Dancing with the Virgin

Dancing with the Virgin

Author: Deidre Sklar

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-03-16

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780520227910

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This book -- at once personal and analytical -- explores, in vibrant detail and compelling depth, the capacity of movement to express the way that human beings experience their lives and identities. In recounting her exploration of a town in the American Southwest, Deidre Sklar examines themes common to cultures around the world."—Benjamin S. Orlove, editor of The Allure of the Foreign


Corrupting Virgins

Corrupting Virgins

Author: Thabang Tlaka

Publisher: Partridge Africa

Published: 2014-07-23

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1482802279

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After her body experiences the Blossom, the confused virgin Vuyis heart begins to burn with unquenchable and relentless passion. Her parents and the village practices compel her to travel to the Village of Virtue, where the fire in her heart would be molded and, thus, gain permission to reign as queen with the faithful. With other virgins, she quickly learns that dreams, pain, and sacrifice are strangehowever necessarybedfellows. Though determined to reach her destination, her journey is littered with sadistic creatures that seek to corrupt her, break her down, and puncture her dreams of purity. Corrupting Virgins is a book about purity, second chances, and tsunamis of hatred. It is a story about wading through oceans of opinions, tunnelling through mountains of ignorance, and dancing through the joys and sorrows of life. It is a story that seeks to defend love in a society where love is constantly on trial. Corrupting Virgins is a book about wrestling arguments and monsters that besiege those who believe in faith, hope, and love. Through a unique African and poetic lens, the reader will be taken through Jungles of Insult, Trains of Testing, Rivers of Life, Cities of Instant Gratification, and Villages of Virtue.


Queen of the Virgins

Queen of the Virgins

Author: M. Cynthia Oliver

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-06-30

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1496800265

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Beauty pageants are wildly popular in the U.S. Virgin Islands, outnumbering any other single performance event and capturing the attention of the local people from toddlers to seniors. Local beauty contests provide women opportunities to demonstrate talent, style, the values of black womanhood, and the territory's social mores. Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean is a comprehensive look at the centuries-old tradition of these expressions in the Virgin Islands. M. Cynthia Oliver maps the trajectory of pageantry from its colonial precursors at tea meetings, dance dramas, and street festival parades to its current incarnation as the beauty pageant or “queen show.” For the author, pageantry becomes a lens through which to view the region's understanding of gender, race, sexuality, class, and colonial power. Focusing on the queen show, Oliver reveals its twin roots in slave celebrations that parodied white colonial behavior and created Creole royal rituals and celebrations heavily influenced by Africanist aesthetics. Using the U.S. Virgin Islands as an intriguing case study, Oliver shows how the pageant continues to reflect, reinforce, and challenge Caribbean cultural values concerning femininity. Queen of the Virgins examines the journey of the black woman from degraded body to vaunted queen and how this progression is marked by social unrest, growing middle-class sensibilities, and contemporary sexual and gender politics.


The Virgin

The Virgin

Author: Hannah Blue Heron

Publisher: Trafford Publishing

Published: 2009-09-11

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1425149391

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Hannah Blue Heron’s many readers will be delighted with The Virgin, her first novel. Living in prehistoric times (c. 3200 BCE), the Temple Virgins serve the Goddess, Inanna, by bringing men from the local villages into union with Her in ecstasy. Their village of Al-Rah is threatened by the teachings of the rough men from the North, the Kurgans, who denigrate women and are beginning to destroy the temples of the Goddesses, replacing them with temples to their fierce Gods. At only twelve sun journeys of age, Ashannah is commanded by the village Oracle to lead the women of Al-Rah over the Great Mountain, which they have never attempted to climb beyond the lowest foothills. Ashannah is filled with fear and confusion. How would she know the way? Unpredictable appearances of Inanna to Ashannah help them begin their journey. Common sense and great determination get them through danger, loss and near starvation. They finally get over the mountain and down into the beautiful valley, only to find that there is already a village of men inhabiting it. The surprising ending, is, in some some ways, no ending at all.


Blood on the Tongue

Blood on the Tongue

Author: Stephen Booth

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 000713066X

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Marie's was not the only body lying undiscovered under the Peak District snow that January morning - nor the first. In 1945 the wreckage of a bomber, full of dead crewmen, was found on Irontongue Hill. The missing pilot was declared responsible, but why would a decorated hero desert? His granddaughter is now determined to uncover the truth and DC Ben Cooper is sufficiently intrigued to offer to help. -- back cover.


The Long Fifteenth Century

The Long Fifteenth Century

Author: Helen Cooper

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780198183655

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The Long Fifteenth Century is intended as a companion volume to Douglas Gray's ground-breaking Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings. Gray's anthology revolutionized critical appreciation of English and Scottish literature of the `long fifteenth century' from the death of Chaucer to the Reformation, but the literature of the period as a whole remains much under-read, undervalued, and under-studied. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, bring to the fore the power of underrated writers, restore to the period writings often attributed to other centuries, open up new possibilities in neglected genres, offer radical rereadings of some more familiar works, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions. Written in honour of Douglas Gray, to mark his long and distinguished tenure of the J.R.R. Tolkein Professorship of English Literature and Language at Oxford university, the 15 essays in this volume portray the long fifteenth century as a major period of literature in its own right. They provide a comprehensive survey of fifteenth-century literature in print, from the morality play to the ballad, verse forms to prose romances, including Chaucer, Lydgate, Skelton, and Hoccleve, along with essays on the Middle French Poets and Scottish writings of the period.


Eloquent Virgins

Eloquent Virgins

Author: M. McInerney

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2003-10-24

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 113706451X

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The tales of the virgin martyrs inevitably emphasize the torture and mutilation of beautiful young women. To the modern reader, these popular texts seem like exercises in sadism, but while they could be made to function as vehicles for active misogyny, they also provided Medieval women such as Hildegard of Bingen and Joan of Arc with role models who helped them to shape their own extraordinary destinies. This book explores the ability of the virgin body to generate contradictory meanings, both repressive and liberating, depending on who told the tale and how it was told.


Carnival and Other Christian Festivals

Carnival and Other Christian Festivals

Author: Max Harris

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2003-12-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0292701918

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With a riotous mix of saints and devils, street theater and dancing, and music and fireworks, Christian festivals are some of the most lively and colorful spectacles that occur in Spain and its former European and American possessions. That these folk celebrations, with roots reaching back to medieval times, remain vibrant in the high-tech culture of the twenty-first century strongly suggests that they also provide an indispensable vehicle for expressing hopes, fears, and desires that people can articulate in no other way. In this book, Max Harris explores and develops principles for understanding the folk theology underlying patronal saints' day festivals, feasts of Corpus Christi, and Carnivals through a series of vivid, first-hand accounts of these festivities throughout Spain and in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Peru, Trinidad, Bolivia, and Belgium. Paying close attention to the signs encoded in folk performances, he finds in these festivals a folk theology of social justice that—however obscured by official rhetoric, by distracting theories of archaic origin, or by the performers' own need to mask their resistance to authority—is often in articulate and complex dialogue with the power structures that surround it. This discovery sheds important new light on the meanings of religious festivals celebrated from Belgium to Peru and on the sophisticated theatrical performances they embody.


The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception

The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception

Author: Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1591434149

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• Explains how Mary was born into a lineage of powerful women who cultivated and passed on the ability to consciously conceive elevated beings • Includes a complete translation of the Infancy Gospel of James and reveals the hidden codes it contains relating to the practice of miraculous conception • Shows how Mary was trained and initiated in the “womb mysteries” and reveals the esoteric techniques she used to conceive Jesus Delving into one of the Virgin Mary’s forgotten gospels, the Infancy Gospel of James, Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, Ph.D., reveals a truth that has been suppressed for nearly two millennia: that Mother Mary was not a passive bystander to her own pregnancy but an advanced member of a sacred order of women trained in divine conception. Unlocking the hidden codes of Mary’s gospel and other ancient source texts, the author reveals how Mary conceived Jesus through a careful process that she willed and initiated. She explains how Mary was born into a family of powerful priestesses, women who possessed, cultivated, and passed on the ability to consciously conceive elevated beings to help the planet. This lineage included Mary’s own mother, Anne, who conceived Mary with this method, her relative Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist), and the biblical matriarch Sarah, the wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. These women were schooled in the shamanic “womb mysteries,” secret knowledge of the capacity of the womb. Decoding the Infancy Gospel of James, the author shows how Mary was trained and initiated, reveals the esoteric techniques she used to conceive Jesus, and explores the birth itself and the mind-altering reality that accompanied it. By revealing the Virgin Mary as a trained holy woman and a conscious actor in the conception of Jesus, the author corrects the impression we have been given of a passive and bewildered girl who had no idea how or why she was pregnant. She also restores Mary as the empowered feminine orchestrator of these significant events, paralleling the redemption of Mary Magdalene in recent years. Explaining how and why virgin birth was accomplished, this book allows us to make sense of miraculous conception and reveals the power that lies in all women’s wombs.