Analyzes the treatment of women as heroines, goddesses, spiders, amazons, and figures of wisdom in the folklore and mythology of the Americas

Spiders & spinsters: Women and mythology

Marta Weigle

University of New Mexico

Spiders &amp; Spinsters weaves a tapestry of voices and images--folk, popular, tribal, ancient and contemporary, by women and men, scholars and critics, psychologists and artists--to show how women have fared in classical Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and indigenous American mythologies. It is a rich sourcebook of goddesses, guides, maidens, crones, heroines, matriarchs, gossips, and those who have portrayed and interpreted them. Hailed as 'wonderful, as well as useful' (Baltimore Sun) and 'a welcome addition to the field of mythology' (Choice), Spiders &amp; Spinsters is a valuable resource for students and scholars in mythology, anthropology, literature, art, psychology, religion, and women studies. It also speaks to creative artists of all kinds and to general readers with interests in story, ritual, dreams, and gender.

Spiders & Spinsters

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Sunstone Press

Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the American Southwest is the first book-length, fully documented study since Dorothy Woodward's 1935 Yale University dissertation. Using newly available sources and contemporary materials from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Marta Weigle shows the Brotherhood's substantial contributions--through acts of charity, supervision of wakes and funerals, and religious observances--to community survival and welfare in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado through the mid-twentieth century. Brothers adapted orthodox forms of Roman Catholic worship into vital, significant religious and social expressions that consecrated and confirmed communal ties and provided setting for personal religious experience. Weigle explores the early history of the Brotherhood, theories about its origins and its ongoing relationship to historical and ecclesiastical developments in New Mexico. Her detailed study of the Brothers' membership, organization, activities, and religious rituals is an invaluable resource for students of religious and Southwest history and will also fascinate the general reader. On April 24, 1976, Marta Weigle received an Award of Honor from the Cultural Properties Review Committee, State of New Mexico, for Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest. Later that year the book was awarded Honorable Mention in the annual University of Chicago Folklore Prize competition.

Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood

Religion & Spirituality

Both Santa Fe and Taos are well known as important twentieth-century American art colonies, but their fame has rested more on the reputations of resident and visiting artists than the contributions of the writers, playwrights and poets, notable among them D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder, Carl Sandburg, John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who visited or lived and worked side-by-side with the artists. First published in 1982, Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer's Era, 1916-1941 highlights 'Literary New Mexico': the writers who followed Alice Corbin Henderson to Santa Fe and Mabel Dodge Luhan to Taos after 1916 and who later sought the company of Witter Bynner, Spud Johnson, Mary Austin, Haniel Long and Oliver La Farge, residents during what Southwest Classics author Lawrence Clark Powell calls a 'glorious literary period.'

Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer's Era, 1916-1941 (Southwest Heritage Series)

Literature & Fiction

Kyle Fiore

United States

Two Guadalupes: Hispanic Legends and Magic Tales from Northern New Mexico

Guadalupe (Tia Lupe) Martinez of Cordova and Guadalupe (Lupita) Baca de Gallegos of Las Vegas were interviewed and their folktales collected in the late 1930s by WPA Writers' Project workers Lorin W. Brown and Bright Lynn. Includes biography of Tia Lupe, 5 of her legends; biography of Lupita, 17 magic tales, her granddaughter, Elba C. de Baca's recollections of her; 1940s Farm Security Administration photos of folk art and services in adobe church at Las Trampas. UNM folklorist Weigle has fully annotated these compelling narratives and life stories

Two Guadalupes: Hispanic Legends and Magic Tales From Northern New Mexico

Ancient City Press