Customer Reviews

A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life

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I read this book way back in 1989, not long after it was first released. That was over a decade ago and I _still_ remember how vivid and brilliant the writing was. The value of the information for those of us looking for history about the women who lived in the 'Dark Ages' is unequaled. An amazing book. Brava to the author.

I read this book for a course on medieval women, for which it was a suitable selection, but I would not recommend it someone without an avid interest in the subject matter. Of greatest interest to the more casual reader are the first two chapters, which give an overview of women's lives before and during the Middle Ages. In the subsequent chapters, Labarge examines the lives of queens, noble ladies, the women religious, mystics, lower-class women, women healers, and women criminals, before closing with a discussion of women's contributions to medieval culture. As the greater part of each of these later chapters consists of a catalogue of particular cases relevant to each category, they are useful to the scholar interested in seeking information to fuel his or her research but can grow rather tedious for the non-scholar (or even the non-medieval scholar). The synthesis with which she closes each chapter is consistently brief and, in my view, somewhat wanting in depth. Further, Labarge's style struck me as occasionally clumsy, almost to the point of rendering her sentences ambiguous. (A stylistic nit-pick: I found her habit of beginning sentences with the phrase "As well" [i.e. as a substitute for "In addition"] irksome.) One positive point: Labarge's sympathetic commentary lends some color to her otherwise dry history without adding too great a bias. In short, the range of Labarge's research is impressive, her writing somewhat less so. A thorough, if not particularly inspiring, survey.

Good history of important medieval women. A little difficult to read--you need to focus.