What would happen if women ruled the world? Everything could change, according to former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Politics would be more collegial. Businesses would be more productive. And communities would be healthier. Empowering women would make the world a better place—not because women are the same as men, but precisely because they are different.
Enter the Body speculates on how the theatre 'plays' women's bodies, and how audiences read them. Ideal for literature, theatre and gender studies courses, it covers topics such as sex, death, race, gender, culture and politics. Carol Rutter explores the five female characters, Ophelia, Cordelia, Emilia, Cressida and Cleopatra to reconstruct specific theatrical moments that put their bodies spectacularly in play. One of the most provocative writers on women's performances of Shakespeare in Britain today, Rutter also situates these roles on the early modern stage, observing performers such as Kate Winslet, Judi Dench and Whoopi Goldberg.
The Book of the Knight of the Tower - Manners for Young Medieval Women
In 1372 a French knight compiled a book of stories to teach his three daughters how to be good wives and good Christians. Here these tales are retold and interspersed with commentary about life in the late Middle Ages-what people wore, how they prayed, what they hoped for in this life and the next. The knight's stories range from the shockingly bawdy to the deeply pious. They include devils and miracles, fashionable ladies and haughty knights, lecherous monks and disobedient wives-all told to help the knight's daughters avoid what he calls blame, shame, and defame.
This collection focuses on a woman's point of view in love poetry, and juxtaposes poems by women and poems about women to raise questions about how femininity is constructed. Although most medieval "woman's songs" are either anonymous or male-authored lyrics in a popular style, the term can usefully be expanded to cover poetry composed by women, and poetry that is aristocratic or learned rather than popular. Poetry from ancient Greece and Rome that resonates with the medieval poems is also included here.
This study of medieval stories of accused queens--noble and hapless victims whose suffering becomes a metaphor of larger social injustice--identifies the types of this fictional narrative and explores their popularity from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Offering evidence of lively debate in the Middle Ages about the nature of women, the book considers such topics as the perpetual lustiness of men, the powerlessness of women, the nature of "good" women, slander as evidence of legal failure, the purifying value of affliction, and economic discrepancies between the rich and the poor.
