Review : Femina

Thanks to some Amazon confusion, my reading order is all out of whack. When I originally ordered Janina Ramirez's Femina it got lost in the post, which led to the happy replacement with Lost Realms. So when I saw this book in a physical bookshop, I immediately bought it. My mythology readings are now all intermingled with history, and I'm still waiting for that Celtic Myths That Shape The Way With Think... but first world problems, I guess.

Femina isn't a bad book by any means. The problem is the author somewhat reminds me of Michael Wood : excellent on the screen, but nothing special as an author. Not as extreme as Wood though – I watched all of his "In Search Of..." shows on TV, but could never finish a single one of the books. Or maybe Judith Herrin's Byzantium : The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, which was in absolutely no way whatever surprising. No, that's still unfair... Femina is better than that. For one thing, I easily finished it, whereas Byzantium I gave up about a third of the way through in outright disgust at the utter lack of anything even mildly unexpected.

The problem is that Femina just isn't the revolutionary tome the author thinks it is. It's decent, yes, it's just not at all Earth-shattering, and doesn't offer the world-changing view of medieval history that Ramirez really quite clearly seems to think that it should. As I've said before, the impact of some books can feel immediate whereas others are only felt after many years have passed. But in all cases some of the lessons of any good book are instantly obvious, even if their fully importance requires some time to gestate.

With Femina I'm struggling to think of a single profound take-home point regarding Ramirez's central message. I suppose the archaeological evidence that medieval London has a similar racial distribution as today's is one, though this is nothing much to do with women; evidence of cross-dressing and transgender roles is another but isn't really any sort of surprise. I'm coming from a background of reading of blatant homophillia and even borderline paedophilia in Plato (and considerably worse than this from the Roman emperors), so that there was a medieval male prostitute who dressed like a woman... yes ? And ? That's about as surprising as a gay rugby player. Oooh, a big burly man wearing tight shorts who likes grappling with other men, and he's gay, you say ? Well, I'm SHOCKED !

Of course there were issues of gender fluidity in the medieval period, why wouldn't there be ? Sexuality is and always has been complicated. It's nice to have evidence for this, but there's much more interesting stuff on the History Hit podcasts.

I did wonder if I was really the target audience for this book though. If you're of the persuasion that Hollywood history is basically accurate, being exclusively male-dominated until all these pesky "feminists" showed up in the 20th century, then you might well get a good deal more out of it : provided you're proceeding from a position of mere ignorance and not bias. For these people I'd recommend Femina very strongly. But for history enthusiasts, I wouldn't, for the simple reason that its main message contains precious little of anything I wasn't previously aware. 

And if you're the sort of person who clings to a nostalgic fantasy of a rosy medieval Europe in which women spent all their time in the home attending to their brave menfolk, then this book definitely isn't for you at all, being deliberately designed to wind you up the wrong way. You deserve it, to be sure, but it won't help.

Taken purely as a history book and ignoring the author's lacklustre delivery of her main theme, this isn't a bad book by any stretch – but it isn't a good one either. Oh, it's got good bits in it to be sure, and they aren't few in number. In particular, the history of the Cathars was well-told and new to me (Ramirez is perfectly capable of writing an engaging history when pinned down to a specific task). The detailed examination of how the Bayeux Tapestry does not show Harold being shot in the eye was also carefully considered and well-explained. And there are plenty of bits of intriguing analysis scattered throughout, such as (provocatively, and I think not definitively) how the plague engendered a new kind of more hateful racism towards foreigners, and how the biblical Three Wise Men were assigned different racial characteristics to indicate different traits.

The problem is that the main message is almost relentlessly unfocused. All the good bits are jumbled up and Ramirez continuously goes off on tangents to nowhere, leaving a narrative that's frequently all over the place. With an opening profession of deliberately trying to write women back into history, it spends far too much time giving potted histories of incidents which have little or no female involvement. The problem often isn't that it's too agenda-driven (I would have left it on the shelf if I didn't like history with an axe to grind !) but that it doesn't do this enough. 

It feels a lot like a television script that ended up in print by mistake : the kind of non-linear topic-jumps that can enliven a documentary don't work well in a book at all. She often ends up repeating basic points quite unnecessarily, like introducing a Viking warrior woman and then restating her femininity a couple of pages later as though this were still a point of revelation. Or that the Bayeux Tapestry isn't really a tapestry, a interesting little factoid that really didn't need any special emphasis but got mentioned almost as a magical incantation*. To do what, I'm not sure... summon the ancient wisdom of the embroiders, perhaps ? 

* Much as how Keir Starmer perpetually insists on saying that his dad was a toolmaker, as though there can be possibly be anyone left in the country who wasn't viscerally aware of this totemic detail. 

But the biggest flaw by far is that Ramirez doesn't know what to do with all the stories she assembles. Now I would think the obvious approach is to look for broad trends in how women acted and were regarded in society, and illustrate this using individual, representative examples. But Ramirez almost never connects any of the stories to the bigger pictures. The result all too often ends up as a series of unconnected anecdotes which say little or nothing about how women were regarded more generally in their different roles. 

I also take issue with Ramirez's throwaway claim that this generalisation isn't possible because life was too varied between individuals : surely we can we can generalise what life is like for modern women just as we can for men* – and surely, especially, recognising that prevailing social attitudes have a gender bias is the book's raison d'etre, and trying to understand past attitudes should be front and centre of a book like this ? Ramirez has quite a few other throwaway claims like this which in the end come across as just a bit weird.

* We can certainly generalise how the genders regard each other, at any rate.

For all these reasons I see no point in doing the kind of in-depth summaries I've been doing a lot lately. Overall, I'm giving this one a 6/10. Some interesting stuff, all readable enough, but badly in need of editing. Rather than feeling enthusiastic it comes across as uncontrolled and sometimes plodding. Worse, it also verges into accusative, judgemental language as though talking to children – at one point I was convinced she was about to launch into a tirade about how the word "pagan" was offensive, but thankfully this didn't happen. It can on occasion be exposition of the worst form, directly telling the reader how to think and how to feel, rather than just laying out a narrative for their consideration. 

I do feel duty-bound to at least give some very brief descriptions of the more interesting points in the book, however.

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Bede : Like Bates. but unlike Morris, Pryor and Williams, Ramirez sticks to the view that Bede was a reliable witness regarding the genocidal invasion of the Anglo-Saxons. Whereas Morris and Williams try and put some nuance into this, thinking it through critically with different strands of evidence, Ramirez does so only in a hotchpotch sort of way : emphasising Bede's intelligence and provable reliability in other areas when she wants to support him, but then excusing him on the rarer occasions she doesn't believe him. It needs a self-consistent, generalised framework to properly accommodate everything. Bede undoubtedly was, like everyone else, at times reliable and at times less so, but as it stands, this is a blatant case of pick-and-choose.

I also take issue with Ramirez's statement about Marc Morris saying the lives of Anglo-Saxon women are "unrecoverable". This is misleading : he actually said there wasn't enough material to dedicate an entire chapter to an individual woman, which is not at all the same as saying that nothing is known of their lives at all.

The ever-changing past : Sometimes Ramirez offers an interesting insight into how the past has been continuously re-written, nicely complementing Larrington on how Viking culture has been inappropriated by the far right. She also explains what the "great man" theory really means, and I have to say this was one point I found genuinely shocking : it means not just that history is strongly influenced by pivotal moments and people, but is overtly masculine in that they are great men. Even worse, in this notion history is utterly dominated by a handful of these unlikely figures, with the rest of us being mere playthings of the gods. This is a prospect demeaning to men and women alike.

Full marks to Ramirez on this score, but I was less impressed by her commentary on how everyone, not just the far right, has supposedly inappropriately rewritten history for their own times. I think we all inevitably do this from our own perspective, and we can't blame the Victorians for seeing history through their own imperial lens. It's this sense of judging our ancestors as though we could still do something about it (by no means unique to Ramirez) that I find very strange and distracting. 

For example : come on, horned helmets are a harmless myth of Viking battle attire, not something to badger modern people about as though they themselves were Nazi sympathisers. Just because some far right loonies associate themselves with this symbolism doesn't mean the rest of us do; the attitude that "oh, it's a racist symbol now, we can't use it" is something that I find all too strange and strangely common among certain segments. I say no. Fuck the racists. They don't get to tell you what to do and they certainly shouldn't get to tell us what symbols mean. Stop telling people off for doing things for perfectly innocent reasons just because some other people want it to mean something else entirely.

The Vikings : Sticking with the theme, Ramirez does have some interesting details to add. She shares with Larrington a hatred of the drinking-out-of-skulls myth, so I'm left feeling I must be the only person in the world who never really heard of this. Unlike Larrington, she mentions the female counterpart to Valhalla (Folkvangr) ruled over by Freya. Ramirez has an interesting take on the supposed surplus-male population leading to Viking raids, saying this may have arisen from patriarchal polygamy : with not enough women to go around, and the need to enhance one's status for any chance of marriage, it was this social practise rather than the actual demographics that may have contributed to the Viking era. Interestingly, despite this male-dominated drive to raid and conquer, there's evidence not just of shield maidens but also female naval commanders. 

All to the good, but calling them "orally literate" just feels cringe. I absolutely accept, unhesitatingly, Ramirez's assertion that Viking culture was complex and sophisticated despite a severe deficiency in writing, but there's no reason to mangle the words thus.

Heterogony : Overall, I think Ramirez makes the point very well that past societies were no more monocultures than we are today. The Church was not the all-powerful institution we think of it, with beliefs varying widely within the general Christian framework. Even for the Cathars, attitudes to sex and marriage and child-rearing varied dramatically, with some espousing total abstinence and others thinking that families were a perfectly normal affair. In England, Margery of Kemp lived in a separate house from her husband, which was apparently not that uncommon, but also seems to have dearly loved him and yet at times not liked him very much : and never wanted sex with him, but deeply desired it from others. She also seems hugely annoying, wailing for no good reason and judging everyone harshly for minor misdemeanours. Truly a singular embodiment of how complex individuals can be and how they can defy their cultural norms.

King Jadwiga of Poland : Again Ramirez presents a disorder and disjointed account, first introducing this extremely important and unfairly overlooked character before going off on one about her handbag. Only then does she turn to the history. Jadwgia (a.k.a. Hedwig) wasn't queen of Poland, nor even an "absolute princess", but an outright king. She had a famous and complicated romance, taking an axe to a door to see her betrothed but ultimately deciding on the political match arranged for her by the nobles instead. She was instrumental in converting the last pagans in Europe, personally commanded armies, and played a crucial role in founding Poland's first university. If she hadn't tragically died young, she might be better known in the west today, as she surely deserves. And in like vein, I full accept that there are a great many female figures of the past who have been unfairly neglected, and should be written back in to our stories : but unfortunately, Ramirez isn't the one to do it.