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3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.

What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.

Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being subversive. Embroidery was used to enforce norms of femininity. At the same time, women rejecting embroidery, in the context of the various feminist movements, often reinforced the idea that things associated with women were inherently inferior. It did talk about how people related to embroidery in different ways and how people could make a world of mandatory embroidery/mandatory femininity more tolerable and find some agency within it, about how embroidery could both trap women and offer them freedom, but it felt rather incongruous with its title. I feel like the book described the situation honestly and accurately, but if you were hoping for more subversion, there isn't a lot in this book.

It actually so far doesn't talk a ton about embroidery directly but there's a lot of interesting things about how notions of gender have evolved. In medieval times (and this is mostly talking about Britain), women were viewed as defective men; this obviously was not great but gave women more freedom than they could later have - a woman could for instance learn a trade so long as it didn't interfere with having kids and stuff, but it was just assumed she'd be worse at it. But it wasn't viewed as a threat to men in the way it later was. Whereas in the Renaissance came the idea that men and women are defined in opposition to each other, that it's the duty of women to be feminine in part because women have to be feminine for men to be masculine. The idea that binary gender as it exists in today's society comes out of the Renaissance is not something I expected.

Also in medieval times, embroidery was more of a communal activity, often done in the service of a church, through projects that required multiple people and someone to plan and direct it. However the association with the church and with nobility meant it was suitable for signaling not just femininity (with embroidery moving from the public to the private sphere) but also social class. This coincided with a move towards the home as an isolated sphere of femininity vs one that overlapped with work (farmwork, workshops etc). After the change towards embroidery being a mark of domesticity it became a way to enforce domesticity: early on in this process women might design patterns that interested them and embroidery was part of a larger (though feminized) education, whereas later on it became part of a preoccupation with making sure everyone was working all the time, and there was a shift towards samplers and towards executing difficult, standardized tasks rather than creativity. Making girls do embroidery, often with messages emphasizing obedience and meekness, became a bigger part of it.

There's also an interesting thing about the story of St Margaret, who is originally said to have killed a dragon and was associated with childbirth, and how her story got censored over time as that was considered unwomanly.

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

Spoiler free version

Edit: I guess I never mentioned that this book is about the day that Moctezuma met with Cortez and all the things that were going on that day. One chapter is Moctezuma taking a nap

On one level this is a work of historical fiction. I love historical fiction, though I haven't read much of it since high school. Especially the political kind, and we've got all the things you'd expect of historical fiction in an imperial court: a mercurial, autocratic, deeply flawed ruler; a court full of people who live and die by their wits, some sympathetic, some not; constant danger and the threat of violence amidst the beauty of one of the great cities of the world, and even in this case a crisis brought on by the barbarians at the gates. I find myself really wanting to read more historical fiction after this, specifically set in one of the many ancient empires of Mesoamerica or South America, there is so much potential there.

It's described as anti colonial- there are several ways this is true, but one thing in particular is how it portrays the people incorrectly referred to as the Aztecs as a complex group with their own agendas, and with the Spanish being kind of secondary to it all. Just getting to hear the story from their perspective was great.

The names are a little hard to follow. I invented mnemonics to keep them straight. But I've seen much worse, at least the names are all distinct. It seems like a bad criticism of the book.

There's a lot more going on. I feel like I need to reread to fully understand it - in particular I'm not sure what the ant was about. A lot of people do a lot of drugs as the story goes on, including it seems the narrator, and I feel like it could use a few reads to wrap my head around it.