If you told a woman her sex had a shared, long-lived history with weasels, she might deck you. But those familiar with mythology know better: that the connection between women and weasels is an ancient and favorable one, based in the Greek myth of a midwife who tricked the gods to ease Heracles’s birth—and was turned into a weasel by Hera as punishment. Following this story as it is retold over centuries in literature and art, Women and Weasels takes us on a journey through mythology and ancient belief, revising our understanding of myth, heroism, and the status of women and animals in Western culture. Maurizio Bettini recounts and analyzes a variety of key literary and visual moments that highlight the weasel’s many attributes. We learn of its legendary sexual and childbearing habits and symbolic association with witchcraft and midwifery, its role as a domestic pet favored by women, and its ability to slip in and out of tight spaces. The weasel, Bettini reveals, is present at many unexpected moments in human history, assisting women in labor and thwarting enemies who might plot their ruin. With a parade of symbolic associations between weasels and women—witches, prostitutes, midwives, sisters-in-law, brides, mothers, and heroes—Bettini brings to life one of the most venerable and enduring myths of Western culture.

Cooking class is back in session for best friends—and sometime sleuths—Annie and Eve. But this time, Annie finds herself on the teacher’s side of the cutting board, and her best friend Eve in more hot water than ever. Bar food. You wouldn’t think it requires any special talent. But the newly redesigned Bellywasher’s, featuring simple, delicious fare, is D.C.’s latest hotspot. There’s something about its down-home ambience that draws people. The owner, Annie’s boyfriend Jim, is offering a six-week bar food cooking class, and Annie is rolling up her sleeves to help. She knows Jim’s food is good—but she’s about to learn that it’s to die for. When one of the students, Brad Peterson, is murdered, Eve becomes the primary suspect. The whole class heard her say she wanted to kill him. She had good reason, too: Brad was the former boss who had her fired when she spurned his advances. But now, to prove Eve’s innocence, she and Annie must make sure all their ducks á l’orange are in a row.

In this fresh look at Chaucer's relation to English and French romances of the late Middle Ages, Crane shows that Chaucer's depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the genre. For Chaucer, she proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the late medieval elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer's profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance. In depicting the maturation of young women and men, romances stage an ideology of identity that is based in gender difference. Less obviously gendered concerns of romance--social hierarchy, magic, and adventure--are also involved in expressing femininity and masculinity. The genders prove to be not simply binary opposites but overlapping and shifting coreferents. Precarious social standing can carry a feminine taint; women's adventures recall but also contradict those of men. This lively study reveals that Chaucer's redeployments of romance are particularly sensitive to the crucial place gender holds in the genre. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Examines the association of love and death in medieval French and Occitan courtly literature using an approach informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida. Offers new readings of canonical authors and texts, including Bernart de Ventadorn, Jaufre Rudel, Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas's Tristan, the Prose Lancelot, the Tristan en prose, La Mort le roi Artu, Marie de France, Le Chastelaine de Vergy, Le Castelain deCouci, and Le Roman de la Rose.

The women who spoke or wrote in the margins of the Middle Ages—women who were oppressed and diminished by social and religious institutions—often were not literate. Or, if they could read, they did not know how to write. Transforming or subverting Western and patristic traditions associated with the clergy, they also turned to Eastern and North African traditions and to popular oral theater, and focused in their choice of genre on lyric, romance, and confessional autobiography. These essays analyze their texts and reconstruct a medieval feminine aesthetic that begins a rewriting of cultural and literary history.

In The Profound Mystery, Mark and Phyllis Kirchberg, husband and wife for twenty years, shine new light on the institution of marriage. Through the Spirit of God, utilizing visions, dreams, revelations, repentance, and personal conversations with the Lord Jesus Christ, the authors are able to cleanse their lives of sin and genuinely love one another. Through an exploration of God, the condition of the human heart, and the Bible, The Profound Mystery provides readers with guidance for marriage and all relationships.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing seeks to recover the lives and particular experiences of medieval women by concentrating on various kinds of texts: the texts they wrote themselves as well as texts that attempted to shape, limit, or expand their lives. The first section investigates the roles traditionally assigned to medieval women (as virgins, widows, and wives); it also considers female childhood and relations between women. The second section explores social spaces, including textuality itself: for every surviving medieval manuscript bespeaks collaborative effort. It considers women as authors, as anchoresses 'dead to the world', and as preachers and teachers in the world staking claims to authority without entering a pulpit. The final section considers the lives and writings of remarkable women, including Marie de France, Heloise, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and female lyricists and romancers whose names are lost, but whose texts survive.