Book review : The Maltese Cindirella and the Women’s Storytelling Tradition

Abstract

It is almost thirty years ago that I met Dr Veronica Veen, the Dutch cultural anthropologist and art historian/ archaeologist. It is illustrative of her open-minded approach as a scholar that she immediately sought the cooperation and dialogue with local expertise. At the time, the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, she was absorbed by an extensive fieldwork project revolving around the storytelling tradition on Gozo. The corpus of stories about a strong, bean-eating giantess who had reputedly brought the Stone of Qala up to its present location, had her special interest, since the connection between this place-bound tale with its many variants and Gozo’s rich prehistoric past might be established: a stone-carrying giantess as a folkloristic remains of a goddess-culture that built megalithic temples.