Feminist interpretation has become one of the important text-centered literary methods in biblical interpretation. It challenges the authority, canonicity, veracity, and normativity of the biblical text due to its patriarchal-androcentric orientation. Feminist readers ask how far the patriarchal texts in the Bible can be authoritative and normative in articulating the theology and practices of the church. The author responds to these important questions both sympathetically and critically and considers whether they might have universal significance. He provides a lucid and thorough examination of the hermeneutical methodologies and presuppositions that lie behind many of the leading proponents of feminist readings of the Old Testament. The author asks whether Eve is unnecessarily accused by the traditional readers or is completely liberated by modern feminist readers.

Encountering Eve's Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2-4 aims to destabilize the persistently pessimistic framing of Eve as a highly negative symbol of femininity within Western culture by engaging with marginal, and even heretical, interpretations that focus on more positive aspects of her character. In doing so, this book questions the myth that orthodox, popular readings represent the 'true' meaning of the first woman's story, and explores the possibility that previously ignored or muted rewritings of Eve are in fact equally 'valid' interpretations of the biblical text. By staging encounters between the biblical Eve and re-writings of her story, particularly those that help to challenge the interpretative status quo, this book re-frames the first woman using three key themes from her story: sin, knowledge, and life. Thus, it considers how and why the image of Eve as a dangerous temptress has gained considerably more cultural currency than the equally viable pictures of her as a subversive wise woman or as a mourning mother. The book offers a re-evaluation of the meanings and the myths of Eve, deconstructing the dominance of her cultural incarnation as a predominantly flawed female, and reconstructing a more nuanced presentation of the first woman's role in the Bible and beyond.

Eve Was Framed offers an impassioned, personal critique of the British legal system. Helena Kennedy focuses on the treatment of women in our courts - at the prejudices of judges, the misconceptions of jurors, the labyrinths of court procedures and the influence of the media. But the inequities she uncovers could apply equally to any disadvantaged group - to those whose cases are subtly affected by race, class poverty or politics, or who are burdened, even before they appear in court, by misleading stereotypes.

The story of the Garden of Eden is one of the most familiar in the Bible. But if we read it without preconceptions, we discover a narrative as its original audience would have heard it, as its author intended. Robbins explores why the man was created first, and the woman for and from him. She elucidates the reason for the particular punishments, and why the storyteller gave a woman the starring role. She does all this by highlighting the importance of wordplay in the Garden of Eden story. This book introduces not only a wordsmith but, above all, a supreme storyteller who is bound to become a personal favorite.

Lieutenant Eve Dallas hunts for the killer of a seemingly ordinary history teacher—and uncovers some extraordinary surprises—in this thriller in the #1 New York Times bestselling In Death series. Eve Dallas doesn’t like to see innocent people murdered. And the death of history teacher Craig Foster is clearly a murder case. The lunch that his wife lovingly packed was tainted with deadly ricin. And Mr. Foster’s colleagues, shocked as they may be, have some shocking secrets of their own. It’s Eve’s job to get a feel for all the potential suspects—and find out why someone would have done this to a man who seemed so inoffensive, so pleasant...so innocent. Someone Eve could easily picture dead is an old flame of her billionaire husband Roarke, who has turned up in New York and manipulated herself back into his life. Consumed by her jealousy—and Roarke’s indifference to it—Eve finds it hard to focus on the Foster case. But when another man turns up dead, she’ll have to keep in mind that both innocence and guilt can be facades...

Women appear in key places and roles throughout the biblical story-line. In the Old Testament we find Eve in the garden of Eden; the matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel; Deborah and Ruth in the time of the Judges; the prophetesses Huldah in King Josiah's time; the capable woman of Proverbs 31; the passionate woman in the Song of Songs. In the Gospels, various women are involved in the life of Jesus, not least his mother Mary and the first witnesses to his resurrection. The book of Acts includes Lydia the converted businesswoman and Priscilla the fearless teacher. Furthermore, both testaments also contain much teaching about women's life and ministry, for example in prayer, in worship, in marriage and in leadership. Derek and Dianne Tidball's wide-ranging exposition begins with some foundations about women in creation and in the new creation. Next, they survey women under the old covenant. Thirdly, they examine women in the kingdom of God, in the life and teaching of Jesus, and in the final section they deal with women in the new community of the early church, and grapple with some of the more controversial writings of the apostle Paul. Mindful of the complexities, challenges and debates, the authors seek to approach the Bible with humility and integrity, while addressing vitally relevant issues for Christians today with clarity and confidence.

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times? Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception. Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. It features a wide range of contributors who showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms, intersectionality, postidentitarian 'nomadic' politics, gender archaeology, and lived religion, and theories of the human and the posthuman. The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field engages a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia, divorce and family law, abortion, 'pinkwashing', the neoliberal university, the second amendment, AIDS and sexual trafficking, and the politics of 'the veil'. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a multitude of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, this collection looks at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It charts the politics of the Pauline veil in the self-understanding of Europe and reads the 'genealogical halls' in the book of Chronicles alongside acts of commemoration and forgetting in 9/11 and Tiananmen Square.

In Malevolent Nurture, Deborah Willis explores the dynamics of witchcraft accusation through legal documents, pamphlet literature, religious tracts, and the plays of Shakespeare.

For more than a hundred years, Glasgow has been right up there in the major league of big-city crime. From Madelaine Smith and Oscar Slater, by way of the Bridgeton Billy Boys and the Norman Conks, through to modern villains like Paul Ferris and Tam McGraw, Glasgow's streets have spawned a succession of fascinating tales of true crime. Even in the twenty-first century, as the new Glasgow polishes a growing reputation for sophistication and culture, blood still gets spilled on the streets and scams of one kind or another are always in the pipeline. "The A-Z of Glasgow Crime" is a compelling journey through an extensive history of crime and crime-fighting in a city where the illicit is never far away. From the tough streets of the east-end to the leafy avenues of the west-end; from murder behind velvet curtains in the douce homes of the wealthy to the violent and bloody street battles on postwar housing estates - all this and more is covered in gripping detail in Jeffrey's definitive true-crime guide to a city with a notoriously violent history.