Review copy provided by the publisher.
I found this book both interesting and frustrating.
Interesting, because there was a lot of good solid information about textiles and trading. Much archaeology, lots of reconstruction! If you want the details of what kinds of paint substrates were being used in the Viking era, Nancy Marie Brown has your back. I do in fact want that. I want that a lot. So this is very useful to me. I expect to some of you also.
Frustrating, because she is very much willing to make assumptions based on herself personally and go galloping forth with them. There is a little note after the main body of the book where she blithely tells the reader that Neil Price encouraged her to take a complex view of gender and she decided not to do so. Oh really, says this reviewer. Well, isn’t that a choice you made.
In Brown’s favor, she is willing to revisit previous positions when there is evidence that they are utter nonsense. Unfortunately this means that there are long sections of this book where the person she is arguing with is not me, not Neil Price, not any of a great number of other people who have been thinking thinky thoughts about the Viking era and gender for decades now (I have restrained myself from listing half a dozen personal friends in this location), but in fact…Previous Version Nancy Marie Brown. For example she says out loud! without prompting! that she personally did not used to believe in women wanting to fight with swords, which was so phenomenally stupid that I nearly shut the book and went off to go reread Neil Price instead. It’s always possible to consider other people having preferences unlike oneself, the more so when they are removed from oneself by an entire millennium, sort it out before you visit it upon the rest of us in several published volumes.
But really there’s quite a lot of useful stuff about dyes and paint substrates and that. Even if her “reconstructed” fiction sections demonstrate why she is not a fiction writer. If you’re thinking of a project in this era you might well want it just for what furs are common where and so on. If you take it all with a grain of salt about how willing this particular author is to generalize from the particular person she has closest to hand.