Despite the feminist revolution of the past twenty years, most women in America are worse off today than at any time in the recent past. Magazines and television programs profile women bank executives, surgeons, and corporate lawyers, but the vast majority of women still work in relatively low-paying jobs. Women work more hours per week in the house and outside than ever before, and a paying job has become a necessity for women in most households.What went wrong? In this provocativ...

This illuminating account of ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan Age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars and Fortun...

The Way of Perfection by Sister Teresa of Ávila was originally written for the sisters of her reformed convent of the Carmelite Order but this work has since become classic text in Christian spirituality and mysticism, especially in the realm of prayer. St. Teresa set out to teach how to progress through prayer and Christian meditation. The first 18 of the 42 chapters discuss the rationale of being a nun, the rest deal with purpose and approaches to spiritual life. Herein she describes way...

This is an electronic edition of the complete book complemented by author biography. This book features a table of contents linked to every chapter. The book was designed for optimal navigation on the iPad, Nook, PDA, Smartphone, and other electronic readers. It is formatted to display on all electronic devices including eReaders, Smartphones and other Mobile Devices with a small display.

Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for a reliance on individual integrity, rather than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of his time and ours, and has given an im...

Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote the essay The Praise of Folly during a week at Sir Thomas More's estate in Bucklersbury. He later refined and extended the piece. In it he personifies Folly as a god, whose companions are likewise-personified sins and human weaknesses. His work criticizes the Catholic Church, and culminates in a statement of Christian ideals. Erasmus was a faithful Catholic, but his text is considered a catalyst to the Protestant movement.

Finally The New Revised Edition is Available!

The best of John Donne's poemsJohn Donne (1572-1631) was born into a Catholic family and studied law before sailing with Essex to attack Cadiz in 1596. He was appointed secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper (later Lord Chancellor), in 1598, but forfeited his worldly prospects when he secretly married Ann More, Lady Egerton's niece, in 1601; he was dismissed by Egerton and briefly imprisoned. The next twelve years or so were passed in poverty, without reg...

No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy, from sacred devotion to lust, he conveys an astonishing range of emotions and poetic moods. Constant in his work, however, is an intensity of feeling and expression and complexity of argument that is as evident in religious meditations such as 'Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward' as it is in secular love poems s...

In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the "image" discarded by later years as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe." This, Lewis’s last book, has been hailed as "the final memorial to the work of a gr...

Love and loyalty, hatred and revenge, fear, deprivation, and political ambition: these are the motives which thrust the characters portrayed in these three Sophoclean masterpieces on to their collision course with catastrophe. Recognized in his own day as perhaps the greatest of the Greek tragedians, Sophocles's reputation has remained undimmed for two and a half thousand years. His greatest innovation in the tragic medium was his development of a central tragic figure, faced with a test o...

Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting.Here this baroque master’s two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new editi...