Lewis Lapham interviewed Richard Cohen on the publication of this book, and I read it mostly because of the whole 37 pages on women historians. It’s not Cohen’s fault.

Apart from Sappho, we possess almost no female voice from the ancient world…Clever women were a threat to men, thus the myriad stories of women’s vanity, their tendency to lying, and the their weak intellects, tales against them multiplying through the centuries.

The first woman historian isn’t even BCE; she’s Bān Zhāo (CE 45-116), who “captured the position of women in Confucian China.” And she wrote history, on mathematics, essays, poetry, and a travel book.

Nine hundred years later (literally the next paragraph) here is Anna Komnene (1080-c.1155), a Byzantine scholar and, unfortunately, a princess who thought she should be heir to her father’s throne and was banished to a convent for her presumption. Where she wrote a military history of her father’s reign.

Apres ça, writes Cohen, “the locker is empty.” He pads what you are now correctly certain will be a very short chapter with two pages on the misogyny and fear the ancients felt for women, a mentality durable enough to last through the Middle Ages and beyond.

Where, of course, women’s work was appropriated by their fathers and brothers and husbands, and those are just ones we know about, like Tycho Brahe’s sister Sophie, and Trotula, an Italian physician whose name was changed to the masculine form a century later by a male historian because no one could have been that smart if she were a woman. Cohen doesn’t mention Caroline Herschel but he could have. Yeah, it’s a short chapter but rest assured there sure is plenty there to infuriate.

Change came, belatedly and sporadically.

He spends serious time (relatively, anyway) with Barbara Tuchman, author of some of my favorite historical works (Stilwell and the American Experience in China, A Distant Mirror, and The March of Folly). He finishes up with a lionization of Mary Beard, a much beloved conteporary classical scholar. Cohen will have to forgive me; after Beard’s dismissive, if not downright contemptuous treatment of Cleopatra in SPQR I am not a fan. Although honesty drives me to say that there are no contemporaneous sources who weren’t totally in the bag for Augustus Caesar, who had an enormous ax to grind. So…

Cohen’s point is that before you read the history, read about the historian. Historians always and ever have their own axes to grind. The chapter on Shakespeare is fun, too.

Book Review Monday Chatter Making History Richard Cohen