Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary

Description

In these four artfully crafted essays, Patrick Geary explores the way ancient and medieval authors wrote about women. Geary describes the often marginal role women played in origin legends from antiquity until the twelfth century. Not confining himself to one religious tradition or region, he probes the tensions between women in biblical, classical

Patrick J. Geary is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford); Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages; Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton); and The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton).

"[T]his is a clever and delightful monograph."--Elisabeth Van Houts, Early Medieval Europe