Janina Ramirez - Femina

I expected Janina Ramirez's book Femina, subtitled "A new history of the Middle Ages, through the women written out of it" just to be a collection of portraits of individual women. While that would have been interesting enough in and of itself, Femina is much more than this. What Ramirez does is to look at the Middle Ages, not simply by telling the story of various women, but also by discussing issues like gender, sexuality and labour within wider contexts. It makes for a fascinating read. 

In the preface Ramirez explains that she wants to "show... that there are so many more ways to approach history now". Surprisingly she begins, not in the Middle Ages, but in the 20th century and Emily Wilding Davison, the Suffragette who was killed at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Davison was an accomplished medievalist who took inspiration from individuals from history and Ramirez explains that she seeks to develop this much further: "we need a new relationship with the past, one which we can all feel a part of".

The women discussed in Femina range from some who are already well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Margery Kempe, to anonymous individuals such as the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry and the Birka Warrior Woman, a Viking who was found buried with arms and armour. The latter is a fascinating study, not least because it is a massive challenge to many who thought Viking warriors must surely all be male. Ramirez argues that this burial "shows us a Viking world connected across thousands of miles; a city teeming with ideas and influences; a cosmopolitan, complex and fascinating environment that challenges traditional representations of Vikings". She continues:

A ninth-century Scandinavian trading town like Birka would be home to all manner of people from all types of backgrounds. it's likely we'd find women who had faced conflicts and threats, then developed the means to defend themselves in response. There is no single narrative, and the skeleton in grave Bj581 reminds us not to look for a collective 'woman' of the past, but instead to examine individuals, and what they can tell us about the particular time and place they lived in.

It is an important point, because as Ramirez highlights, women in the Middle Ages were not all the same. Their roles, lives and experiences depended on their class, where they lived and the work they did. But we must also be wary of understanding our subjects only through the lens of our own era. Ramirez makes this point well with her discussion of Æthelflæd a powerful figure in late 9th and early 10th century Mercia. Æthelflæd's "story" was told, and retold. A twelfth century poem included the lines, "A man in valour, though a woman in your name / Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed / Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid." The Normans saw her as a "warrior woman who deserved fame", but her reputation was lost in favour of King Alfred her father, as later generations preferred to remember his male role. As Ramirez says,

She was a victim not of medieval prejudice, but of modern attitudes towards female leadership. Seeing her as her contemporaries did shows us that women could wield influence, and their voices, now written out of the records, can still be heard.

Ramirez asks us to remember her as "Æthelflæd the Great". As the account of Æthelflæd shows, we should be wary of seeing the Middle Ages as contemporary prejudice implies. Women were often, though not always, celebrated, encouraged and supported. Ramirez makes this point about Hildegard of Bingen who "broke gender barriers, but the encouragement from the men around her suggests we should not only be reviewing our understanding of how women thought and felt in the twelfth century; we should also be turning our attention to the way we view the men of this time." It is a theme of this book that modern prejudices obscure a clear understanding of both women and the wider society they inhabited.

High class women, are more likely to make it into records that survive into modern times, or be buried, like the Viking warrior, in graves that highlight their wealth and power. Even so, picking women out in the historical and archaeological record is difficult. It means that the sections of the chapters were Ramirez explores how we know about these women are important. But this book does not neglect the lower orders. In addition, while the focus is very much on what we would now call Europe, Ramirez also explores how modern research offer insights into a Middle Age world that is significantly more connected than usually thought. For instance, we learn that of the London plague victims whose DNA was studied, 29 percent "were classified as Asian, African or dual heritage. Of these, four women and three men had black African ancestry. One woman had black African/Asian ancestry, but the evidence from her teeth and bones revealed she had grown up in Britain". In other words, Ramirez argues, if you were in medieval London "you could expect to encounter a similarly diverse range of people" as you would today. 

This section of the book also looks at one example of someone who would likely call themselves transgender today, though as Ramirez points out, "retrospectively applying terms that have only recently been defined" is problematic. This woman, Eleanor Rykener, worked as a sex worker and a seamstress, and is one of the few examples we have of someone who was gender nonconformist in the era and whose trial is the only example of a trial of someone that documents "same-sex intercourse". Ramirez explains though that the records show that it was "dishonesty in trading, breaking of curfew... etc.. that were of greater concern... than their gender nonconformity". While only a short part of the book, the chapter on race and gender is perhaps the most fascinating of the whole work.

Femina takes it name from the books that were written by woman and labelled heretical by the Church. It is a profoundly interesting, insightful and readable account - that doesn't simply tells us the forgotten stories of women in the Middle Ages, but locates them in their times and explores how our own present is a "Distant Mirror" with which we can understand or misunderstand the past. It's an excellent work.

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