The Second Sex and the First Estate: The Sisters of St-André between the Bishop of Tournai and Rome, 1850–1886

2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-474
Author(s):  
VINCENT VIAENE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Holy See ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Beaten Track ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Silent Revolution ◽  
New Generation

In 1855 the sisters of St André in Tournai (Belgium) openly revolted against their bishop by sending a delegation to the pope. It was the high point of a conflict that had been simmering since 1850, and would continue to reverberate until 1886. This case study illustrates the religious, social and gender fault-lines opened by modernity between authoritarian bishops and a new generation of self-conscious religious women active in society. The field of tension provided Vatican diplomacy with the opportunity for an unprecedented affirmation of its mediating role. The affair of St André was one of the first occasions on which the Curia was directly confronted with ultramontane feminism, and it neatly defines the margins within which the Holy See was hammering out a matrix for the Romanisation and ‘standardisation’ of religious women. At the price of ‘following the beaten track’ to Rome, the second sex could sufficiently escape the grip of the first estate to operate a silent revolution in education, charity and devotion during the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

Gender and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Religious Women

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Ground Plan ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
And Gender

Space and gender have been two of the ‘buzz words’ in archaeology over the last few years; and quite rightly so, since they identify two of the most crucial aspects of human experience. As we move around buildings today, we are all well aware of norms and restrictions — public spaces and doors marked ‘private’, lounges and bedrooms, stairways and corridors. We negotiate and respect these according to customs and habits learned mainly in childhood. What is true of our own society is true of every other society, past and present, and one of the challenges — not to say obligations — facing archaeologists is to gain some understanding of these spatial mores, even when presented with little more than a ground plan.In Gilchrist's case-study of medieval English nunneries, the evidence is rather more substantial. Not only has some of the fabric survived — both of churches and their associated buildings — but there is a rich body of textual information about the nunneries, the nuns who inhabited them, and the Christian symbolism and belief which underlay the whole institution.What better place to study gender and its material expression than in such a uniquely female institution as the medieval nunnery? Fezv would deny that archaeology can play a powerful role in helping us to understand these religious communities — enabling us to see beyond the confines of written records. The application of particular theoretical approaches, however, is somewhat more contentious. Just how well do they fit such a body of evidence? And on a subject where we already have a great deal of textual evidence, can study of the material remains — in layout of buildings, evidence of their use, and iconography — truly reveal new levels of meaning? In sum, how successful is this new analysis?These are among the key issues which are discussed in the following pages. As usual, we begin this Review Feature with an introduction by the author herself, Roberta Gilchrist. Then follow four contrasting reactions, from archaeologists and historians, rounded off by Gilchrist's reply. Whatever our assessment, the interplay of gender and space has profound and far-reaching significance, and raises issues that no serious historical archaeologist — or indeed prehistorian — can afford to ignore.

scholarly journals Lives in the balance? Gender, age and assets in late-nineteenth-century England and Wales

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID R. GREEN ◽  
ALASTAIR OWENS ◽  
JOSEPHINE MALTBY ◽  
JANETTE RUTTERFORD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Life Course

AbstractStudies of wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Britain focus either on establishing aggregate measures or on individual case studies. These do not allow for a comparative analysis of the way that the composition of wealth was influenced by age and gender. This article explores the importance of these factors using both a case-study approach and a more comprehensive analysis of wealth left at death for a sample of 1,444 individuals. By establishing the age at death for 1,274 of these individuals, together with evidence from a series of death duty records, it is possible to determine the composition of assets by age and gender. For both men and women, shares became more important over the life course. Real estate was more important for men of all ages compared to women, for whom safe investments in government securities assumed greater significance with age. These findings confirm that both age and gender influenced the amount and composition of wealth and demonstrate that these factors need to be taken into account in any model that seeks to make generalizations about the pattern of wealth-holding in the population at large. Emphasizing these demand-side factors provides a different perspective on the rise of Britain as a ‘nation of investors’.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johannes Brahms ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Gendered Space ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
Joseph Joachim ◽  
And Gender

This introductory chapter establishes foundations of the book: who formed the priesthood of art (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Amalie Joachim, Joseph Joachim) and the birth of artistic priesthood from the art-religious spirit of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In particular, this chapter introduces the notion that the artistic priesthood occupied a kind of alternative gendered space—neither fully masculine nor feminine—and that desirable characteristics of an artistic priest (devotion, humility, spiritial leadership) could be gendered in various ways in musical-critical discourse. After midcentury, changes in music aesthetics and gender roles created pressure to understand Romantic notions of musical priesthood as antiquated and outmoded. In short, Brahms offers a case study in the intersection of art-religious values with a gender dichotomy that became increasingly prescriptive over the second half of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals ACTIVITY AND PASSIVITY: CLASS AND GENDER IN THE CASE OF THE ARTIFICIAL HAND

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Stainthorp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Artificial Limbs ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Military Surgery ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Artificial Hand ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Uk

This article analyzes the tensionbetween the active, present body and the absent, passive body in this medical case study, presented by doctor and prosthetist Henry Robert Heather Bigg in his 1885 bookArtificial Limbs and the Amputations which Afford the Most Appropriate Stumps in Civil and Military Surgery. I reproduce Bigg's account in its entirety because, to date,Artificial Limbshas not been digitised, although it is held at around a dozen academic libraries in the UK and USA respectively. Bringing attention to and providing a close reading of a source not previously discussed academically sheds new light on the way the disabled body was read by medical professionals in the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition, I consider Bigg's narrative rendering of this unique case study alongside several contemporary sources, including memoirs, novels, short stories, and journal articles. In doing so, I identify how assumptions made by Bigg about the (disabled, female, privileged) hand mirror and echo those in the wider cultural sphere. The sensing hand is an instrument of will, and the creation of such a prosthesis troubles the dynamics of active and passive, touching and touched that Pamela K. Gilbert has identified as crucial to nineteenth-century discourses surrounding the hand. By designing and making this prosthesis, Bigg exerts his professional and masculine agency to make the woman's body assume the position of something beheld rather than embodied.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

The Category Is . . . Opulence!

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Plaster
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The Cross ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Performance

In recent years there has been a strong “public turn” within universities that is renewing interest in collaborative approaches to knowledge creation. This article draws on performance studies literature to explore the cross-disciplinary collaborations made possible when the academy broadens our scope of inquiry to include knowledge produced through performance. It takes as a case study the “Peabody Ballroom Experience,” an ongoing collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, the Peabody Institute BFA Dance program, and Baltimore’s ballroom community—a performance-based arts culture comprising gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people of color.

More than a “Petty Chief”: Understanding Fijian Chiefship through the Entrance Ceremony and Local History

1969 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-226
Author(s):  
Hao-Li Lin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
Local History

The diverse nature of Fiji’s chiefship and how its supremacy was strengthened by colonialism have already been closely examined. However, few studies have focused on village chiefs, who have limited authority and are at the lower end of regional chiefly hierarchies. Using both historical and ethnographic materials from a Fijian village, I argue here that its “petty chief,” as the role was called by nineteenth-century Westerners, is a powerful linkage to a past of stability represented by the chiefly title. This is particularly important for communities that have experienced historical turbulence. In this case study, it was mainly the measles crisis that caused population decline. The linkage is materialised by a standardised entrance ceremony in which the chiefly title is routinely acknowledged by foreign visitors through offerings (i-sevusevu) and thus elevated to a symbol that holds the community together. I also argue that the entrance ceremony that we observe today may have been prompted by Western contact. Through the analysis of the ceremony and local history, this study shows that the power of “petty chiefs” should be understood not solely by the structure of hierarchy, but also by their significance to historically turbulent communities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document