Book excerpt: While the Wisdom volume in the first Feminist Companion series investigated multiple aspects of characterizations of women found in Wisdom literature, the 13 essays in this volume move beyond the study of the characterization of females that formed one of the first steps of modern feminist criticism-the recovery of what had been ignored or trivialized by androcentric readings dominant through the centuries. This second volume takes up questions of voice, exclusion and construction as well as the reinforcement of world views that, while perhaps necessary to the survival of the postexilic community as a whole, nevertheless left a legacy of continued gender asymmetry in Judaism and Christianity.