ABSTRACT

In A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present: Volume One, Bonnie S.Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser quote a handful of exquisitely lovely, yet deeply disturbing, lines from a Celtic lyric in which the imagined speaker, Eve, describes what the world would have been like if she had not picked the apple. ‘There would’, she says, ‘be no ice glazing ground…no glistening windswept winter…no hell…no sorrow…no fear, were it not for me’ (Anderson and Zinsser 1990:335).