scholarly journals Midwifery and Maternity Care for Single Mothers in Eighteenth-Century Wales

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-416
Author(s):  
Angela Joy Muir

Summary The history of childbirth in England has gained increasing momentum, but no studies have been carried out for Wales, and therefore the nature of childbirth in early modern Wales remains largely unknown. This article seeks to redress this imbalance in two ways: First, by examining Welsh parish, court and ecclesiastical records for evidence of those who attended parturient women. This evidence demonstrates that Welsh midwives were not a homogeneous group who shared a common status and experience, but were a diverse mix of practitioners drawn from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Secondly, by assessing the care these practitioners provided to some of the most marginalised in Welsh society: unmarried pregnant women. Parish resources were limited, and poor law provision often covered only what was considered absolutely necessary. Analysis of what was deemed essential for the safe delivery of illegitimate infants provides a revealing glimpse of to the ‘ceremony of childbirth’ in eighteenth-century Wales.

Itinerario ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhaswati Bhattacharya

Both overseas trade and shipbuilding in India are of great antiquity. But even for the early modern period, maritime commerce is relatively better documented than the shipbuilding industry. When the Portuguese and later the North Europeans entered the intra-Asian trade, many of the ships they employed in order to supplement their shipping in Asia were obtained from the Indian dockyards. Detailed evidence with regard to shipbuilding, however, is very rare. It has been pointed out that the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were more particular than their North-European counter-parts in the following centuries in providing information on seafaring and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding on the west coast has been discussed more than that on the eastern coast of India, particularly the coast of Bengal. Though Bengal had a long tradition of shipbuilding, direct evidence of shipbuilding in the region is rare. Many changes were brought about in the history of India and the Indian Ocean trade of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1750s. When the English became the largest carriers of Bengal's trade with other parts of Asia, this had an impact on the shipbuilding in Bengal. It was in their interest that the British in Bengal had their ships built in that province.


Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.


Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.


In the early modern period, Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions were impelled to establish colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories. The Irish, English and Scots Colleges founded in France, Flanders, the Iberian peninsula, Rome and elsewhere are the best known, but the phenomenon extended to Dutch and Scandinavian foundations in southern Flanders and the German lands. Similarly colleges were established in Rome for various national communities, among whom the Maronites are a striking example. The first colleges were founded in the mid-sixteenth century and tens of thousands of students passed through them until their closure in late eighteenth century. Only a handful survived the disruption of the French Revolutionary wars to re-emerge in the nineteenth century. Historians have long argued that these exile colleges played a prominent role in maintaining Catholic structures by supplying educated clergy equipped to deal with the challenges of their domestic churches. This has ensured that the Irish, English and Scots colleges in particular have a rich historiography laid out in the pages of Archivium Hibernicum, the Records of the Scots Colleges or the volumes published under the aegis of the Catholic Record Society in England. Until recently, however, their histories were considered in isolating confessional and national frameworks, with surprisingly little attempt to examine commonalities or connections. Recent research has begun to open up the topic by investigating the social, economic, cultural and material histories of the colleges. Meanwhile renewed interest in the history of early modern migration has encouraged historians to place the colleges within the vibrant migrant communities of Irish, English, Scots and others on the continent. The Introduction begins with a survey of the colleges. It assesses their historiographies, paying particular attention to the research of the last three decades. The introduction argues that an obvious next step is to examine the colleges in transnational and comparative perspectives. Finally, it introduces the volume's essays on Irish, English, Scots, Dutch, German and Maronite colleges, which provide up-to-date research by leading historians in the field and point to the possibilities for future research on this exciting topic.


Author(s):  
Roni Cohen

Abstract This article examines an unknown collection of 16 letters written by the 14-year-old Moses Samuel ben Asher Anshel of Gendringen found in a small booklet for Purim that he copied in Amsterdam in 1713. In the letters, written in Hebrew and Yiddish and decorated with illustrated frames, Samuel (as he calls himself) writes to his parents about his studies and ambition to become a professional scribe. This article discusses Samuel’s letters as sources for the history of Jewish book culture in Early Modern Amsterdam, and for the history of professional Jewish scribes and copyists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It does so by offering an analysis of Samuel’s descriptions of his studies and his own self-perception, and of the letters in context of their presence in Samuel’s booklet.


Author(s):  
Sarah Maza

The concept of a group called “the bourgeoisie” is unusual in being both central to early modern and modern European history, and at the same time highly controversial. In old regime France, people frequently used the words “bourgeois” or “bourgeoisie” but what they meant by them was very different from the meaning historians later assigned to those terms. In the nineteenth century the idea of a “bourgeoisie” became closely associated with Marxian historical narratives of capitalist ascendancy. Does it still make sense to speak of a “bourgeoisie”? This article attempts to lay out and clarify the terms of the problem by posing a series of questions about this aspect of the social history of Ancien Régime France, with a brief look across the Channel for comparison. It considers first the problem of definition: what was and is meant by “the bourgeoisie” in the context of early modern French history? Second, what is the link between eighteenth-century economic change and the existence and nature of such a group, and can we still connect the origins of the French Revolution to the “rise” of a bourgeoisie? And finally, can the history of perceptions and representations of a bourgeoisie or middle class help us to understand why the concept has been so problematic in the longer run of French history?


1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Daston

The ArgumentNaturalization confers authority on beliefs, conventions, and claims, but what kind of authority? Because the meaning of nature has a history, so does that of naturalization:naturalization is not the same tactic when marshaled in, say, eighteenth-century France and in late nineteenth-century Britain. Although the authority of nature may be invoked in both cases, the import of that authority depends crucially on whether nature is understood normatively or descriptively, within the framework of the natural laws of jurisprudence or within that of the natural laws of mechanics. During the early modern period, the denotative center of gravity of the word “nature” shifted dramatically. Writings about the female intellect are particularly well suited to reflect and focus these changes for three reasons: first, as with so many aspects of gender identity, what was distinctively female about women's way of thinking was usually alleged to be part and parcel of their “nature”; second, thepolitical and social implications of the female intellect were debated heatedly and in unprecedented detail, particularly in France; and third, the actual content of beliefs about what traits sex the intellect as female remained relatively constant during this period, despite sharp differences of opinion over their putative “natural” causes. The female intellect was naturalized not once but repeatedly, and therein lies its value for a history of naturalization.


Author(s):  
Александр Каменский

The history of suicide in Russia, especially prior to the nineteenth century, remains understudied. While in most European countries the process of decriminalization and secularization of suicide was underway, in Russia, with the introduction of the Military Article of 1715, it was formally criminalized. On the basis of the study of more than 350 newly examined archival cases, this article examines how the transfer of suicide investigations to secular authorities also entailed secularization, while the peculiarities of the Russian judicial and investigative system, as well as lacunae in the legislation, actually led to the gradual decriminalization of suicide. At the same time, although among Russians, as well as among other peoples, a number of superstitions were associated with suicide, there is no evidence in the archival documents studied in this article of a particularly emotional perception of suicide. The phenomenon of suicide in eighteenth-century Russia, when compared to early modern Europe, did not have any significant, fundamental differences. However, the features of the Russian judicial-investigative system made this phenomenon less public, less visible and less significant for public consciousness.  


Author(s):  
Judith Pollmann

This chapter explores the importance of family memory for early modern people, before moving to the question of how and why people structured personal memories as they did. Departing from the observation that early modern personal memories were more often associated with bodies than with emotions, it explores how memoirists selected memories for their exemplary potential. Memoirs were used to show how someone had ‘performed’ his life in accordance with cultural ‘scripts’ that were used to give meaning to personal experiences and made them useful to share. This helps explain the memorialization of two particular types of personal religious experience—martyrdom and conversion. Finally, this chapter will explain how, in the eighteenth century, memoirs were first put to a new use, to construct a history of one’s own emotional and moral development, so creating an important new cultural script for personal remembering that is more in line with modern expectations.


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