Product Description: The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image...read more

Product Description: These paired Arthurian legends suggest that erotic desire and the desire for companionship undergird national politics. The maiden Britomart, Queen Elizabeth's fictional ancestor, dons armor to search for a man whom she has seen in a crystal ball...read more

Product Description: In 1953, when Dorothy Stephens and her husband lived in married student housing at the University of Michigan, she envisioned a safe, conventional life ahead. She never imagined living in Kenya toward the end of the Mau Mau uprising, plunged into an exotic new world, facing safari ants, wild bees, and a vicious monkey, and discovering a core of strength deep in her security-loving soul...read more