Table of Contents

Preface: My Family Jewels, and Other Tall Tales
Introduction: The Signifying Ring
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Marriage Rings (and Adultery Rings)
Chapter 2: The Ring Fished from the Ocean
Chapter 3: Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory
Chapter 4: Rings of Forgetfulness in Medieval European Romances
Chapter 5: Siegfried's Ring and Wagner's Ring
Chapter 6: Pregnant Riddles and Clever Wives
Chapter 7: The Rape of the Clever Wife
Chapter 8: The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
Chapter 9: The Slut Assumption in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Chapter 10: Are Diamonds A Woman's Best Friend?
Chapter 11: Two Conclusions, on Money and Myth

About the Author

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of over 40 books, including On Hinduism and Redeeming the Kamasutra.

Reviews

"Doniger's exploration of the ring's symbolism as a manacle that binds a woman to a man is particularly insightful, as is her witty deconstruction of the modern myth of the diamond engagement ring that proves to have much more to do with savvy marketing than any enduring romantic tradition."--Library Journal
"Reading Wendy Doniger's book is not unlike reading Don Quixote, with all its familiar adventures peppered with memorable detours of love, adultery, and the foibles of jealous husbands and clever wives. She leaps easily from Sanskrit fables to Roman times, from medieval lore to the eighteenth-century French Court and modern Doris Day movies, landing wherever she wishes with her characteristic supreme knowledge of 'anytime and anywhere' and her
contagious preoccupation with Sex."--Francis Ford Coppola
"Only a great scholar like Wendy Doniger could bring together Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Siegfried, Shakuntala and Marie Antoinette, Solomon and Shakespeare and so many others with such ease and lucidity in an endlessly mesmerizing ring."--Robert Calasso, author of Ardor
"Why did I read this book, so passionately glued to it, hardly taking a break? The tales and the connections, the inner working of the layers of each tale kept working on my mind and my body. Wonder and amazement were the determining qualities of the book. I never stopped wondering what the next sentence would say, and the next tale would tell."--Velcheru Narayana Rao, Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Chair in Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory
University
"Doniger has the uncanny ability to delight and teach at the same time. Her whimsical approach to complicated material causes scholars to marvel and nonspecialists to be entranced....This wonderful book reads like a true modern best seller as well as a thoughtful, scholarly endeavor."--CHOICE

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