THE IMPORTANCE OF GENDER EQUALITY IN MAINTAINING SOCIAL JUSTICE AND WOMEN’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETIES

Although we have information about the unique participation of women in politics in every period of human history, it is the truth that the right and opportunity to do so in public administration does not apply to every woman in society and is not guaranteed by legal norms. Ancient Greek poets, such as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, referred to the city as the best state in which equality and justice reigned in society. as the best laws, they also put forward laws that guaranteed everyone equality. Applying the idea of equality between men and women in his writings, the Greek scholar Antifont stated, "Nature creates all: women and men equally, but people develop laws that make people unequal." Abu Nasr al-Farabi, one of the encyclopedic scholars of the East, in his City of Noble People, described a state that ruled equality as a state that aspired to virtue recognized as entitled.

P1837THE HISTORY OF THE URINES SPECIFIC GRAVITY TEST FROM THE 15TH CENTURY UNITL TODAY

Background and Aims To present the history of the specific gravity test in the study of urines from the 15th cent. AD until today. Method The first description of a hydrometer, the progenitor of the urinometer, appears in the fifteenth letter from Synesius of Cyrene to the Greek scholar Hypatia of Alexandria, from the 5th century AD. However, its evolution to the urinometer took 15 centuries until 1849, when Johann Florian Heller (1813-1871) introduced it. During the next two centuries, we note a rapid improvement of the appropriate laboratory instruments and a wide acceptance of the importance of specific gravity for the evaluation of urine. We present passages from relevant texts from the discussed period. Results The first call for attention to measuring urine weight comes from Nicolas of Cusa’s work The Layman: Experiments with Weights, where we read “Accordingly, since the weight of blood or the weight of urine is different for a healthy man and for a sick man or for a youthful man and an elderly man or for a German and an African, wouldn’t it be especially useful to a physician to have all these differences recorded? Orator: Most certainly”. The theoretical proposal was solidified in Francis Bacon’s Novurn Organum (1620): “Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done”. Herman Boerhaave, in 1753, weighed the distilled urine residue in order to calculate its density, a complicated and time-consuming procedure. Later, Groenevelt J. in The Rudiments of Physick writes “The particles in it sink or float according to their own gravity [specific!], but their position is also dependent on the thickness of the urine [albumin in it plus formed particles].” Osborne, in 1820, made a genius comparison “When a mucous cloud is present [in the urine] it ascends and descends in the fluid according to specific gravity, thus serving the purpose of a hydrometer”. Becquerel, in 1842, laid out tables calculating the solid articles in urines of given specific gravity. Graves, in 1866, reported intermittent albuminuria with a parallel variation of the specific gravity of urine in infectious disease. The same year, an article in the London Medical Gazette: Or, Journal of Practical Medicine, and another one in The New York Lancet stress the variation of specific gravity in the course of a renal disease. Clover R.M. in the Case of sialorrhoea (1846) states that specific gravity may vary greatly even with the same amount of solids and fluid due to fluid heterogeneity. In 1848, Garrod describes a bottle for measuring urine specific gravity. Johann Florian Heller introduced the mercury-based floating urinometer in 1849 thus greatly facilitating the test of urine specific gravity. The increasing demand for the test’s application resulted in the discovery of refined laboratory instruments, such as the refractometer. Very recently, urine specific gravity is considered an accurate renal function marker, equal to creatinine clearance or proteinuria levels (Constantiner M. et al, Am J Kidney Dis., 2005 May;45(5):833-41. and Anestis SF et al, Am J Primatol., 2009 Feb;71(2):130-5). Conclusion It seems that the understanding of urine specific gravity underwent “mechanisation”, from its inception as the use of the sediment’s location in the vial to access it, during the Middle Ages to complex apparatuses like refractometers. Originating in the Classical and Middle Ages mainly from the East, it obtained its sound scientific background in the West from the Renaissance onwards. After debate on its usefulness, it is again a vital tool for assessing renal damage.

Dodds, Plotinus, and Stephen MacKenna

This chapter examines E.R. Dodds’s relationship with the Irishman Stephen MacKenna (1872–1934), the remarkable journalist turned Greek scholar, who devoted the latter part of his life to the translation into English of the Enneads of Plotinus. MacKenna discovered Plotinus when his journalistic work for Pulitzer’s New York World brought him to St Petersburg in 1905, to cover the abortive revolution there. During his stay, he discovered a copy of the Enneads of Plotinus, which he then began to read while confined temporarily in his hotel room. By the beginning of 1907, he had already formed the idea of translating Plotinus into English. Dodds was regularly consulted over the latter part of MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus. He then initiated a connected series of efforts to bring both Plotinus and MacKenna’s translation of him to a wider public in the year after he took up the Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford.

Pure and Common Greek in Early Tudor England

This chapter presents Greek as a new force in sixteenth-century literary culture, disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. The first part explores the paradox of how Bible translation could enable Greek to be both the pure source and an agent of the common in this period, as well as the supposed affinity between Greek and English. The Protestant Greek scholar, Sir John Cheke is a key figure here. The second part of the chapter discusses the impact of Greek on the humanist renaissance represented by the work of Erasmus and More. Here the issue of how the principle of the common can work in an elite literary context is discussed with reference to Erasmus’ Adagia, Colloquies, and Encomium Moriae, and More's Utopia. Encomium Moriae in particular aims to fulfil Erasmus’ dream of reconciling classical literary values and Christian doctrine through an investment in the common.

Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell

Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell (b. 1540–d. 1609) was the seventh child and fourth daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke and his wife, Anne Fitzwilliam. With the ascension of Edward VI in 1547, Cooke became tutor to the nine-year-old king, a position he held until Edward’s death in 1553. Cooke also dedicated himself to the education of his children, both male and female. The Cooke sisters, as they became known to contemporaries, benefited with their brothers from a humanist education grounded in Greek and Latin languages and texts. By the age of twelve, Elizabeth Cooke was fluent in Latin, Greek, and French. Mildred, her eldest sister, was a noted Greek scholar and the wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I throughout most of her reign. Anne Cooke married Sir Nicholas Bacon, the queen’s keeper of the Great Seal. She translated fourteen Italian sermons by Bernardino Ochino, as well as Bishop John Jewel’s Latin Apology for the Church of England. Katherine married Sir Henry Killigrew and was the author of Latin poems that circulated in manuscript, and of her own Latin epitaph, inscribed on her tomb, where Greek and Latin verses by her sister Elizabeth were also engraved. Russell was sister-in-law to William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, aunt to Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon, and wife first to Sir Thomas Hoby and second to Lord John Russell, son and heir of the Earl of Bedford. Her family connections put her in close proximity to the center of power in her day, while her intelligence and tenacity enabled her to negotiate the political, social, and religious complexities of Elizabethan culture. Russell’s literary reputation emerges from three related forms of early modern publication. First, her fame spread through the circulation of her manuscript works, including poems in Greek and Latin and most likely a manuscript copy of her English translation of John Ponet’s treatise on the Eucharist, A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man (Russell 2001, cited under Printed Texts). Second, Russell was renowned in her lifetime as the author of funerary epitaphs in three languages, engraved upon tombs that she designed and commissioned for members of her family. Finally, Russell’s reputation was established through the joint endeavors of the Cooke sisters and the works that praised them. The Cooke sisters’ shared erudition underwrites Russell’s self-representation and self-defense as a woman of learning, culture, and literary achievement. By foregrounding her role as co-heir with her sisters of their father’s intellectual legacy, Russell’s writings challenge her period’s frequent dismissal of educated women as anomalous and endorse a pedagogy that would educate girls as well as boys.

The World on a Fingernail: An Unknown Byzantine Map, Planudes, and Ptolemy

MS Vat. Gr. 915 (bombyc., ca. 266 × 170 mm, 258 fols.) is a most interesting collection of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek poetry (from Homer and Hesiod to Pindar, from Theocritus and Lycophron down to Moschus and Musaeus) put together during the early Palaeologan Renaissance, more exactly between the last years of the thirteenth century and 1311 (theterminus ante quemis provided by the subscription on fol. 258v). The contents of this codex as well as the textual facies of several of its items have led various scholars, each from a different perspective, to conclude that it was produced in the circle of Maximus Pianudes, the most outstanding Greek scholar of his age (of which he is also in a sense the “eponymous hero”); more on this will be said below in §3.