Lina Eckenstein

Through the Casentino with Hints for the Traveller, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Reproduction of the original: Woman under Monasticism by Lina Eckenstein

Reproduction of the original: Through the Casentino by Lina Eckenstein

Reproduction of the original: A History of Sinai by Lina Eckenstein

Feminist scholar and activist Lina Eckenstein (1857–1931) was educated in modern and medieval European languages, as well as classical and medieval history. She published on art history, and participated in archaeological excavations in Egypt alongside Flinders Petrie. During the 1880s, while working as a research assistant, translator and proofreader, Eckenstein embarked on her pioneering study of medieval convents. Based on close engagement with medieval textual evidence, but written from a secular, sceptical viewpoint, it was published by Cambridge University Press in 1896. Eckenstein argued, persuasively and with great originality, that religious life allowed medieval women educational and social opportunities similar to those that she and her contemporaries were campaigning for. In her view, the Reformation had seriously restricted women's freedom for several centuries, but she noted that the modern movement for women's education had now arisen in the societies most radically affected by the Protestant reforms.

The feminist, medievalist and political theorist Lina Eckenstein (1857–1931) spent the excavation seasons from 1903 to 1906 working with Flinders Petrie (whose wife Hilda was a close friend) at Saqqara, Abydos and elsewhere. This 1921 publication was inspired by her experiences at the site of Serabit in the Sinai peninsula (Petrie's account of the excavation is also reissued in this series). Eckenstein describes it as a 'little history which will, I trust, appeal to those who take an interest in the reconstruction of the past and in the successive stages of religious development'. The narrative begins in the prehistoric period, suggesting that the inhospitable landscape (caused by ancient deforestation) and climate dissuaded large-scale permanent settlement until the first hermit and monastic communities of the Christian era (although the Egyptians had been drawn there by resources of turquoise and copper), and continues down to the nineteenth century.