Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France

Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France PDF Author: Rebecca May Wilkin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754661382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of 16th- and 17th-century France, this study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. It challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth.

Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France

Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France PDF Author: Rebecca May Wilkin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754661382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of 16th- and 17th-century France, this study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. It challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth.

Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France

Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France PDF Author: Rebecca M. Wilkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, this innovative study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. Rebecca Wilkin focuses on the contradictory representations of women from roughly the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and depicts this period as one filled with epistemological anxiety and experimentation. She shows how skeptics, including Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, subverted gender hierarchies and/or blurred gender difference as a means of questioning the human capacity to find truth; while "positivists" who strove to establish new standards of truth, for example Johann Weyer, Jean Bodin, and Guillaume du Vair, excluded women from the search for truth. The book constitutes a reevaluation of the legacy of Cartesianism for women, as Wilkin argues that Descartes' opening of the search for truth "even to women" was part of his appropriation of skeptical arguments. This book challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth, their role in the development of rational thought, and the way in which intellectuals of the period dealt with the emergence of an influential female public.

Imagining Women's Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800

Imagining Women's Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800 PDF Author: Barbara R. Woshinsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135192866X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Blending history and architecture with literary analysis, this ground-breaking study explores the convent's place in the early modern imagination. The author brackets her account between two pivotal events: the Council of Trent imposing strict enclosure on cloistered nuns, and the French Revolution expelling them from their cloisters two centuries later. In the intervening time, women within convent walls were both captives and refugees from an outside world dominated by patriarchal power and discourses. Yet despite locks and bars, the cloister remained "porous" to privileged visitors. Others could catch a glimpse of veiled nuns through the elaborate grills separating cloistered space from the church, provoking imaginative accounts of convent life. Not surprisingly, the figure of the confined religious woman represents an intensified object of desire in male-authored narrative. The convent also spurred "feminutopian" discourses composed by women: convents become safe houses for those fleeing bad marriages or trying to construct an ideal, pastoral life, as a counter model to the male-dominated court or household. Recent criticism has identified certain privileged spaces that early modern women made their own: the ruelle, the salon, the hearth of fairy tale-telling. Woshinsky's book definitively adds the convent to this list.

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy PDF Author: Karen Detlefsen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315449994
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 655

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy is an outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon. Comprising 46 chapters by a team of contributors from all over the globe, including early career researchers, the Handbook is divided into the following sections: I. Context II. Themes A. Metaphysics and Epistemology B. Natural Philosophy C. Moral Philosophy D. Social-Political Philosophy III. Figures IV. State of the Field The volume is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy who are interested in expanding their understanding of the richness of our philosophical past, including in order to offer expanded, more inclusive syllabi for their students. It is also a valuable resource for those in related fields like gender and women’s studies; history; literature; sociology; history and philosophy of science; and political science.

Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France PDF Author: Kirk D. Read
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317174070
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body PDF Author: Sarah Toulalan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136744355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
The Routledge History of Sex and the Body provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of sexuality from 1500 to the present day. The history of sex and the body is an expanding field in which vibrant debate on, for instance, the history of homosexuality, is developing. This book examines the current scholarship and looks towards future directions across the field. The volume is divided into fourteen thematic chapters, which are split into two chronological sections 1500 – 1750 and 1750 to present day. Focusing on the history of sexuality and the body in the West but also interactions with a broader globe, these thematic chapters survey the major areas of debate and discussion. Covering themes such as science, identity, the gaze, courtship, reproduction, sexual violence and the importance of race, the volume offers a comprehensive view of the history of sex and the body. The book concludes with an afterword in which the reader is invited to consider some of the ‘tensions, problems and areas deserving further scrutiny’. Including contributors renowned in their field of expertise, this ground-breaking collection is essential reading for all those interested in the history of sexuality and the body.

Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe

Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Julian Goodare
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000080803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Demonology – the intellectual study of demons and their powers – contributed to the prosecution of thousands of witches. But how exactly did intellectual ideas relate to prosecutions? Recent scholarship has shown that some of the demonologists’ concerns remained at an abstract intellectual level, while some of the judges’ concerns reflected popular culture. This book brings demonology and witch-hunting back together, while placing both topics in their specific regional cultures. The book’s chapters, each written by a leading scholar, cover most regions of Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain through to Germany, France and Switzerland, and Italy and Spain. By focusing on various intellectual levels of demonology, from sophisticated demonological thought to the development of specific demonological ideas and ideas within the witch trial environment, the book offers a thorough examination of the relationship between demonology and witch-hunting. Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe is essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of demonology, witch-hunting and early modern Europe.

English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557

English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557 PDF Author: Anne E.B. Coldiron
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351940031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Bringing to light new material about early print, early modern gender discourses, and cultural contact between France and England in the revolutionary first phase of English print culture, this book focuses on a dozen or so of the many early Renaissance verse translations about women, marriage, sex, and gender relations. Anne Coldiron here analyzes such works as the Interlocucyon; the Beaute of Women; the Fyftene Joyes of Maryage; and the Complaintes of the Too Soone and Too Late Maryed as well as the printed translations of writings of Christine de Pizan. Her selections identify an insufficiently discussed strand of English poetry, in that they are non-elite, non-courtly, and non-romance writings on women's issues. She investigates the specific effects of translation on this alternative strand of poetry, showing how some French poems remain stable in the conversion, others subtly change emphasis in their new context, but some are completely transformed. Coldiron also emphasizes the formal and presentational dimensions of the early modern poetic book, assessing the striking differences the printers' paratexts and visual presentation strategies make to the meaning and value of the poems. A series of appendices presents the author's transcriptions of the texts that are otherwise inaccessible, never having been edited in modern times.

Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain

Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain PDF Author: Grace E. Coolidge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351931997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Contrary to early modern patriarchal assumptions, this study argues that rather trying to impose obedience or enclosure on women of their own rank and status, noblemen in early modern Spain depended on the active collaboration of noblewomen to maintain and expand their authority, wealth, and influence. While the image of virtuous, secluded, silent, and chaste women did bolster male authority in general and help to assure individual noblemen that their children were their own, the presence of active, vocal, and political women helped these same men move up the social ladder, guard their property and wealth, gain political influence, win legal battles, and protect their minor heirs. Drawing on a variety of documents-guardianships, wills, dowry and marriage contracts, lawsuits, genealogies, and a few letters-from the family archives of the nine noble families housed in the Osuna and Frías collections in Toledo, Guardianship, Gender and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain explores the lives and roles of female guardians. Grace Coolidge examines in detail the legal status of these women, their role within their families, and their responsibilities for the children and property in their care. To Spanish noblemen, Coolidge argues, the preservation of family, power, and lineage was more important than the prescriptive gender roles of their time, and faced with the emergency generated by the premature death of the male title holder, they consistently turned to the adult women in their families for help. Their need for support and for allies against their own mortality meant, in turn, that they expected and trained their female relatives to take an active part in the economic and political affairs of the family.

The Science of Demons

The Science of Demons PDF Author: Jan Machielsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135133364X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Witches, ghosts, fairies. Premodern Europe was filled with strange creatures, with the devil lurking behind them all. But were his powers real? Did his powers have limits? Or were tales of the demonic all one grand illusion? Physicians, lawyers, and theologians at different times and places answered these questions differently and disagreed bitterly. The demonic took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe. By examining individual authors from across the continent, this book reveals the many purposes to which the devil could be put, both during the late medieval fight against heresy and during the age of Reformations. It explores what it was like to live with demons, and how careers and identities were constructed out of battles against them – or against those who granted them too much power. Together, contributors chart the history of the devil from his emergence during the 1300s as a threatening figure – who made pacts with human allies and appeared bodily – through to the comprehensive but controversial demonologies of the turn of the seventeenth century, when European witch-hunting entered its deadliest phase. This book is essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of the supernatural in medieval and early modern Europe.