{"title":"Books by Sarah Ruden","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781324075905","title":"Reproductive Wrongs – A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women","description":"The dangerous belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to “traditional” values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West. How did such damaging ideas arise?In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American “abortion survivor”, Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated.   Scathing and vital, Reproductive Wrongs unearths the evolution of a right-wing radicalism that endures to this day.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368668737909,"sku":"9781324075905","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781324075905.jpg?v=1791212795"},{"product_id":"9780300282009","title":"Vergil","description":"A biography of Vergil, Rome’s greatest poet, by the acclaimed translator of the Aeneid  “Ms. Ruden has converted the writer of the Aeneid from a noble and stodgy ‘ancient’ into our contemporary . . . persuasively re-imagined [as] a sympathetic, three-dimensional figure. . . . The existence of the Aeneid is cause for gratitude. So is Ms. Ruden’s sensitive, celebratory portrait of its maker.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal   The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend.      But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Vergil’s most famous work, the Aeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil’s dying wish that it be destroyed.      Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct his life. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil’s work, she brings to life a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable, even at great personal cost.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419554853237,"sku":"9780300282009","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300282009_9ab46e6c-66cb-4e30-9aa4-89ffdae6cb54.jpg?v=1786012165"},{"product_id":"9780300273717","title":"Perpetua","description":"An intimate and human portrait of Perpetua, a third-century woman author who was idealized as a Christian martyr“[Ruden’s] fresh, engaging translation of the Perpetua dossier captures the nuances of the Latin with remarkable skill. She has an eye for fine but crucial distinctions of meaning. It is a pleasure to read something with such a sensitive guide.”—George Woudhuysen, Wall Street JournalOn March 7, 203, in the monumental amphitheater at Carthage, Vibia Perpetua was one of five Christians who met their deaths after refusing to venerate the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and his son. Perpetua stood out from the other four, and in fact from all the other martyrs of her era and before: she was an aristocratic married woman with an infant son, and she is the first female prose author whose work survives.   Offering a probing new translation of Perpetua’s extraordinary prison diary and situating the life behind that diary within the turbulent late Roman Empire, Sarah Ruden tells the story of Perpetua’s remarkable feat of self-invention as a martyr. As she builds on Perpetua’s own words and integrates them into their religious and historical contexts, Ruden shines a light on Perpetua’s disarming candidness, her brashness, and her naïvété. In contrast to traditional portrayals of the saint as a brave but submissive young woman, Ruden’s narrative reveals a complex individual who flaunts a vivid public persona as a martyr while at the same time navigating the emotions of a mother, daughter, sister, and friend approaching death.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420355866997,"sku":"9780300273717","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300273717.jpg?v=1791212769"},{"product_id":"reproductive-wrongs","title":"Reproductive Wrongs","description":"The belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to “traditional” values is a dangerous myth that has long prospered in American politics, providing justification for increasing control over women’s bodies and lives. How did such damaging ideas arise?In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American “abortion survivor,” Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated.   The New Testament’s Pastoral Epistles introduced near-totalitarian measures to force childbearing in the early days of Christianity. In the late fifteenth century, The Hammer of Witches outlined a program that demonized women’s fertility, justifying mass torture and killing. And Charles Dickens’s The Chimes glorified the virtues of large families among the very poor, playing into their suffering and exploitation in industrialized Victorian Britain. Scathing and vital, Reproductive Wrongs unearths the evolution of a right-wing radicalism that endures to this day, when half of the US population is once again threatened with the loss of basic human rights and totalitarian law.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57573232836981,"sku":"9781324099819","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-sarah-ruden.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}