Kalamazoo Book Intake Part 4

It's only cheating just a smidge to consider these part of my Kalamazoo haul. I'd already done my day in the bookroom and missed spotting these, when my girlfriend texted the covers and suggested they might be interesting. I never did make it back to the bookroom to check them out, but when I looked them up online I concurred. Since they'd been spotted at the Powell's Books vendor, I tried the Powell's website first but couldn't find a listing, but I was able to pick them up second hand from another seller.

Challet, Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres. 2013. Like Man, Like Woman: Roman Women, Gender Qualities, and Conjugal Relationships at the Turn of the First Century. Peter Lang, Oxford. ISBN 978-3-03911-912-7

• The author challenges the idea that Roman culture viewed women and men in substantially different terms, and looks at how Roman male writers actually described women. The result is a double vision: a traditional, idealized voice that does represnt the genders in qualitatively different terms, and an individual, realistic voice that views the qualities and abilities of individual women as equivalent to those of men. While the study doesn't directly address same-sex desire, it provides a more nuanced context for the treatment of gender in Roman society. (One of my novel projects is set in the 1st century in Rome and Britain, so I often pick up background research toward that end.)

Honegger, Thomas (ed.) 2004. Riddles, Knights and Cross-dressing Saints. Peter Lang, Oxford. ISBN 3-03910-392-X

• A collection of conference papers on England in the middle ages. Specifically of interest for the paper on cross-dressing saints.

I still have four shipments pending, so expect more exciting updates!