The Oxford History of Hinduism: The Goddess

one of the best anthologies of essays on its subject that I have come across in a long academic career spanning the study of Hinduism. The fourteen essays that comprise the substance of this book (all of which are attached to female names) are uniformly informative, well-researched, and scholarly, and, bookended as they are by the editor's Introduction and Afterword which give a useful overview of the book's contents and argument, they provide an excellent treatment, necessarily in limited compass, of what the Hindu Goddess is about from inception to current times. For this, we are indebted indeed to the acumen of Mandakranta Bose, the editor.

Auteur
Mandakranta Bose is Professor Emerita, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, Canada. She studied Sanskrit and Hindu religious texts in Calcutta, comparative literature in Vancouver, and holds a doctorate from Oxford in textual studies in the classical performing arts of India. Bose is the editor of The Ramayana Revisited (2004) and Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India (2000).

Texte du rabat

This book explains how Hindus think about divinity in its feminine aspect, as the supreme creative energy of the cosmos. That energy is a single abstract idea but manifests itself in many forms, each imagined as a goddess with particular powers and functions.