He is the Sun, She is the Moon

He is the Sun, She is the Moon PDF Author: Heide Wunder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674383210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Renowned German social historian Heide Wunder refers to the cosmic image contained in the 1578 Book of Marital Discipline that characterizes the relationship between husband and wife. Today, "He is the sun, she is the moon" might be interpreted as a hierarchy of dominance and subordination. At the time it was used, however, sun and moon reflected the different but equal status of husband and wife. Wunder shows how the history of women and the history of gender relations can provide crucial insights into how societies organize themselves and provide resources for political action. She observes actual circumstances as well as the normative rules that were supposed to guide women's lives. We learn what skills were necessary to take charge of households, what people ate, how they furnished their homes, what birth control measures were available, what role women played in peasant protest. Wunder finds that, in addition to the history of losses and setbacks for women observed by so many current interpreters, there is a history of gains as well. The regency of noble women was normal, as was the shared responsibility of wife and husband in a peasant household, an artisan's workshop, or a merchant's business. Using sources as diverse as memoirs, wedding and funeral sermons, novels, and chronicles, and including a wealth of demographic information, Wunder reveals a surprising new image of early modern women and provides a richer interpretation of early modern Europe.

He is the Sun, She is the Moon

He is the Sun, She is the Moon PDF Author: Heide Wunder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674383210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
Renowned German social historian Heide Wunder refers to the cosmic image contained in the 1578 Book of Marital Discipline that characterizes the relationship between husband and wife. Today, "He is the sun, she is the moon" might be interpreted as a hierarchy of dominance and subordination. At the time it was used, however, sun and moon reflected the different but equal status of husband and wife. Wunder shows how the history of women and the history of gender relations can provide crucial insights into how societies organize themselves and provide resources for political action. She observes actual circumstances as well as the normative rules that were supposed to guide women's lives. We learn what skills were necessary to take charge of households, what people ate, how they furnished their homes, what birth control measures were available, what role women played in peasant protest. Wunder finds that, in addition to the history of losses and setbacks for women observed by so many current interpreters, there is a history of gains as well. The regency of noble women was normal, as was the shared responsibility of wife and husband in a peasant household, an artisan's workshop, or a merchant's business. Using sources as diverse as memoirs, wedding and funeral sermons, novels, and chronicles, and including a wealth of demographic information, Wunder reveals a surprising new image of early modern women and provides a richer interpretation of early modern Europe.

Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany

Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Gerhild Scholz Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351873539
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Gerhild Scholz Williams's Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time, reviews key discourses in eight of Praetorius's works. She introduces the modern reader to the kinds of subjects, the intellectual and spiritual approaches to them, and the genres that this educated and productive German scholar and polymath presented to his audience in the seventeenth century. By relating these individual works to a number of contemporaneous writings, Williams shows how Praetorius constructed a panorama in print in which wonders, the occult, the emerging scientific way of thinking, family and social mores are recurrent themes. Included in Praetorius's portrait of the mid-seventeenth-century are discussions of Paracelsus's scientific theories and practice; early modern German theories on witchcraft and demonology and their applications in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, we read about the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies. Moreover, throughout his work and certainly in those texts chosen for this study, Praetorius appears before us as an assiduous reporter of contemporary European and pan-European events and scientific discoveries, a critic of common superstitions, as much a believer in occult causes and signs and in God's communication with His people. In his writings, in his way of telling, he offers strategies by which to comprehend the political, social, and intellectual uncertainties of his century and, in so doing, identifies ways to confront the diverse interpretive authorities and the varieties of structures of knowledge that interacted and conflicted with each other in the public arena of knowing.

Witchcraft narratives in Germany

Witchcraft narratives in Germany PDF Author: Alison Rowlands
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 184779520X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Looks at why witch-trials failed to gain momentum and escalate into 'witch-crazes' in certain parts of early modern Europe. Exames the rich legal records of the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a city which experienced a very restrained pattern of witch-trials and just one execution for witchcraft between 1561 and 1652. Explores the social and psychological conflicts that lay behind the making of accusations and confessions of witchcraft. Offers insights into other areas of early modern life, such as experiences of and beliefs about communal conflict, magic, motherhood, childhood and illness. Offers a critique of existing explanations for the gender bias of witch-trials, and a new explanation as to why most witches were women.

Panaceia's Daughters

Panaceia's Daughters PDF Author: Alisha Rankin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226925382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Panaceia’s Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen’s healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen’s pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it. Rankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomen’s pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. The opening chapters place noblewomen’s healing within the context of cultural exchange, experiential knowledge, and the widespread search for medicinal recipes in early modern Europe. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony then demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patient’s experience of illness.

Disputatio 5: Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate

Disputatio 5: Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate PDF Author: Georgiana Donavin
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725240971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description


Debating Women's Equality

Debating Women's Equality PDF Author: Ute Gerhard
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813529059
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Gerhard (sociology, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Germany) examines equality as a principle and practice of law in history, and legal theory from a feminist perspective. She reviews the history of the women's movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on Germany, and examines three major legal issues: women's rights in the public sphere, women's legal capacities in private law, and women's human rights. This work was first published in German in 1990 (C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung); this American edition, somewhat revised, was translated by Allison Brown and Belinder Cooper and includes a new foreword. c. Book News Inc.

The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany

The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0198208863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
'The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany' is a fascinating study of 'deviant' women. It is the first scholarly account of how women were prosecuted for theft, infanticide, and sexual crimes in early modern Germany, and challenges the assumption that women were treated more leniently than men. Ulinka Rublack uses criminal trials to illuminate the social status and conflicts of women living through the Reformation and Thirty Years War, telling, for the first time, the stories of cutpurses, maidservants' dangerous liaisons, and artisans' troubled marriages. She provides a thought-provoking analysis of labelling and sentencing processes, and of the punishments inflicted on those found guilty. Above all, she brilliantly engages with the way 'ordinary' women experienced authority and sexuality, household and community.

The Power of a Woman's Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures

The Power of a Woman's Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110897776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

Family History Revisited

Family History Revisited PDF Author: Richard Wall
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874136876
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This collection of original essays by scholars on the historical study of the family from various parts of the world represent a new departure in this field. The essays cover a great variety of topics, and many countries are represented. The essays open up new debates and point to new directions in the field by examining dimensions of family relations that had not been sufficiently addressed in previous scholarship.

The Saved and the Damned

The Saved and the Damned PDF Author: Prof Thomas (Professor of Church History Kaufmann, University of Goettingen)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198841043
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Thomas Kaufmann, the leading European scholar of the Reformation, argues that the main motivations behind the Reformation rest in religion itself. The Reformation began far from Europe's traditional political, economic, and cultural power centres, and yet it threw the whole continent into turmoil. There has been intense speculation over the last century focusing on the political and social causes that lay at the root of this revolution. Thomas Kaufmann, one of the world's leading experts on the Reformation, sees the most important drivers for what happened in religion itself. The reformers were principally concerned with the question of salvation. It could all have ended with the pope's condemnation of Luther and his teaching. But Luther believed the pope was condemned to eternal damnation, and this was the root cause of the great split to come. Hatred of the damned drove people to take up arms, while countless numbers left their homes far behind and carried the Reformation message to the furthest corners of the earth in the hope of salvation. In The Saved and the Damned, Thomas Kaufmann presents a dramatic overview of how Europe was transformed by the seismic shock of the Reformation--and of how its aftershocks reverberate right down to the present day.