The scholarly notion of gender has only recently been framed. In the aftermath of World War II, a series of social demands and protests emerged which shook the Western world. These movements placed social and political inequality at the core of their struggle. In particular, feminist movements, collectively called the second wave, blossomed throughout the Western world in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Their powerful socio-political dimension and dynamism quickly attracted worldwide attention. This chapter also presents an overview of this book. The book covers various regions in Europe in different time periods at all levels of society. It covers a wide socio-professional spectrum, from elite women to female artisans, domestics and peasant women. The book redresses a lack of scholarship on gender and 'the dark or unofficial side of the preindustrial economy'. It examines the illness experience articulated by two late medieval mystical writers through the possibilities afforded by medicine and religious culture.
Do women have a history? Did women have a renaissance? These were provocative questions when they were raised in the heyday of women's studies in the 1970s. But how relevant does gender remain to premodern history in the twenty-first century? This book considers this question in eight new case studies that span the European continent from 1400 to 1800. An introductory essay examines the category of gender in historiography and specifically within premodern historiography, as well as the issue of source material for historians of the period. The eight individual essays seek to examine gender in relation to emerging fields and theoretical considerations, as well as how premodern history contributes to traditional concepts and theories within women's and gender studies, such as patriarchy.
The North has long attracted attention, not simply as a circumpolar geographical location, but also as an ideological space, a place that is 'made' through the understanding, imagination, and interactions of both insiders and outsiders. The envisioning of the North brings it into being, and it is from this starting point that this volume explores how the North was perceived from ancient times up to the early modern period, questioning who, where, and what was defined as North over the course of two millennia.
Covering historical periods as diverse as Ancient Greece to eighteenth-century France, and drawing on a variety of disciplines including cultural history, literary studies, art history, environmental history, and the history of science, the contributions gathered here combine to shed light on one key question: how was the North constructed as a place and a people? Material such as sagas, the ethnographic work of Olaus Magnus, religious writing, maps, medical texts, and illustrations are drawn on throughout the volume, offering important insights into how these key sources continued to be used over time. Selected texts have been compiled into a useful appendix that will be of considerable value to scholars.
Nineteenth-century Madeira was a popular destination for wealthy British people suffering from consumption and other pulmonary ailments. A rich store of sources from the period provide first-hand accounts of invalids on the island or offer special advice for the invalid traveller. After positioning medical travel within the context of contemporary science about climate, health and acclimatization, this article will provide a brief account of existing sources related to medical travel to Madeira. This article then examines this material for what it reveals about contemporary ideas about the Madeiran climate upon health, as well as cultural interaction between the British and the island. In particular, the article will trace how writing about Madeira conforms or diverges from popularly held views about the southern European climate and southern European people, as well as what resonance such views may have in the present.
Chapter A:
This chapter provides descriptive information about people, places, things, and concepts in Chaucer's works and Chaucer's influence on generations of writers after him, and also an overview of topics of particular significance to Chaucer scholarship. It contains entries that start with the letter “A”, and the subsequent chapters of this book are alphabetized accordingly. This book thus provides a comprehensive overview of the life, times, works, sources/analogues, and influence of Geoffrey Chaucer for a new millennium of general readers, students, and scholars. The entries contain the headword, the name and institutional affiliation of the author of the entry, the body of the entry, often a “see also” section with cross-references to related entries in the encyclopedia, and finally in most cases a list of references, with complete bibliography, that are mentioned as in-text citations in the entry.
The relationship of the physical, gendered body to mental health is a common theme in literary studies, which have sought to understand historical and contemporary narratives by female authors. Medieval mystics, in particular, have invited psychological and medical intrigue, both in their own period and much later. While both male and female mystics often write in highly embodied imagery, female mystics often write in immediate relation to their own bodies. Mystics sought personal experience, or what is called mystical union with the divine, through certain practices, which ranged from contemplation to extreme fleshly mortification. In the later Middle Ages, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, women took a particular role in shaping mystical practices and texts through their works in various languages. Not only their own contemporaries but also far more recent readers have offered various biomedical and psychosomatic diagnoses for these medieval female mystics. This chapter outlines these attempts, while arguing for a new interpretation of the texts using the women's own use and understanding of medicine. From the outset, the range of diagnoses from various readers from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first century seems vast and incompatible—from medieval accounts of demonic possession and humoral balance, to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century notions of hysteria, to more current diagnoses of temporal lobe epilepsy and botulism. However, I argue that they have a common clinical core. They assume that these women are bodies and minds to be diagnosed by various authoritative standards, whether religious or biomedical. This chapter considers contemporary and anachronistic diagnostic tools for mystical experience through the works of two mystical women of late medieval England: Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–ca. 1438) and Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416). Despite the wealth of criticism on these women, which refers to their contemporary and later authoritative discourses of religion and medicine, the women's own medical knowledge and the way they negotiate it in terms of their own experience has not yet been considered. I argue that these texts stand witness to two women attuned to medical knowledge and capable of diagnosing themselves. Rather than clinical narratives, these texts represent illness experiences, and as such the interplay of their own contemporary biomedical knowledge and their own lived embodied experience. They are at once doctors and patients.
This article discusses the presentation of wrath and envy, primarily in the Middle English poem the Confessio Amantis, but with some references to the French Mirror of Man, as a means of exploring the fourteenth-century English poet John Gower’s understanding of the body, medicine and sin. Wrath and envy present interesting case studies as Gower claims that they are the most unnatural of the seven sins. Yet wrath and envy are richly embodied in both his poetry, as well as contemporary medical and pastoral literature as will be shown. The essay argues for the hitherto unnoticed importance of medicine in understanding Gower’s poetry. I would specifically like to address the question of whether wrath, envy and other passions cause or are metaphors for, sin, in Gower's representations of these passions. By attending to human physiology, Gower invites the reader to recognize their shared human weakness, particularly in reference to the passions (emotions) and the predisposition to sin: his text thus fosters co-passion or compassion in his reader, as I will argue.
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was widespread concern about the fate of immigrants to the United States. One area of particular concern was mentally ill immigrants, as illustrated in contemporaneous screening procedures, asylum reports, government commissions, popular media, fiction, and scientific studies. This article examines the depiction of one mentally ill immigrant in O. E. Rølvaag's novel Giants in the Earth within the context of these discussions. The novel, published originally in two parts in 1924 and 1925 in Norwegian, was translated in collaboration with the author into English in 1927. While many explanations were posited for rates of mental illness among immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rølvaag presents a more nuanced view which accounts for mental responses to change of climate, environment, and cultural loss.