A review by jaina8851
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages by Janina Ramírez

Did not finish book. Stopped at 68%.

I went to pick this book up after a few week hiatus and found myself saying "... do I actually WANT to keep listening to this?" and unfortunately the answer is no. I had high hopes about this book because it seemed like it would be really interesting. The hook at the beginning about the mystery of the buried princess was really cool, and the chapter about Hildegard of Bingen was particularly great. But I felt like a lot of the book suffered from... not actually talking about women? There was so much history retelling that didn't mention women at all and I just found myself disengaged. I had paused on the bits about Saint Hild because I was in the middle of reading Menewood by Nicola Griffith and wanted to finish that first, but when I picked it back up, I felt like I only got a cursory description of the rest of her life. This feels kind of stupid to say, but the parts of this book that shone were the parts were the women in question were already well documented. I was hoping for more fleshing out of the stories of the less known women, because I feel like that is what the book was claiming it would be. I feel like Hild and Menewood, while works of fiction about the course of Hild's younger life, did much more of what I was hoping for from this book in terms of being meticulously researched accounts of the day to day lives of women: descriptions of weaving and spinning, but also accounting and butchering and running the logistics of industry. Give me more of that in a book like this rather than high level overviews of men-centered history.