Review of July Book Releases: From Medieval Women to Themes of Eugenics and Khazaria

Anastasia Palamarchuk's book 'Myths about Medieval Women: Regents, Troubadours, Pirates, and Heretics' explores the diversity of female figures of the era. There is a common theory that men sought to push medieval brewers out of the craft, portraying them as precursors to witches. However, this version only hints at a broader and lesser-known history of the daily life of a medieval woman, including her labor, household management, crafts, methods of earning a living, family duties, knowledge of herbs and healing, as well as forms of autonomy that might have been limited.

Palamarchuk illuminates the lives of women in various social roles: from wives and mothers to peasants, townswomen, abbesses, mystics, rulers, poets, heretics, and warriors. Interest in medieval women's history is growing, evidenced by memes about Hildegard of Bingen and renewed attention to Joan of Arc. The female gaze focuses on less obvious aspects—daily life, the body, the home, the family, labor, religion, upbringing, clothing, diet, fears, and survival methods, which are integral to understanding that era.

Studies of daily life often turn to female themes, similar to Tatiana Dittrich's bestseller 'Daily Life in Victorian England,' which meticulously describes domestic life. Palamarchuk's book expands this perspective, suggesting that the Middle Ages should be viewed not only through the monumentality of castles and chronicles but also through the hidden lives of women who do not fit into the traditional heroic narrative.

Medieval women's history encompasses family diplomacy, monastic politics, urban economy, religious movements, land management, marital alliances, inheritance, legal proceedings, labor, creativity, and power. Despite the patriarchal nature of society, the role of women was significant. The author emphasizes that she does not replace one myth with another, but rather shows the diversity of women's fates: from a mother preserving the family's reputation to an abbess negotiating, becoming a poet, or a figure of authority.

The main conclusion is that the role of women in the Middle Ages was no less, and sometimes even more decisive, than that of men. Women participated in land management, negotiations, forming alliances, maintaining family reputation, managing inheritance, influencing monasteries and daily order. They did not merely exist in a male world; they actively supported, circumvented, violated, and changed established rules.

Turning to the topic of eugenics, Eric Peterson's book 'Undesirables: How Science Decided Who Should Be Born, and Why Eugenics Has Not Disappeared in the 21st Century' presents a dense account of the dangerous idea of who, according to specialists, should be born, and whose reproduction is undesirable. The word 'eugenics' comes from 'well-born,' but Peterson reveals that behind the concern for a 'healthy future' lies the question of the right to determine which lives are desirable and which are a mistake of nature.

Peterson does not limit himself to a simplified presentation of eugenics as pseudoscience following Nazism. He traces the roots of eugenic ideas from ancient utopias to Victorian anxieties, racial theories, medical arbitrariness in American punitive medicine, and birth control programs. Thus, eugenics is presented not as an isolated phenomenon of the Third Reich, but as an evolving phenomenon with deep roots in respected institutions.

Interesting trends in this topic can be traced long before the 20th century. Peterson begins his analysis not with Francis Galton, but with ancient thinkers. The ancient Greek poet Theognis spoke of the mixing of breeds, comparing marriages to livestock breeding. Plato, in 'The Republic,' asserted that 'the best men' should marry 'the best women,' and the offspring of the 'worst' should not be raised. Seneca also used the language of selection, speaking of the necessity of separating the 'healthy' from the 'useless' regarding weak children. These thoughts do not make them modern eugenicists, but they lay the groundwork for the idea of the possibility of sorting people and improving the race from above.

The author strives to maintain an objective tone, yet his emotionality surfaces in descriptions of those who contributed to the development of Nazi biopolitics. Peterson mentions the concept of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who, seeking to confirm his Scandinavian ancestry, provided unreliable information. His career, which began as a research assistant to Alexis de Tocqueville, was largely built on useful connections.

The book 'Undesirables' analyzes a topic too easily relegated to the past. Eugenics was a mechanism through which power, medicine, and science attempted to solve social problems by controlling the most vulnerable groups: the poor, the sick, the racially marked, the incarcerated, migrants—people declared 'unfit.' The ending is worrying, as the author concludes that humanity will repeatedly return to this idea, changing its guise. Today, eugenics is more often linked to issues of poverty, security, demographics, and efficient governance, rather than just 'racial purity,' which Peterson demonstrates as a persistent temptation to consider some people as the future and others as a problem requiring elimination.

In the third part of the selection, Oleg Ivik and Vladimir Klyuchnikov's book 'Khazars: A Forgotten History of the Middle Ages' is examined. This work returns Khazaria from the realm of romantic notions to the field of archaeological data and cautious scientific hypotheses. The authors admit that even the origin of the Khazars in the Volga-Don steppes, where they disappeared after the fall of the state, and who should be called Khazars, is unknown. The question of the Judaization of Khazaria remains controversial.

The 2013 re-edition includes new archaeological discoveries and genetic data, allowing old questions to be viewed from a new angle. The main difficulty in studying the subject is that the Khazar Khaganate was a vast power stretching from the Volga to the Dnieper and from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea, where many peoples lived (Bulgars, Alans, Oguz, Savirs), but the Khazar traces themselves are difficult to identify. There is no reliable Khazar pottery, and settlements are either not found or cannot be unambiguously identified as Khazar. The empire exists, but its main people seem dissolved in a multinational structure.

The archaeological part of the book plays a key role, demonstrating how knowledge about the Khazars is formed through burial mounds with square ditches, robbed graves, belts, horse remains, pottery kilns, and signs of fortifications. 'Khazars' represents not so much a solution to a mystery as a demonstration of scientific discipline before attempting to solve it. The authors do not provide final answers about the nature of the Khazars or the degree of their Judaization, but they convincingly explain why myths arise so easily around this people. Thus, the 'forgotten empire' turns out to be more excessively constructed than forgotten, and requires careful archaeological analysis.

Finally, Geoffrey Jerome Cohen, in his book 'Stone: The Ecology of the Nonhuman,' explores the possibility of finding life not in stone as a historical artifact, but in ordinary stone lying on the road. The American medievalist attempts to prove that stone can possess a form of life that is difficult for humans to notice. The idea, although seemingly simple, may appear intellectually opportunistic, given the contemporary interest in stones, new ontologies, and medieval studies.