| Introductory Essays | 15 |
|---|
| Renaissance Chronology | 15 |
| Preface | 18 |
| Women Heard and Hidden | 18 |
| Manuscript Description | 25 |
| The Spielmann Hypothesis | 35 |
| On the Title of our Manuscript | 38 |
| The Languages of MPW | 39 |
| Rhyming Couplets and Music | 43 |
| Didactic Poetry | 45 |
| Writing in the Vernacular | 47 |
| MPW and the Bovo-Buch | 50 |
| Belief in the Demonic and Other Folkloristic Elements | 51 |
| A Storyteller | 53 |
| Sangmeister | 54 |
| Reader/Audience Approval | 55 |
| If They Only Had Knowledge | 56 |
| Women’s Prayer | 57 |
| On Piety | 58 |
| The Condition of Exile | 61 |
| Conjugal Relations | 62 |
| Female Exemplarity | 63 |
| Redemption Through Sex | 65 |
| The Renaissance Context | 68 |
| Introduction | 68 |
| Women and Ashkenazi Jews | 71 |
| Did Ashkenazi Women have a Renaissance? | 79 |
| The “Masculine” Heroic, Moses, and the Phallus | 88 |
| MPW and Children | 96 |
| Women’s Work | 101 |
| Judith among the Amazons: The Power of Women | 103 |
| MPW and Querelle des Femmes | 126 |
| MPW and Food | 135 |
| Translator’s Foreword | 141 |
| A Translator’s Adventure | 141 |
| Reading and Handwriting | 141 |
| A World of Words | 142 |
| The World of the Author | 145 |
| Restoring a Minor Masterpiece | 148 |
| Traduttore, traditore | 148 |
| Transcribing, not Translating? | 151 |
| Literal Translation and “Bible Yiddish” | 154 |
| Alternative Approaches | 157 |
| Our Author as Translator | 157 |
| An Earlier Translation from Our Text | 158 |
| Translation Questions | 159 |
| Prayer book or Torah? | 159 |
| Playing or cursing? | 160 |
| The Contents of a Chamber Pot | 161 |
| More untranslatable words | 161 |
| Reading the Yiddish Text | 162 |
| An opportunity | 162 |
| The language | 162 |
| Early Yiddish Spelling | 164 |
| Consonants | 165 |
| Vowels | 167 |
| Hebrew vowels | 169 |
| Facsimile of folios 57b–58a of MPW in Cambridge Add. 547 | 171 |
|---|
| Note on the Translation and the Yiddish Text | 172 |
|---|
| Many Pious Women. Annotated Translation and Yiddish Text | 175 |
|---|
| Part 1: “If they remembered this...” | 176 |
| Pregnancy | 176 |
| Labor | 178 |
| Confinement | 182 |
| Breast-feeding | 184 |
| Child Care | 186 |
| Women’s Hard Lot | 188 |
| Part 2: “From the Torah and from ancient history” | 190 |
| The Golden Calf | 190 |
| The Exodus | 190 |
| The Midwives | 192 |
| Jochebed | 192 |
| Tamar | 196 |
| The Mirrors | 200 |
| The Promised Land | 204 |
| Zelophehad’s Daughters | 206 |
| Ruth | 206 |
| Deborah | 210 |
| Jael | 210 |
| Bathsheba | 212 |
| Judith | 216 |
| Esther | 224 |
| Women and the Torah | 240 |
| Part 3: “With commandments they do wonders!” | 242 |
| Special Sabbaths | 242 |
| Wedding Customs | 244 |
| Religious Sewing | 248 |
| Circumcision Customs | 250 |
| Candle-Making | 252 |
| Postscript | 252 |
| Notes | 254 |
|---|
| Notes to Part 1: “If they remembered this...” | 254 |
| Pregnancy | 254 |
| Labor | 256 |
| Confinement | 259 |
| Breast-feeding | 263 |
| Child Care | 265 |
| Women’s Hard Lot | 266 |
| Notes to Part 2: “From the Torah and from ancient history” | 267 |
| The Golden Calf | 267 |
| The Exodus | 268 |
| The Midwives | 269 |
| Jochebed | 270 |
| Tamar | 272 |
| The Mirrors | 275 |
| The Promised Land | 277 |
| Zelophehad’s Daughters | 279 |
| Ruth | 279 |
| Deborah | 282 |
| Jael | 283 |
| Bathsheba | 285 |
| Judith | 286 |
| Esther | 292 |
| Women and the Torah | 303 |
| Notes to Part 3: “With commandments they do wonders!” | 305 |
| Special Sabbaths | 305 |
| Wedding Customs | 307 |
| Religious Sewing | 313 |
| Circumcision Customs | 314 |
| Postscript | 315 |
| Bibliography | 316 |
|---|
| Index | 343 |
|---|
