[Book Review] Queen, Empress, and Concubine by Claudia Gold

Judul: Queen, Empress, Concubine
Penulis: Claudia Gold
Penerjemah: Ida Rosdalina
Penerbit: Alvabet
Web Penerbit: link
Terbit: April 2012, cetakan pertama
Tebal: 152 halaman

ISBN: 978-602-9193-17-6
Kategori: Non Fiksi
Genre: Biografi, Sejarah
Beli di: Yes24
Harga: Rp. 115,900

Di balik dominasi laki-laki dalam sejarah, ternyata ada sejumlah perempuan hebat yang menjadi penguasa, sebagai ratu atau permaisuri, presiden atau perdana menteri. Kaum elit perempuan ini—yang berkuasa melalui suksesi dinasti, pemilu demokratis, atau dengan cara lain—telah mencapai kepemimpinan tertinggi dalam politik. Beberapa di antara mereka bahkan menjadi tokoh sangat berpengaruh dan karismatik dalam sejarah dunia.

50 Perempuan Penguasa melukiskan dengan jelas potret kehidupan 50 perempuan luar biasa yang memegang posisi politik sangat dominan dalam sejarah, dari Ratu Sheba di zaman kuno hingga Perdana Menteri Benazir Bhutto di era modern. Setiap profil tokoh digambarkan dengan jelas dalam konteks dan budaya setempat kala itu, sehingga memungkinkan sang penulis untuk tidak hanya menceritakan kisah hidup tokoh-tokoh perempuan yang penuh keberanian dan ketegasan ini, melainkan juga menyuguhkan informasi memikat perihal sejarah sosial alternatif selama 3.500 tahun terakhir.

Dilengkapi dengan gambar-gambar eksklusif untuk setiap tokoh serta didesain dengan tata letak isi yang bervariasi, buku ini benar-benar indah dan memikat. Dan, jika Anda meragukan kompetensi, keahlian, dan keagungan perempuan dalam kepemimpinan dan kekuasaan, buku ini akan dengan mudah membalikkan pandangan Anda.

Saya nggak sengaja menemukan buku ini di situs Yes24. Tadinya saya mau membeli sepatu. Ternyata, memang dasar bukan rezeki, sepatu tersebut sold out. Saya bingung mau beli apa. Pada hari tersebut, buku ini muncul di halaman utama. Karena saya sedang menonton serial The Borgias, saya memutuskan untuk membeli buku ini. Dua tokoh dalam serial yang berdasarkan kisah nyata pemerintahan Vatikan era Paus Alexander VI tersebut, yaitu Lucrezia Borgia dan Catharina Sforza dibahas dalam buku ini.
Saya juga sedang membaca buku Maharani karya Pearl S. Buck. Tokoh utamanya, mantan selir yang menjadi Empress dinasti Qing, yaitu Ci Xi juga ada di buku ini.

Dari ke-50 tokoh wanita penguasa di buku ini, beberapa yang menarik perhatian saya adalah:
1. Nefertiti
Selain terkenal karena kecantikannya, Nefertiti dan suaminya, Akhenaten, berani membuat agama baru. Sebelumnya, rakyat Mesir memuja Amun-Ra. Saat Akhenaten berkuasa, ia menghancurkan kuil pemujaan terhadap dewa Amun, Mut, dan Khonsu, diganti dengan dewa tunggal, Aten.

2. Izebel
Istri raja Ahab yang memuja Baal ini menjadi musuh Elia. Suaminya yang dulu mengakui satu tuhan membiarkan istrinya membawa nabi-nabi palsu ke istananya. Ia juga membunuh nabi-nabi pemuja Yahweh. Sesuai ramalan Elia, Izebel mati mengenaskan. Sebelumnya saya pernah membaca kisah Izebel dari buku The Fifth Mountain yang reviewnya ada di sini.

3. Caterina Sforza
Musuh bebuyutan keluarga Borgia ini dikenal sebagai perempuan perkasa yang mampu berperang dalan keadaan hamil.
Ketika musuh mengancam akan membunuh anaknya, ia mengangkat roknya dan mempertontonkan kelaminnya sambil berkata bahwa ia tidak takut karena ia sanggup memproduksi lebih banyak anak lagi.

4. Mary Tudor
Ratu pertama Inggris yang ditolak ayahnya karena kasus pembatalan perkawinan antara ayahnya, Henry VIII dengan ibunya Catherine Aragon. Ia juga difitnah telah melakukan pembakaran massal kaum Protestan. Gara-gara peristiwa itu, ia dikenal dengan nama “Bloody Mary”.

5. Cixi
Selir kelas tiga yang naik pangkat menjadi istri raja karena kecerdasannya. Demi ambisinya untuk naik tahta, ia mencuri hati ibu suri, juga menjalin hubungan baik dengan kasim kerajaan dan pemegang kekuasaan politik. Ia melahirkan seorang putra yang kelak menjadi kaisar, namun anaknya mengangkat musuh Cixi menjadi menteri. Peristiwa berdarah tak terelakkan. Cixi memimpin tahun-tahun terakhir runtuhnya dinasti Manchu.

Yang saya sukai dari buku ini selain ukurannya yang besar (coffee table), juga ilustrasi dan halaman full color. Biografi tiap tokoh ringkas dan padat, dilengkapi inset kejadian penting dan kronologis dari awal mula berkuasa hingga tokoh tersebut tutup usia.

Sayangnya, terjemahannya masih terasa kaku di beberapa bagian.
Tapi secara keseluruhan saya suka buku ini. Gara-gara membaca buku ini saya jadi tertarik untuk mencari buku biografi beberapa tokohnya.

Until next time

Wishful Wednesday 38: History of Imperial China Series

Udah lama banget kayaknya ngga update blog dan ikutan meme Wishful Wednesday. Tahun ini jadwal baca rada berantakan karena ada tugas lebih penting yang menanti *lap keringet*.

Saya sedang tergila-gila dengan segala sesuatu yang berbau sejarah. Waktu sekolah dulu, sejarah adalah salah satu mata pelajaran favorit saya. Banyak yang nggak suka dengan sejarah karena membosankan, pusing menghafal tanggal kejadian, ada juga teman yang berpendapat bahwa kita harus move on, gak perlu mengungkit kejadian lampau yang terlanjur terjadi.
Kenapa saya suka sejarah? Salah satunya karena saya suka drama dan intrik, dan ada aja drama dan intrik dalam peristiwa sejarah yang lebih ngejedar dari kejadian sekarang.

Wishlist saya kali ini adalah buku-buku berikut:

The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis

Description:

In 221 BC, the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia.

The Qin and Han constitute the “classical period” of Chinese history—a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity.

The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China’s long history of imperialism—events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.

China Between Empires by Mark Edward Lewis

Description

After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north–south line. Mark Edward Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.

The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy.

By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 CE, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.

China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis

Description:

The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Edward Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.

The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars.

Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

The Age of Confucian Rule by Dieter Kuhn

Description:

Just over a thousand years ago, the Song dynasty emerged as the most advanced civilization on earth. Within two centuries, China was home to nearly half of all humankind. In this concise history, we learn why the inventiveness of this era has been favorably compared with the European Renaissance, which in many ways the Song transformation surpassed.

With the chaotic dissolution of the Tang dynasty, the old aristocratic families vanished. A new class of scholar-officials—products of a meritocratic examination system—took up the task of reshaping Chinese tradition by adapting the precepts of Confucianism to a rapidly changing world. Through fiscal reforms, these elites liberalized the economy, eased the tax burden, and put paper money into circulation. Their redesigned capitals buzzed with traders, while the education system offered advancement to talented men of modest means. Their rationalist approach led to inventions in printing, shipbuilding, weaving, ceramics manufacture, mining, and agriculture. With a realist’s eye, they studied the natural world and applied their observations in art and science. And with the souls of diplomats, they chose peace over war with the aggressors on their borders. Yet persistent military threats from these nomadic tribes—which the Chinese scorned as their cultural inferiors—redefined China’s understanding of its place in the world and solidified a sense of what it meant to be Chinese.

The Age of Confucian Rule is an essential introduction to this transformative era. “A scholar should congratulate himself that he has been born in such a time” (Zhao Ruyu, 1194).

China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing by William T. Rowe

Description:

In a brisk revisionist history, William T. Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West.

The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts—especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear queues—were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a “universal” empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the conquest and incorporation of Turkic and Tibetan peoples in the west, vast migration into the southwest, and the colonization of Taiwan.

Despite this geographic range and the accompanying social and economic complexity, the Qing ideal of “small government” worked well when outside threats were minimal. But the nineteenth-century Opium Wars forced China to become a player in a predatory international contest involving Western powers, while the devastating uprisings of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions signaled an urgent need for internal reform. Comprehensive state-mandated changes during the early twentieth century were not enough to hold back the nationalist tide of 1911, but they provided a new foundation for the Republican and Communist states that would follow.

This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.

Saya baru punya 1 buku dari seri ini, yaitu The Troubled Empire by Timothy Brook link

Semoga saya kesampaian bisa mengoleksi seri ini.

Yuk, yang mau ikutan Wishful Wednesday, langsung aja klik blog Perpus Kecil by Astrid.

Happy Wednesday