Women, Art and Observant Franciscan Piety

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Giles Arthur
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women Patrons

Caterina Vigri (later Saint Catherine of Bologna) was a mystic, writer, teacher and nun-artist. Her first home, Corpus Domini, Ferrara, was a house of semi-religious women that became a Poor Clare convent and model of Franciscan Observant piety. Vigri's intensely spiritual decoration of her breviary, as well as convent altarpieces that formed a visual program of adoration for the Body of Christ, exemplify the Franciscan Observant visual culture. After Vigri's departure, it was transformed by d'Este women patrons, including Isabella da Aragona, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. While still preserving Observant ideals, it became a more elite noblewomen's retreat. Grounded in archival research and extant paintings, drawings, prints and art objects from Corpus Domini, this volume explores the art, visual culture, and social history of an early modern Franciscan women's community.

Doctoring the Body and Exciting the Soul: Drugs and consumer culture in medieval and early modern Iran

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 554-617
Author(s):  
RANIN KAZEMI
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

AbstractThis article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).

Digging the Dirt in the Pursuit of Cleanliness

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of

The introduction outlines the historiography on cleanliness and the influence of Georges Vigarello on early modern social history and history of the body. It reviews both the philosophical and the practical aspects that make researching cleanliness so challenging. On one hand, the prejudices of contemporary observers and commentators are acknowledged and, on the other, the practice of cleanliness is so habitual it goes unnoticed and unrecorded. The methodology for the book is described, first to use traditional documentary sources from a variety of media to elucidate what advice was given about cleanliness in early modern England. In order to determine whether such advice was followed, a study of the material culture of cleanliness is proposed and outlined, acknowledging that it may be more successful for linen than for bodies. Finally the drawing together of these various strands of research is emphasized.

Renaissance Mass Murder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Human Tragedy

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

Taming worldly emotions and appetites

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Lux-Sterritt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Prescriptive Literature

Early modern nuns belonged to ‘emotional communities’, with their own ways of expressing emotions. In this chapter, the emotional experiences of individuals are compared to the communal constructions that make up the collective emotionology of their cloistered context. The personal writings of English Benedictine nuns reveal their efforts to comply with clerical prescriptive literature on emotions, usually construed as passions or appetites, and described as enemies of spirituality. Yet nuns’ relationships with emotions (and more generally with the body as a vector of emotions) remained complex. On their way to the spiritual, many religious women struggled to reconcile what they really felt with what they were taught they should feel.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

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