This concise edition of the biography of Walatta-Petros (1672) tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who lived from 1592 to 1642 and led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism. This is the oldest-known book-length biography of an African woman written by Africans before the nineteenth century, and one of the earliest stories of African resistance to European influence. Written by her disciples after her death, The Life of Walatta-Petros praises her as a friend of women, a devoted reader, a skilled preacher, and a radical leader, providing a rare picture of the experiences and thoughts of Africans--especially women--before the modern era. In addition to an authoritative and highly readable translation, this edition, which omits the notes and scholarly apparatus of the hardcover, features a new introduction aimed at students and general readers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: Prophet against slavery
• Early life
• "A man of strife & contention"
• Philadelphia's "Men of renown"
• How slave keepers became apostates
• Books and a new life
• Death, memory, impact
• Conclusion: The giant oak.

"The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man--a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labor, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life"--Provided by publisher.

This edition features a shrewd, annotated abridgment of Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) accompanied by an array of texts that help situate the Vindication in its political, historical, and intellectual contexts. Included are key selections from Wollstonecrafts other writings; from closely related works by Burke, Paine, Godwin, Rousseau, Macaulay, Talleyrand, and Brockden Brown; and from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and de Gouges Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen (1791).
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Arabic philosophical fable "Hayy Ibn Yaqzan" is a classic of medieval Islamic philosophy. Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), an Andalusian philosopher, tells of a happy child raised by a doe on an equatorial island who grows up to discover the truth about the world and his own place in it, unaided - but also unimpeded - by society, language, or tradition. Hayy's discoveries about God, nature, and man challenge the values of the culture in which the tale was written as well as those of every contemporary society. Translator Lenn E. Goodman's commentary places "Hayy Ibn Yaqzan" in its historical and philosophical context. The volume features a new preface and index, as well as an updated bibliography.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Book 1: we reach the same end by discrepant means
• on idleness
• on punishing cowardice
• on fear
• to philosophize is to learn how to die
• on educating children
• that it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities
• on the cannibals
• judgements on God's ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence
• on solitude
• on prayer
• on the length of life. Book 2: on the inconstancy of our actions
• on drunkenness
• on conscience
• on the affection of fathers for their children
• on cruelty
• in defence of Seneca and Plutarch
• on three good wives
• on the resemblance of children to their fathers. Book 3: on repenting
• on three kinds of social intercourse
• on some lines of Virgil
• on coaches
• on the lame
• on experience.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself. "On Some Lines of Virgil" opens out into a frank discussion of sexuality and makes a revolutionary case for the equality of the sexes. In "On Experience" he superbly propounds his thoughts on the right way to live, while other essays touch on issues of an age struggling with religious and intellectual strife, with France torn apart by civil war. These diverse subjects are united by Montaigne's distinctive voice - that of a tolerant man, sceptical, humane, often humorous and utterly honest in his pursuit of the truth.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Response to the most illustrious poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz
• First I dream
• Romances -- Redondillas -- Epigrams -- Decimas -- Sonnets -- Villancico -- Theater, sacred and profane: Loa for el divino Narciso ; Fragment from Los empenos de una casa.

• RESPONSE TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS POETESS SOR FILOTEA DE LA CRUZ
• FIRST I DREAM
• ROMANCES : Prologue to the Reader
• In Reply to a Gentleman from Peru
• While by Grace I Am Inspired
• REDONDILLAS : A Philosophical Satire
• EPIGRAMS : Satiric Reproach
• Which Reveals
• A Much-Needed Eyewash
• A Bit of Moral Advice
• Demonstration to a Sergeant
• DECIMAS : She Assures that She Will Hold a Secret
• Accompanying a Ring
• A Modest Gift
• She Describes in Detail
• SONNETS : She Attempts to Minimize the Praise
• She Laments Her Fortune
• Better Death
• Spiritedly, She Considers the Choice
• She Distrusts, as Disguised Cruelty
• One of Five Burlesque Sonnets
• She Answers Suspicions
• Which Recounts How Fantasy Contents Itself
• She Resolves the Question
• VILLANCICO : Fragment from "Santa Catarina"
• THEATER, SACRED AND PROFANE : Loa for El Divino Narciso
• Fragment from Los Empenos de Una Casa.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) wrote her most famous prose work, La Respuesta a Sor Filotea, in 1691 in response to her bishop's injunction against her intellectual pursuits. A passionate and subversive defense of the rights of women to study, to teach, and to write, it predates by almost a century and a half serious writings on any continent about the position and education of women. Moreover, notes Ilan Stavans in his introduction, it has become "a cornerstone of Hispanic-American identity ... at once a chronicle of the tense gender relations in the Western Hemisphere, a rich portrait of the social behavior that prevailed more than a century before independence from Spain was gained in 1810, and the very first intellectual autobiography written by a criolla in a hemisphere known for its solipsism, introversion, and allergy to public confessions. Also included in this wide-ranging selection is a new translation of Sor Juana's masterpiece, the epistemological poem "Primero Sueno, " as well as revealing autobiographical sonnets, reverential religious poetry, secular love poems (which have excited speculation through three centuries), playful verses, and lyrical tributes to New World culture that are among the earliest writings celebrating the people and the customs of this hemisphere.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)