UNT Dallas Library News

Women's History Month - eBooks

Image descriptions:

Image one: E-book titled The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages (2001) - synopsis: The legendary bearded female St. Wilgefortis, also known by a variety of other names including “Kummernis” and “Uncumber,” was the object of fervent veneration in areas of Western and Central Europe for almost half a millennium. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the legend of her dramatic transformation from a beautiful, privileged princess into a bearded, Christlike martyr on the cross inspired scores of paintings, sculptures, poems, prayers and shrines in her honor all across Europe. In spite of frequent opposition by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, her cult of veneration at one point nearly rivaled that of the Virgin Mary in some parts of Europe. In this informative and groundbreaking new book, Professor Ilse E. Friesen examines the phenomenon of St. Wilgefortis from an art historical perspective, tracing the origins of depictions of the saint from an early medieval Italian statue known as Volto Santo, or “holy face,” through the emergence of increasingly feminized crucifixes over the course of the subsequent centuries.

Image two: E-book titled Resistance Reimagined: Black Women's Critical Thought as Survival (2017) - synopsis: Resistance Reimagined highlights unconventional modes of black women's activism within a society that has spoken so much of freedom but has granted it so selectively. Regis Fox terms this gap between democratic promise and dispossession the “liberal problematic,” and in this book she shows how black women have disrupted it as a form of resistance. Looking closely at nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings by African American women that reimagine antebellum America, Fox introduces types of black activism that differ from common associations with militancy and maleness. In doing so, she confronts expectations about what African American literature can and should be.