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Loading... Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Irelandby Lisa M. Bitel
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"This book disperses the shadows in an obscure but important landscape. Lisa Bitel addresses both the history of women in early Ireland and the history of myth, legend, and superstition which surrounded them. It is a powerful and exact book and an invaluable addition to our expanding sense of Ireland through the eyes of Irish women."--Eavan Boland, author of In a Time of Violence: Poems "It is refreshing to read in a book by a woman on medieval women that not all clerics hated women and that not all men were oversexed villains consciously bent on exploiting women. [Bitel] challenges not only the medieval Irish male construct of female behavior, but she is also courageous enough to question constructs of medieval women invented by modern Irish medieval historians."--Times Higher Education Supplement No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.4Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people WomenLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I like how she uses literary representations of gender roles to dissect gender ideologies, and how she takes a more common sense (and to my mind, correct) approach as to the relative rights and freedoms which Gaelic women enjoyed in early medieval Ireland. Her lack of precision is frustrating, though; there's a lack of a chronological sense to some parts of the book, and while she states the pitfalls of the longue duree approach she uses, still falls into them at times. Reasonable introduction to the area, however. ( )