Taking a variety of critical approaches, the papers in Women, the Book and the Godlyanalyse the subject of women and religion, illustrating clearly the wealth of previously untapped material on this topic, whether in archive, manuscript or early printed source. The volume examines writing by women, writing which excludes women, and writing which ignores them, as well as women readers, women patrons, and women who were read to. Archaeology, canon and civil law, and trial depositions are all represented. The common determinants of marital and social status are, of course, explored, but so also...

This second volume of proceedings from the Women and the Book' conference, held at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1993, brings together fifteen papers dealing with women's experience in the secular literary world. It covers the whole variety of roles women might take, as patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature; encompassed in its range are well-known characters, real and fictional, such as Christine de Pisan and the Wife of Bath, and the more obscure but no less fascinating topic of women in Chinese medieval court poetry. Like its predecessor Women, the Book, and the...

"Lesley Smith is a new star on the horizon" - Michael Bunker, author of Pennsylvania. "A grand science fiction fable in the tradition of Herbert's Dune and Martin's Game of Thrones." - Nick Cole, author of The Wasteland Saga. Deep in an ancient desert, a young potter is about to begin her latest-and final-commission as midsummer burns around her. Trouble is coming with the wind, a storm which will take millennia to blow itself out and will affect a line of seers down through the ages. Blinded and alone, tortured and broken, Kia must rise to her destiny as High Oracle and lead her people, or...