Unveiling Eve
Subtitle: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: March 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780812237108
Subjects: Literature: History & Criticism; Religion; Judaism - General; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Women in literature; Jewish; Medieval; Literary Criticism & Collections / Jewish; Hebrew literature, Medieval; History and criticism
First sentence: A SINGLE POEM ATTRIBUTED TO a woman has reached us from the wide literary corpus of medieval Hebrew literature.
Description: "Unveiling Eve is the first feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In the Jewish Middle Ages, writing was an exclusively male competence, and textual institutions such as the study of scripture, mysticism, philosophy, and liturgy were men's sanctuaries from which women were banished. These domains of male expertise - alongside the belles lettres, on which Rosen's book focuses - served as virtual laboratories for experimenting with concepts of femininity and masculinity, hetero- and homosexuality, feminization and virilization, transvestism and transsexuality.

Reviewing texts as varied as love lyrics, love stories, marriage debates, rhetorical contests, and liturgical and moralistic pieces, Tova Rosen considers the positions and positioning of female figures and female voices within Jewish male discourse."--Jacket.