Customer Reviews

Uppity Women of Medieval Times

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is essentially the same review that I wrote for the same author's "Uppity Women of Ancient Times." Unfortunately, the same comments apply to both...

I received this book and its companion on Ancient women as gifts. One lives in the bathroom (unfortunately, the most appropriate place for it...) and one by my bed. I am deeply interested in history and was looking forward to learning about an often-overlooked segment of the population - the women, famous and not, who directly or indirectly influenced and contributed in large and small ways to their times.

It's clear that Ms. Leon has done a lot of research, but her writing style is terribly irritating and ultimately gets in the way of the material. She could have written it in an informal conversational style that would have served the same purpose, that of making the material accessible and interesting, but she chose instead to use a dated, "cool" Daddy-O style that just doesn't suit the material or ring true to her voice. Hip jargon is cool only briefly, and people who try to be funny usually aren't; why did she find it necessary or appropriate to trash her research and insult the intelligence of her readers with her silliness? I appreciate her obviously extensive research (but not the fact that she neglected to include a bibliography, for those of us with more than a passing interest in the subject of womens' history) and the fact that she included ordinary women as well as movers and shakers, because we really know very little about women in history, but then she undermined her own efforts with her ridiculous writing style. That's why I rate the book a 3 instead of 5 - the content is worth a 5 but it's hard to take seriously a work that its own author obviously didn't.

"You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things." A message that more than a few of my fellow reviewers should take to heart. And one that Ms. Leon certainly has!

I will not spend any great time arguing over the historical accuracy of this book or with the crazed women studies scholars who are outraged by it. I will say, though, lighten up just a wee bit, please.

This is an informative and fun book. Like Ms. Leon's other "Uppity" books, it offers to any reader an overview of women in history that is often overlooked. Its sense of humour is what makes the topic matter more inviting and available to a greater number of people. The predominant crusty tomes of "herstory" that are sadly prevailing in this field will put people to sleep faster than Trotsky's "My Life"!

I have my advanced degrees in history and women's studies - and I understand the adage of a little knowledge can often be dangerous. But there is nothing in this delightful book that is remotely "dangerous". If anything, with a bit of luck, it will inspire more women - especially young women - to take a deeper look at the subject. Providing strong role models from history is far more productive than teaching young women to yell "victim"!

Ms. Leon's books are smart and sassy - and that is what makes them great! We need more of these sort of women - historically and contemporaneously - to demonstrate a path of empowerment for women.

Much credit should be given to Ms. Leon for attacking so many years of history with such vigor and vim! A good read for any human being - female or male!

This is a fun and sometimes funny book. However, I think it's ridiculous to consider it an important scholarly work addressing issues in womens' history. I enjoyed it for what it is, a cute and fun book.

Personally, I don't think previous reviews are bizarre. I can see that if taken as a scholarly work this would trivialize the experience of women of the past. As a history major I've seen nothing cute about being a woman in ancient times. Like all women, "uppity" women got put down far more often than not. But I thought it was clear that this book was meant as entertainment, nothing more, so no big deal that it doesn't fit with what I know about history. What I think is bizarre is reviewers taking offense at reviewers and offering spitting-mad reviews of the negative reviewers. I think the negative reviews of this book made strong points, many of which i agree with, so read them I won't repeat them. Often seems as if those offended are authors themselves. I like seing negative reviews, like those found for this book, helps inform my purchases, helps decide what books I will devote time towards. Imagine if there were no negative reviews? Seems like that would be dull and uninformative. But I guess I can understand how an author would want all reviews to be positive. I recommend this book for a fun read.

_Uppity Women of Medieval Times_ has so much potential. It is frustrating that potential is wasted. It is wonderful that women are beginning to receive the historical attention they deserve - however, flippant and downright silly historical abstracts like _Uppity Women_ do a disservice to women's history.

I can forgive the broad take on when the middle ages took place, but struggled with the author's voice, which attempts at being humourous and "fresh" (often referring to women by nicknames created by the author.) The book itself is entirely composed of one - two page summaries of the lives and "accomplishments" of women during the middle ages. That so little information is written about the women discussed is another disappointment. More depth and less breadth would have made a much better read.

The choice of women presented further detracts from the book. While many women who deserve recognition for real contributions are included such as washerwomen of the Crusades, Walladah - al Mustakfi and Sei Shonagon, there are many, many more women included who had no historical contribution whatsoever. This inclusion seriously detracts from those women who did. (Juana la Loca readily comes to mind.) A final irritation were outright historical innacuracies - for example, claiming that Nicolo Machiavelli wrote _the Prince_ for Catherine d' Medici (in 1533) - simply inexcusable in a "history" book.

A bright spot of _Uppity Women_ was its international flavor. While the vast majority of its subjects were European, women from the Near East, the Americas and Asia were also included. I would recommend this book for middle schoolers, or perhaps (as an earlier reviewer noted) as bathroom reading.

The author needs to quit writing these pseudo-history books and/or just call them historical fiction to be taken with a very large grain of salt. It seems people either really like this book and ignore its glaring flaws or really dislike it and point out those flaws. I definitely side with the latter. Having minored in Women's Studies in college, I have to say I've never read anything so poorly conceived and executed (pun intended? perhaps). The author really murders her subject matter when she crams it into her idealized notion of what an "uppity woman" is. Who cares whether or not a woman is uppity? And why should we care who the author considers to be uppity? She's no scholar, that much is clear in her lack of a page of resources and/or choice to not refer the reader to a list of books for further reading. So many women seem to think this book is important or worth reading, don't let yourself be one of them.

I received this as a gift, and I guess the giver meant well. I don't think I've ever read anything that so makes women of various cultures and time-frames sound like they belong on daytime TV. This book would have benefitted if the author had refrained from generalization, use of slang, completely shut up her running commentary, etc. I don't know how long it took her to write this, but these vignettes sound completely fictional (doesn't help, as another reader pointed out, that the biblio is nonexistant). It bothers me that the readers who like this book, REALLY like it and totally disregard the poor scholarship. It's deceiving to label a book like this as Women's Studies and/or History, and it's disturbing that some women who are getting their feet wet in the Women's Studies area of history are going to pick up this book and take it seriously. If the author is trying to make a point about women being vivacious and/or head strong during the Middle Ages, why use words like "uppity" and trivialize these women with a purely History of Western Thought frame of reference?

This book's main weakness lies in its overly apparent lack of scholarship. If the language were not so slang-ridden, if the information were not so clearly dumbed-down, I would be willing to recommend this to my cousin in highschool if only as a springboard to further women's studies research. It disturbs me to find a book that falls into the women's studies/history category that only makes the rest of this category look like bad research done by airheads. This book should have had a detailed bibliography, and while reading I could not help but wonder if the author had pulled most of these thumbnail bios out of thin air. It's great to be enthusiastic about medieval women's history and to educate the rest of us, but books like this make women's history read like a lurid comic book. This book is bad scholarship for the same reason Joseph Campbell is bad anthropology, historical events and people get taken completely out of context and reworked to fit an innappropriate agenda shaped by cultural biases. The result? Some people seem to like and encourage it, unfortunately.

This book is chalk full of woman who did "amazing" things in the middle ages. First of all, not all of it seemed that amazing, infact some of it sounded like everyday living for that time period. Second, not all woman were from the mideival period, some were from the ancient times and others in the Elizabethan Era. Third, the author is almost insulting when she dumbs things down. I was put off by her writing technique and her attitude. I would have liked more facts and more insight about these "uppity" women. Even the title is insulting. Uppity insinuates that these were rich girls with nothing better to do than stick their noses in the air. I'm sorry, but if a woman is struggling to support her and her family, I would not call uppity unless I wanted to get punched. I would never buy this book if I were you, I would check it out in the library, or buy it if I could return it.

This is a fun quick read, and can easily serve as a springboard for those who find the subject matter of the Middle Ages, and Medieval women in particular, interesting. Though it's not really meant as a thorough in-depth scholarly historical study, there are a lot of fascinating historical tidbits contained within its pages. The book is divided into ten sections, with categories such as "Got a Brain, Not Afraid to Use It," "The Joy of Sects--31 Flavors of Religious Life," "Plagues and Other Predicaments," and "Persecution Mania, Witch-Burning Madness." Prior to reading this book, I had only heard about two dozen of these women, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Khadijah (Prophet Mohammad's first wife), Empress Constance (who became a first-time mother, to Frederick II, at the age of 40), Pope Joan, Christine de Pizan, and Sei Shonagon. Although many people seem to think of the Middle Ages only in relation to Europe, the women in this book come from all over the world--Korea, Angola, China, Japan, Spain, Mexico, Georgia, Russia, Hungary, England, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and many other diverse locales. The women covered in this volume did a lot of things that most people don't associate with Medieval women, such as having careers, being best-selling authors, exploring the "New World," being medical pioneers, making important astronomical discoveries, and fighting on the battlefield. Many of them were feminists before feminism even had a name.

However, the book does have its shortcomings, as other reviewers have mentioned. Ms. Léon's Medieval timeline encompasses 470 to about 1650, whereas most other sources say the era began about the year 300 and ended either in the 1490s or the 1500s. Quite a few of the women profiled clearly lived in the Renaissance, and one of them, Queen Elizabeth I, had an entire historical era named after her. I don't exactly think of women like Queen Elizabeth I, Sophia Brahe (sister of the more famous astronomer Tycho Brahe), Countess Erszebet Báthory, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Mary, Queen of Scots as having lived in the Middle Ages. The slangy writing style can also get to be a bit much. The constant attempts at sounding funny, hip, and witty actually dumb down the historical research that went into the writing of this book, to say nothing of the amazing women profiled within. While it's possible to strike a balance between a scholarly presentation of the facts and hip modern language designed to make the material seem interesting and relevant to the modern audience, that wasn't always the case here. For example, what self-respecting Medieval woman would have used a silly childish word like "preggers"? The nicknames Ms. Léon frequently gives her subjects can also get to be a bit much, particularly when they're not nicknames that anyone would have used in the respective subjects' languages or homelands, like calling French-born Queen Melissande "Mel" or calling Bianca Capello's husband Francesco "Frankie." Seemingly little details like this can compromise the entire premise, even if it is meant to be a series of brief semi-humorous biographical sketches instead of a long-winded historical treatise. (A pronunciation guide also would've been helpful for some of these names.) Still, the basic material is so interesting and tells such a long-neglected story that these less-than-scholarly aspects of it can be overlooked to a point.

Just a brief example of incorrect info presented in the book: the entry "Erszebet Bathory" claims she lived in Romania. In fact, her castle Cachtice is situated in what is today the Slovak Republic, what between 1918 - 1993 was the part of Czechoslovakia and during her lifetime a Hungarian Empire (the connection between Slovakia and Transylvania,where she places her story). I come from Slovakia and am very familiar with the story, which itself is correct, however, it also doesn't take place in Middle Ages, but in Renaissance period. Also, it is a great simplification, or rather false statement to say that "despite their sluggish deductive powers, locals were finally able to bring the countess to justice", since she executed her subjects and moreover people of a subdued nation. It would generally be extremely difficult to accuse and bring to a trial a member of the highest class. I agree with readers who consider her stories not to be correct historical analysis and I would add that it makes an impression on me she tries to gain "no clue", limited historical knowledge readers by applying temporary perception of society and life and temporary "let's make everything fun" attitude to those distant times. This trend I find very irritating in American literature and historical films. The result is very distorted images rewriting history.