(no subject)

[beccaelizabeth]

History books don't often tell things very interesting. It's like, half a page of this king, half a page of next king, half a page of bishops and saints and suchlike. How people actually lived and what kind of deals they made and how their society was organised? Not in these books so far. So I'm bored. It's like a king list but with more judgey descriptions of the dudes that didn't make it into the list.

I know the sort of thing I'm looking for exists, I just need to find the right books.
And possibly a different bit of history with more surviving evidence.

Also the books I've got at the moment persist in describing Anglo Saxon inheritance as a series of constantly broken primogeniture inheritances, instead of maybe possibly a system that didn't just go to the firstborn son in the first place so all the zig zag around the family trees is just how things worked. I mean, if it very seldom does the thing, maybe it's not trying.

And even histories about Queens are being annoying about women. Like, it's using how many children a couple had as evidence of how close they were and how much sex they had? Pretty sure there's too many variables in there to use it that way. Also the stupid book just used the fact that one queen had a baby every year to say that they were not political and totally taken up by baby making. And this is written by a woman. I'm pretty sure pregnant women still have brains and talkings and so forth! Also also it's being pretty stupid about the role of religious communities and being logically inconsistent. Like, bishops and abbesses keep on being important to the story, but every time an ex-queen goes away to be a nun and becomes an abbess the book says they're being pushed out of power. They're being pushed out of the line of inheritance, maybe, but they're in a position to wield a different sort of power.

I'm just really frustrated at how the distant past is being written about as if it's a sort of defective inconsistent version of one particularly sexist interpretation of ... one slice of the medium past. Pretty sure it didn't work that way. I mean, the fifth century isn't going to know it's being rubbish at being the fifteenth century.

Boo. Need more and better books.

Comments

[slashmarks]

I'm reading a book that might be useful to you? It's called Cloth and clothing in early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 450-700, by Penelope Walton Rogers. It goes into a lot of detail about cloth production, which was an industry mostly controlled by women in Anglo-Saxon England and so it spends a lot of time talking about peasant women's lives. Lots of dry academic prose but maybe more useful information.

[beccaelizabeth]

Sounds cool. *makes note*