Women in the Ancient Near East offers a lucid account of the daily life of women in Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The book systematically presents the lives of women emerging from the available cuneiform material and discusses modern scholarly opinion. Stol’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the history of women in the Ancient Near East.
In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.
Norman Wright’s bestselling Before You Remarry has a dynamic new cover and has been updated to appeal to today’s couples. Drawing from the latest findings on adjustments in second marriages, well-known marriage and family counselor H. Norman Wright shares steps couples can take to make their marriages fulfilling and successful. Before You Remarry helps readers— make sure they’re ready for a new marriage discover the essentials for successful remarriages openly communicate personal and family needs establish realistic expectations for roles, responsibilities, and decision-making handle common problems in remarriage: past and present in-laws, merged families, money, sexual issues Through this insightful workbook, couples will explore major remarriage issues, develop open communication, and affirm their decision to remarry. An ideal resource book for ministers, counselors, couples’ study groups, and individual couples.
