scholarly journals His Belly, Her Seed: Gender and Medicine in Early Modern Demonic Possession

2019 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Boyd Brogan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Demonic Possession ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Medical Perspective

This article reassesses the role of gender in early modern demonic possession from a medical perspective. It takes as its starting point the demoniac Richard Mainy, who in 1585 claimed to be suffering from hysteria. Best known for its influence on Shakespeare's King Lear, Mainy's gender-crossing diagnosis should be read in the context of the close historical relationship between hysteria and epilepsy. While medical historians have viewed hysteria as the key possession-related illness, epilepsy was equally important. Both were seen as convulsive illnesses caused by an excess of reproductive fluids. Emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences between male and female sexuality, this shared etiology underpinned medical approaches to demonic possession.

Nobody, Somebody, and King Lear

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Womack
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
The University

The approximately contemporary Jacobean plays, King Lear and Nobody and Somebody, share an ancient British setting, a preoccupation with instability in the state, and an unsettling interest in negation. Peter Womack here suggests that by reading them together we can retrieve some of the theatrical strangeness which the more famous of the two has lost through familiarity and naturalization. The dramatic mode of existence of the character called ‘Nobody’ is paradoxical, denaturing – an early modern visual and verbal Verfremdungseffekt, at once philosophical and clownish. His negativity, which is articulated in dialogue with the companion figure of ‘Somebody’, is matched in King Lear, above all in the role of Edgar, but also by a more diffused state of being (withdrawal, effacement, folly) which the play generates in reaction to its positive events. Ultimately the negation in both plays is social in character: ‘Nobody’ is the dramatic face of the poor and oppressed. Peter Womack teaches literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is English Renaissance Drama (2006), in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series.

scholarly journals “Take (Meta)physic, pomp”: King Lear and (Dis)oriented Ontology

ROMARD ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
M. Burdick Smith
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Insight Into

This essay uses Object-Oriented Ontology, a posthumanist theoretical model, to explore how King Lear’s use of and relation to objects can provide insight into his characterization. This essay provides a model for scrutinizing the role of objects—whether animate or inanimate—in performances of early modern drama; furthermore, it argues that King Lear’s use of objects reveals a consistent refusal to understand others, which upsets a redemptive arc in the play. To that end, the article proposes an ethical model—demonstrated by Kent—that responds to the play’s otherwise desolate worldview.

Sex in an Old Regime City

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Hardwick
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Double Standard ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Reproductive Consequences

Based on extensive archival research, the extraordinary stories of ordinary people’s lives in this book explore many facets of young people’s intimacy from meeting to courtship to the many occasions when untimely pregnancies necessitated a range of strategies. These might include marriage but could also be efforts to induce abortions, arrangements for out-of-wedlock delivery, charging the father with custody, leaving the baby with a foundling hospital, or infanticide. Clergy, lawyers, social welfare officials, employers, midwives, wet-nurses, neighbors, family, and friends supported young women and held young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. These practices of intimacy reframe our understanding of multiple aspects of the Old Regime. Young people’s intimate experiences challenge the belief that disciplining female sexuality was a critical early modern goal of state formation and religious reformation. They suggest rethinking the history of a sexual double standard in local and long contexts, the history of marriage, and the role of law in the politics of communities and institutions. The lives of young people also reshape many more specific debates, for instance, about the history of emotions, infanticide, attitudes to illegitimacy, pre-modern workplaces, and the body. The book reveals the important role of the young people’s working communities, where the norm was local management of intimacy with a heavy emphasis on pastoral care and pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

The Avenging Daughter in King Lear

2018 ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Marguerite A. Tassi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Geoffrey Of Monmouth ◽  
Negative Stereotypes

This chapter addresses the scarcity of avenging daughters in early modern texts, arguing that Shakespeare’s Cordelia in King Lear provides an exception to this paradigm. In scripting such an unexpected part for a female character, Shakespeare subverts the traditionally male gendered role of the avenger son and reconfigures earlier versions of the legend (such as those found in accounts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holinshed, and John Higgins and the anonymous King Leir). The chapter demonstrates the play’s structural affinities with the revenge genre, arguing that King Lear offers ethically contrasting forms of requital that are also gendered: while Goneril and Regan correspond to negative stereotypes about vengeful women, Shakespeare’s Cordelia (particularly in the 1623 folio), resembles the ‘male-like’ Cordelia depicted in the historical chronicles. Finally, the chapter asks what commentary on injustice, filial duty, and revenge Shakespeare’s harrowing, unsentimental dramatization of the Lear legend offered its early seventeenth-century audiences.

The Role of Women in Pursuing Scottish Criminal Actions, 1580–1650

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Stephanie Dropuljic
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
The Law ◽  
Role Of Women

This article examines the role of women in raising criminal actions of homicide before the central criminal court, in early modern Scotland. In doing so, it highlights the two main forms of standing women held; pursing an action for homicide alone and as part of a wider group of kin and family. The evidence presented therein challenges our current understanding of the role of women in the pursuit of crime and contributes to an under-researched area of Scots criminal legal history, gender and the law.

INTERPRETATION OF SINO-RUSSIAN CULTURE AND HUMANITIES COOPERATION IN THE NEW ERA

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-193
Author(s):  
REN YANYAN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Current Status ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
New Era ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cooperative Partnership ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
The Belt And Road

The friendship between nations lies in the mutual affinity of the people, and the people’s affinity lies in the communion of hearts. The cultural and humanities cooperation between China and Russia has a long history. In recent years, under the role of the“Belt and Road” initiative, the SCO, and the Sino-Russian Humanities Cooperation Committee, Sino-Russian culture and humanities cooperation has continued to deepen. Entering a new era, taking the opportunity to promote Sino-Russian relations into a “new era China-Russia comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership”, the development of human relations between the two countries has entered a new historical starting point, while also facing a series of problems and challenges. This article is based on the current status of Sino-Russian human relations in the new era, interprets the characteristics of Sino-Russian human relations in the new era, analyzes the problems and challenges of Sino-Russian human relations in the new era, and tries to propose solutions and solutions with a view to further developing Sino-Russian cultural and humanities relations in the new era. It is a useful reference, and provides a reference for future related research, and ultimately helps the Sino-Russian cultural and humanities relations in the new era to be stable and far-reaching.

Füchsische Poetologie. Zur Spiegelfiktion im Reynke de Vos (1498)

POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Hannah Rieger
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Ancient Rhetoric ◽  
Wooden Frame ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Specific Material

Abstract The Middle Low German Beast Epic Reynke de Vos (1498) is about two legal proceedings against the fox Reynke, who is charged by the other animals with the tricks he played on them. When he is sentenced to death, Reynke defends himself by delivering speeches that are constructed as described in ancient rhetoric. Part of those speeches is Reynke’s lie about his treasure, which he would give to the lion if he pardoned him. Reynke describes three pieces of jewellery as part of this made-up possession, one of which is a mirror. When Reynke describes it, he also tells Aesopic fables that are carved into its wooden frame. His fictional artefact, especially the interplay of its specific material and the content of the fables told, has a poetological level. In his description, Reynke hybridizes the political discourse of the early modern period, in which the virtue of prudentia becomes more and more important, with the rhetorical competence to deliver speeches and tell fables. In his fiction of the mirror he draws up a poetological draft that combines the role of a rhetor in court with his well-known properties of being clever and cunning. By describing the artefact, Reynke shows how to use rhetorical strategies, especially to tell fables, as an instrument to gain acceptance and to acquire political influence.

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