God and the Goddesses : Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages

"God and the Goddesses is a study medieval imaginative theology, examining the numerous daughters of God who appear in allegorical poems, theological fictions, and the visions of holy women. We have tended to understand these deities as mere personifications and poetic figures, but that, Barbara Newman contends, is a mistake. These goddesses are neither pagan survival nor versions of the Great Goddess constructed in archetypal psychology, but distinctive creations of the Christian imagination."--BOOK JACKET.

Barbara Newman is Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University and author of From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.