The Creation of Female Disability: Medical, Prescriptive and Moral Discourses

Author(s):  
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros

The first chapter explores sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how they inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The exposition includes selected medical works from the fifteenth to the end of sixteenth century that deal with anatomic descriptions of bodily functions, the role of each sex in procreation, and the explanation of diseases, prophylactic measures and cures. In addition, chapter 1 examines discourses of the plague and syphilis in order to show how stigmatizing diseases particularly affected women. Besides medical treatises, the chapter examines influential moral works, such as Juan Luis Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1524) and fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada (1583), as well as discourses on poverty such as Vives’s De subventione pauperum (1525), and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Amparo de pobres (1598), to illuminate how the established conception of female mental and physical inferiority had detrimental consequences for her diminished social role.

1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton

WHEN on the previous two occasions I discussed Parliament and Council as political centres, as institutions capable of assisting or undermining stability in the nation, I had to draw attention to quite a few unanswered questions. However, I also found a large amount of well established knowledge on which to rely. Now, in considering the role of the King's or Queen's Court, I stand more baffled than ever, more deserted. We all know that there was a Court, and we all use the term with frequent ease, but we seem to have taken it so much for granted that we have done almost nothing to investigate it seriously. Lavish descriptions abound of lavish occasions, both in the journalism of the sixteenth century and in the history books, but the sort of study which could really tell us what it was, what part it played in affairs, and even how things went there for this or that person, seems to be confined to a few important articles. At times it has all the appearance of a fully fledged institution; at others it seems to be no more than a convenient conceptual piece of shorthand, covering certain people, certain behaviour, certain attitudes. As so often, the shadows of the seventeenth century stretch back into the sixteenth, to obscure our vision. Analysts of the reigns of the first two Stuarts, endeavouring to explain the political troubles of that age, increasingly concentrate upon an alleged conflict between the Court and the Country; and so we are tempted, once again, to seek the prehistory of the ever interesting topic in the age of Elizabeth or even Henry VIII.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 428-450
Author(s):  
Claudio Sergio Nun-Ingerflom

This article attempts to interpret the insurrection led by Razin in the seventeenth century as the beginning of modern politics, because it was founded on the immanence of the social in contrast to the transcendent conceptions of power maintained by the court and church. This advance was made possible by the working of magic. Through performative speech, magic permitted the creation of a verbal presence for the non-existent tsarevich Alexis, who, however, was never given material form. In keeping the self-appointed heir invisible and by declaring his father’s rule illegitimate, the rebels reduced the role of the tsar to a pure signifier. The proof that this uprising represented a turn toward modern politics is that it did not rely upon the invocation of an intangible philosophical or spiritual ideal (as in the West); it was built instead upon an armed people, expressing itself in a language that was still archaic but already oriented toward a new representation of power as socially legitimatized. This analysis opens an important line of argument that has power beyond this specific case.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly A. Rine

This article analyzes the process of how Albany came to stand as a center of Anglo-Indian relations in the seventeenth century. Through the understanding of the diverse and changing geographical interpretations of particular places and spaces, this paper analyzes Iroquois, Dutch and English understandings of significance and uses of the Fort Orange, later Albany, courthouse to demonstrate how the Iroquois, Mohawks in particular, were able to both function within and contribute to the reinvention of this quintessential European institution to suit their own diplomatic purposes. Through understanding varying interpretations of the court as a diplomatically significant place, we gain a clearer understanding of the role of Native peoples in the creation of this cross-cultural courthouse as it became “the only appointed and prefixed place” of the Covenant Chain of Alliance between the Iroquois and English in 1677.


2006 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-228
Author(s):  
Eric Saak

AbstractThis article traces the role of the desert fathers in the creation of the late medieval Augustinian Myth. It argues that the major problem facing members of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine (OESA) was how to appropriate the tradition of the desert fathers and that of Augustine's monasticism for the tradition of the Order. In this light, special attention is given to the Pseudo-Augustinian Sermones ad fratres in eremo and the central importance of John Cassian and Paul of Thebes. Of particular importance are the works of Jordan of Quedlinburg, which shaped the identity of the OESA from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The desert fathers provided the model of the eremitical life, and thus Jordan "mythified" the desert fathers as he had Augustine himself. This was not an issue of historical identification, but of mythic creation in an attempt to provide the foundation of the late medieval OESA.


2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 362-395
Author(s):  
Xavier Gil

AbstractThe Cortes of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia were well known in Renaissance times for their mature institutional development and their capacity to counterbalance the tendency of monarchs towards authoritarianism. But, from the mid sixteenth century onwards, they were summoned by kings at increasingly long intervals, thus losing part of their visibility in the political scene. But this did not exactly mean parliamentary decline. As Cortes became rarer, lesser corporate bodies, ultimately deriving from the Cortes themselves, acquired an enhanced political status. Different sorts of meetings of estates (brazos) and small committees of members of the estates, while already known in previous times, won a more active role by the late sixteenth century and were a major, if not crucial, factor in the different political crises of the seventeenth century. This article contributes to the current reassessment of the Cortes by emphasizing the role of these bodies, focusing on their interplay with the Cortes, with some comparative remarks on other such bodies in Europe.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Miller

This article presents findings and conclusions from a recently completed Ph.D. project which researched the use of recorders in performing sacred music in Spanish cathedrals and churches during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This study also examined interactions of the historical findings with artistic questions arising in twenty-first-century performance of sacred music repertoire. Paradoxically, while numerous sets of recorders were purchased by ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth century, most contemporary compositions did not specifically call for their use. As well, surviving sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century documentation is highly fragmentary regarding the participatory role of recorders in sacred repertoire of this period. Scholarly research and writing had not addressed this issue, and many questions persisted regarding any role of recorders in this repertoire. Sacred music of this era offers the modern musician an extensive and rich potential repertoire of supreme quality and beauty. Therefore, in seeking an historically informed basis for performance, this project asked if recorders were used in such works in Spanish ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and, if so, how.


2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yigal Bronner ◽  
Gary A Tubb

AbstractThe last active period in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, although associated with scholars who for the first time explicitly identified themselves as new, has generally been castigated in modern histories as repetitious and devoid of thoughtfulness. This paper presents a case study dealing with competing analyses of a single short poem by two of the major theorists of this period, Appayya Dīkṣita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (seventeenth century). Their arguments on this one famous poem touch in new ways on the central questions of what the role of poetics had become within the Sanskrit world and the way in which it should operate in relation to other systems of knowledge and literary cultures.


2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Maclean

AbstractThis paper reassesses the role of sceptical thinking in the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, in the context of the seminal but contestable History of Scepticism by Richard Popkin. It investigates the anti-sceptical essay by Galen De optimo modo docendi (on the best method of teaching), which was retranslated in the sixteenth century by Erasmus and later published as an adjunct to the works of Sextus Empiricus, in order to highlight the currency of ideas about hyperbolic doubt, and links this to the long tradition of free enquiry (libertas philosophandi) in which doubting authority is seen as a profitable exercise closely associated with the independence of philosophy from theological domination; and it argues that this long tradition (along with a number of other factors) played an important role in the emergence of the new science.


Costume ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Arch

As a concept, the idea of product branding offers insights into the history of uniform in Britain. The creation of a brand, by which a product is understood and recognised by its name, fits the cultural history of the red coat, that part of his uniform by which the British infantryman was known for over three hundred years. While the earliest references to the redcoat in this context occur in the sixteenth century, it is really from the eighteenth century onwards that the term becomes widely employed to denote the soldier. However, a review of royal portraiture in Britain from the late seventeenth century onwards also reveals that monarchs used the red coat as a way of uniting the ideals of patriotism with the monarch — a device that was particularly important for the Hanoverian dynasty. Both literature and the visual arts helped identify the red coat as a synonym for the soldier. Numerous references may be adduced, from Jane Austen writing of polite society, to Rudyard Kipling's Tommy. Lady Elizabeth Butler was perhaps the most famous artist to depict red-coated heroes in battles, which marked the defence or development of the Empire.


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