Feminist Poetics of the Sacred

This book is an interdisciplinary and multicultural study of ancient and contemporary texts that encode women''s spirituality. The contributors using modern critical methods such as feminist theory poststructuralism and the new historicisms examine how the ideas in these texts are being reworked in different religious traditions. The volume encompasses both contemporary and historical contexts tracing the roles actions writings and beliefs of women in pre-Christian Christian Islamic indigenous and neo-pagan contexts. The book builds on three decades of feminist research into such areas as goddess worship indigenous spiritualities eco-feminism biblical hermeneutics Christian and Islamic mysticism subversive poetics and mythological systems inside and outside the mainstream.