A breezy, pertinent study that demonstrates how learning about social constructs is crucial to changing them.
A British scholar revisits the medieval era to investigate long-held beliefs about women’s roles, bodies, and sexuality.
Janega, a professor of medieval and early modern history at the London School of Economics and author of The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, traces entrenched ideas about women largely created and reinforced by male writers, philosophers, and clergy. She first returns to the ancient writings of Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen for theories about women’s nature—namely, that they are comprised of the cold and wet humors (men being warm and dry) and their bodies, “prone to sickness.” In an era before dissection, women’s bodies were simply unknown. “If men were essentially the default humans,” as taught by Plato and Aristotle, women were the afterthought, an idea elaborated on by the early church fathers. Since so much of medieval thought was drawn from ancient writings, the sense of women as inferior creatures prevailed, and thanks to the doctrine of original sin, women were regarded as oversexed. They were denied serious education and thus locked out of the “standard pedagogic system.” Examining sermons, mystery plays, and troubadour songs, Janega shows the constant reinforcement of many of the stereotypes about women, and she pays close attention to the ancient and medieval standards of beauty, many of which persist to this day. Women’s sexuality, menstruation, and childbearing caused male thinkers innumerable conundrums. Yet women were always out in the world laboring, essential to the medieval economy as farmers, brewers, seamstresses, laundresses, midwives, and teachers of children—though their work was regarded as less valuable than that of men. In the final chapter, “Why It Matters,” the author challenges specious scientific studies in our own supposedly feminist era and emphasizes how many expectations of women about marriage and motherhood remain unchanged since the medieval era.
A breezy, pertinent study that demonstrates how learning about social constructs is crucial to changing them.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-393-86781-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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