Femina by Janina Ramirez: the review by Serena Dandini

Lhe effervescence and cultural eclecticism of the female universe continues to amaze me. For centuries women’s creativity has been locked up, dormant, discouraged but now it is freeing itself like a geiser which, held back for a long time, finally glimpses free and overwhelms us with novelties.

Today I want to tell you about a very interesting book about medieval women by an art historian from Oxford University, Jamina Ramirezbut first I would like to tell you about the author, who for me fully represents that new emancipated generation that with so much effort, study and joy has managed to put together competence, professionalism and even a couple of children.

Jamina is not the classic bookworm who spent the best years of his life studying on hard-earned papers, his path is more rock than academic. He was born as a bassist in a punk band and has transferred his enthusiasm to the art world without losing the desire to communicate the wonders of the past to a wide audience as well as more contemporary interests.

Virginia Woolf would be proud of this new wave of hardened 40-year-old scholars who despite the depth of their studies have managed to keep passions and lightness alive and to give us back a vision of the unedited history and certainly more interesting than many serious and often illegible tomes.

A book to redeem women

His book Female (the Assayer) tells us the other side of the Middle Ages that it wasn’t just a dark age populated mostly by wandering knights, clerics and conquerors, in short, a male army that only included tender-hearted maidens.

Thanks to new historical and social studies and even genetic mapping today it is possible to rediscover a female world that has made history like men but has often been obscured and its exponents considered “Femine”: thus the wording that starting from the Reformation, contemptuously labeled the works of women who were not worthy of being handed down.

Here, by moving the spotlights, Ramirez illuminates a number of extraordinary figures who have shone in all fields: artists, scientists, travelers and even great leaders whose existence we did not suspect.

Starting with the Viking warrior whose remains were found in Birka together with a funeral outfit of spears, arrows and swords, considered a “warrior” before an accurate analysis of the DNA. A fascinating narrative that once again confirms how necessary it is to free ourselves from any stereotype in any field of knowledge.

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