Reviews for Land of women

The average rating for Land of women based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-10-02 00:00:00 Anthony Beck When I buy a book with a big old Síle na Gig* on the cover, I expect to like it. Not so much this time around. It had its good parts, but it also has some big problems. First, there's a problem with the title. It should be "medieval Ireland." Early Ireland, to me at least, implies pre-Medieval. Secondly, the author did a good amount of research in the Vitae, medieval legal tracts like Cain Adomnain, and some mythology. But oh, what a mistake she made in interpreting the myths. Frankly, she made a blunder that most Freshman students would make just once, and then they would be so ridiculed by any prof worth even a teaspoon of salt that they would never make it again. Let me make this clear: There is almost always a huge span of time between when a myth, saga, or epic is composed and when it is transcribed. Huge. Hundreds of years. Imagine how much any society changes in hundreds of years. Sadly, Bitel conflates the Ireland of the Táin Bó Cúailnge and the Ireland of monks in the scriptorium copying the Táin Bó Cúailnge. That conflation allows her to make some huge errors in judgment about what the Ireland of the Tain was like for women. Of course it does. Ireland changed utterly in the span of time between 100 BC or so to the early Christian era. Tribal systems collapsed, external influences from pre- and post-Christian Rome filtered across the water, invading Northmen found and sacked Britain and Ireland. Hundreds of years, left out of the explanation. Sloppy. In Old-Irish texts, we know that the monks did not understand the Irish they were transcribing. It contains linguistic forms that were out-moded and ill-understood by the early medieval period. Scholars far more qualified than I have dated the language of the Irish epics, and identified the periods in which they were composed. Doing one's homework is truly all that's required for those of us who wish to interpret mythology. I get that many scholars want to focus on Patrician Ireland in their studies. But, as in all forms of scholarship, once you pick your specialty you either need to stick to it or you need to do huge gobs of extra research and work when you decide to branch out. I don't think Bitel did. I think her mind remained ensconced in the context of Patrician Ireland, and that prevented her from better understanding the Ireland of the sagas. More's the pity. All that said, I'm glad I read the book. Bitel makes a lot of great points. But I think her mistake in dates wrecks her thesis, and that's a shame. She could have moved the debate forward with this book. Instead, she negated her own opinions. She's wrong when she rails about how powerless women were in ancient Ireland, and she's wrong because she messed up her dates and neglected her studies.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-11-22 00:00:00 Michele Hanna There are aspects of this that I would quibble with, and some of her stylistic choices drove me batty (why she insisted on contracting the place name Cluain Mhic Nois to Cluain is a mystery, especially given the predominance of places either called Cluain, or which have 'Cluain' as a prefix), but overall it's really an okay example of scholarship in what is still an emerging field. I like how she uses literary representations of gender roles to dissect gender ideologies, and how she takes a more common sense (and to my mind, correct) approach as to the relative rights and freedoms which Gaelic women enjoyed in early medieval Ireland. Her lack of precision is frustrating, though; there's a lack of a chronological sense to some parts of the book, and while she states the pitfalls of the longue duree approach she uses, still falls into them at times. Reasonable introduction to the area, however.