—there's use of imaginative "must haves" to fill in the inevitable gaps—but because I think it could be a useful springboard to get students to grapple with methodological and conceptual choices.
The "Fredegund felt this" and "Brunhild may have done that" parts did irk me, but it feels churlish to critique Puhak for them overly when she's very clear that she's not writing a traditional academic history. But what actually made me pencil the most question marks in the margins of The Dark Queens were the tired invocations of the tropes of "the women who've been written out of history"/"I never read about these women when I was younger therefore everyone must have been ignoring them"/"why don't historians write more about these women", etc.
It's undeniable that because of sexism and/or misogyny, medieval chroniclers paid far less attention to women than they did to men, and that as best we can tell those chroniclers were men. But to say that Fredegund and Brunhild were erased from history isn't true—how then would we know anything at all about them? What we have is a historiographical tradition which often caricatures these queens in service of later political goals, as Puhak touches on in her last chapter—a less sexy proposition but a more complex one to grapple with. The fact that Brunhild and Fredegund don't crop up much in history books for kids in the U.S.—nor, I would imagine, do many Merovingians, male or female—might tell us something about geographical biases in the Anglophone world, but it doesn't mean that children everywhere are ignorant of who they are.
And I'm increasingly irritated with the kind of pop history that breathlessly decries how historians! don't! write! about! medieval! women! When since the 1970s there's been a steadily widening body of scholarship (building on a foundation laid from the late 19th century on) on women in the Middle Ages, generally by women scholars. But all that careful work on medieval women and power, ethnicity, memory, patronage, religion, lordship, etc, isn't as sexy as the promise of "the women they don't want you to know about." Ironic.
The "Fredegund felt this" and "Brunhild may have done that" parts did irk me, but it feels churlish to critique Puhak for them overly when she's very clear that she's not writing a traditional academic history. But what actually made me pencil the most question marks in the margins of The Dark Queens were the tired invocations of the tropes of "the women who've been written out of history"/"I never read about these women when I was younger therefore everyone must have been ignoring them"/"why don't historians write more about these women", etc.
It's undeniable that because of sexism and/or misogyny, medieval chroniclers paid far less attention to women than they did to men, and that as best we can tell those chroniclers were men. But to say that Fredegund and Brunhild were erased from history isn't true—how then would we know anything at all about them? What we have is a historiographical tradition which often caricatures these queens in service of later political goals, as Puhak touches on in her last chapter—a less sexy proposition but a more complex one to grapple with. The fact that Brunhild and Fredegund don't crop up much in history books for kids in the U.S.—nor, I would imagine, do many Merovingians, male or female—might tell us something about geographical biases in the Anglophone world, but it doesn't mean that children everywhere are ignorant of who they are.
And I'm increasingly irritated with the kind of pop history that breathlessly decries how historians! don't! write! about! medieval! women! When since the 1970s there's been a steadily widening body of scholarship (building on a foundation laid from the late 19th century on) on women in the Middle Ages, generally by women scholars. But all that careful work on medieval women and power, ethnicity, memory, patronage, religion, lordship, etc, isn't as sexy as the promise of "the women they don't want you to know about." Ironic.
stelhan's review
4.0
Very enjoyable and interesting, and a period in history which I know very little about.