Abstracts of Books

Abstracts of Books Gillian T. W. Ahlgren. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. ix + 188 pp. ISBN 0-8014-3232-4 (cl). Ahlgren examines the theological and ecclesiastical climate of sixteenth-century Spain and the challenges Teresa of Avila encountered as a female theologian and mystic. As the inquisitional censure increased and the authority of women's visions and ecstatic prayer experiences declined, Teresa's written self-expressions became, of necessity, less direct. Further, her rhetorical style and theological messages were a direct response to the climate of suspicion created by the Inquisition. As the only female theologian to be published in late sixteenth-century Spain, Teresa sought to provide a clear defense of mystical experience, particularly that of women. Ahlgren suggests that church officials eventually used rUetorical strategies Teresa developed to protect women's visionary experience to rewrite aspects of Uer life and ideas, thus transforming her into the model for official Counter-Reformation sanctity. The author relies upon primary and secondary sources of inquisitional inquiries regarding Teresa and her work to support her arguments. Steeve O. Buckridge Begona Aretxaga. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. xiv + 211 pp. ISBN 0-691-03755-8 (cl); 0-691-03754-X (pb). Aretxaga writes an ethnography of republican nationalist, working-class women from Catholic West Belfast, Northern Ireland, whom historians of the radical Irish republican nationaUst struggle have erased and misrepresented. Relying on the idea that political struggles and manifestations of nationalism are gendered, the author reviews historical processes of the nationalist movement and nationalist feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. The manifestations of women's activism and the strike in Armagh Prison show that dominant masculine nationalist discourse is unable to express the particularity of republican women's experiences. At the same time, unable to acknowledge that gender identity in West Belfast is constructed at the intersection of class, ethnic identities, and experiences of colonialism, mainstream feminism frequently fails to articulate nationalist women's feminist politics . But, in opposition to some pessimistic feminist and nonfeminist writers, this book indicates the ways republican women powerfully subvert and modify both dominant nationalist and feminist discourses to create their political subjective voice from the position of political margins. leva Zake Uche Azikiwe, ed. Women in Nigeria: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. χ + 144 pp. ISBN 0-313-29960-9 (cl). Azikiwe suggests that this bibliography will help in the efforts to improve the © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 3 (Autumn) 216 Journal of Women's History Autumn quality of the lives of women in Nigeria by illuminating unknown problems, solutions to those problems, and the numerous steps toward uplifting tUe status of Nigerian women. A product of tUe call for a data bank on women in every member country of the United Nations, the bibliograpUy contains 521 entries and consists of seven cUapters on such topics as agriculture and economy, national development, and education. Azikiwe compiled this work from both publisUed and unpublisUed materials including books, journals, theses, dissertations, government documents, and conference papers. Steeve O. Buckridge Lisa M. Bitel. Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996. xvi + 307 pp.; ill. ISBN 09014 -3095-X (cl). This work seeks to offer an understanding of gender roles and relations in Ireland roughly between 700 and 1100 with the understanding that a small group of literate men wrote all of the primary sources. Bitel examines the social roles women played in terms of sex, love, and marriage as well as economic strategies and social networks. She explores the conflicting ideas of women the authors of the texts portrayed. In addition, the work asks why negative images of women predominate in the literature of the time even though men and women interacted in a wide variety of arenas. Men and women lived within the constraints of social and religious realities, at times rebelliously and at other times compliantly. Although clear guidelines existed to determine what women were supposed to be and do, the sources demonstrate that women did rebel...