Book 52: The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starbird

How I came by this book is so funny. Sophomore year of high school, I was reading any Wiccan/Pagan book I could get my hands on and one of them mentioned The Woman with the Alabaster Jar. My Jesuit high school library, which was very small and dark and nearly nobody used it, had a copy! I read it and when my speech class teacher assigned us to prepare an informative speech on a nonfiction book this is the one I chose! My class, including the teacher, reacted to the information of Mary Magdalene being Jesus' wife and fleeing to France to deliver his daughter by saying "wow, why don't they teach this in church?!" BAHAHAHA!!! And then The DaVinci Code came out about 6 years later and stole all my glory!

I owned a copy of this book for a few years and either lost it or lent it to someone who never gave it back. My current copy I've owned for just a few years; this was probably the 4th time I've read The Woman with the Alabaster Jar.
The parts about Bible passages and heresies really bore me. They're written dryly, and Starbird makes a few leaps of logic. The last few chapters about medieval artwork, from watermarks to tarot cards to unicorn imagery, really interest me! 

The last few books in my library have been fun fiction, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is the first of several scholarly, feminist, nonfiction books before swinging back to fun fiction. This pattern in my library wasn't intentional, and I acquired the fiction years before the nonfiction. I feel like this pattern says a lot about me, and I'm hoping to learn more about the waves of feminist nonfiction when I go to the Women's Ordination Conference 50th Anniversary next month!


https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/278433.The_Woman_with_the_Alabaster_Jar

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