The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages

The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Joan Cadden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521483780
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book examines how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in cultural assumptions about gender.

The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages

The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Joan Cadden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521483780
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book examines how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in cultural assumptions about gender.

Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages

Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Joan Cadden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521343633
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Robert Mills
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616912X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Challenging the view that ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form in the Middle Ages, the author demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period - and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took.

Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe

Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Lisa M. Bitel
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
In Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe, six historians explore how medieval people professed Christianity, how they performed gender, and how the two coincided. Many of the daily religious decisions people made were influenced by gender roles, the authors contend. Women's pious donations, for instance, were limited by laws of inheritance and marriage customs; male clerics' behavior depended upon their understanding of masculinity as much as on the demands of liturgy. The job of religious practitioner, whether as a nun, monk, priest, bishop, or some less formal participant, involved not only professing a set of religious ideals but also professing gender in both ideal and practical terms. The authors also argue that medieval Europeans chose how to be women or men (or some complex combination of the two), just as they decided whether and how to be religious. In this sense, religious institutions freed men and women from some of the gendered limits otherwise imposed by society. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus exclusively either on masculinity or on aristocratic women, the authors define their topic to study gender in a fuller and more richly nuanced fashion. Likewise, their essays strive for a generous definition of religious history, which has too often been a history of its most visible participants and dominant discourses. In stepping back from received assumptions about religion, gender, and history and by considering what the terms "woman," "man," and "religious" truly mean for historians, the book ultimately enhances our understanding of the gendered implications of every pious thought and ritual gesture of medieval Christians. Contributors: Dyan Elliott is John Evans Professor of History at Northwestern University. Ruth Mazo Karras is professor of history at the University of Minnesota, and the general editor of The Middle Ages Series for the University of Pennsyvlania Press. Jacqueline Murray is dean of arts and professor of history at the University of Guelph. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art

The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art PDF Author: Sherry C. M. Lindquist
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409422846
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Addressing a strangely neglected key issue in the history of art, this volume engages the variety and complexity of medieval representations of the unclothed human body. The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art breaks ground by offering a variety of approaches to explore the meanings of both male and female nudity in European painting, manuscripts and sculpture ranging from the late antique era to the fifteenth century.

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Ruth Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe

The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe PDF Author: Patricia Simons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
A richly textured cultural history that investigates the characterization of the sex of adult male bodies before the Enlightenment.

Nothing Natural Is Shameful

Nothing Natural Is Shameful PDF Author: Joan Cadden
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.

Gender in the Early Medieval World

Gender in the Early Medieval World PDF Author: Leslie Brubaker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521013277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
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Common Women

Common Women PDF Author: Ruth Mazo Karras
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190284226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Through a sensitive use of a wide variety of imaginative and didactic texts, Ruth Karras shows that while prostitutes as individuals were marginalized within medieval culture, prostitution as an institution was central to the medieval understanding of what it meant to be a woman. This important work will be of interest to scholars and students of history, women's studies, and the history of sexuality.