Femina; A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez was not for me, personally. I am still thankful that I got to read this!

A very well put together book that suffers a little from some broad-spectrum marketing. I like this as a collection of histories, but it is not a wholly connected work beyond the gender of its subjects. That being said, it is well done by those subjects as best this somewhat uneducated layman can tell. I enjoyed it thoroughly, though found it to be a tad brief.

This is a short, but highly interesting book that sheds light on the women of the middle ages history often forgets. The author shares the roles and works of women, focusing largely on those that held some sort of power, whether religiously or secularly, and how they impacted Medieval society. We also get a few chapters, like the one on the Bayeux Tapestry, that don't focus on a specific person, but use what these women left behind as a means to discuss women's activities during the Middle Ages. I thought that the author did a goo job of pulling from various time periods, the Middle Ages is a long stretch of time and things changed drastically from the beginning to the end, though I felt that the focus on powerful women left little room for those we don't know by name. The women of the period who were not a part of the historical record are just as important, and I had expected to see more about them. I also wish that the focus wasn't on Western Europe, and that more stories had been included from other regions. It would have been interesting to see the comparisons.