In this book -- the first in more than fifty years to treat the entire body of Grimms' Tales -- Ruth B. Bottigheimer provides a thorough analysis of the stories' content, focusing in particular on the matter of gender. By combining a sociohistorical examination of the stories with close scrutiny of[...]

This book details magic's generally maleficent effect on human beings from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. Bottigheimer shows that certain magical motifs lived on from age to age, but that it took until the Ital[...]