Download or read book Emblematic Monsters written by A.W. Bates and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern Europe, monstrous births were significant events that were seen alive by many people, and dissected, embalmed and collected after death. Emblematic Monsters is a social history of monstrous births as seen through popular print, scholarly books and the proceedings of learned societies. Representations of monsters are considered in the context of their roles as wonders and emblems, and studies of the anatomy of monsters are discussed along with contemporary theories of their origin. By approaching accounts of monstrous births not only as a literary form but also as descriptions of real-life cases, similarities between the pre-scientific recording of wonders and the scientific case report can be explored. Most impressively, A.W. Bates draws upon his own experience of diagnosis of birth defects to summarise more than two hundred original descriptions of monstrous births and compare them with modern diagnostic categories. Emblematic Monsters is an up-to-date approach to a classical yet under-explored subject: gruesome, compelling and monstrous.
Download or read book Emblematic Monsters written by Alan W. Bates and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emblematic Monsters is a social history of monstrous births as seen through popular print, scholarly books and the proceedings of learned societies.
Download or read book Monstrous Things written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable resource for students and researchers of paranormal myth and media, this book explores the undead and unholy in literature, film, television, and popular culture. Following an introduction to frightful manifestations in media, sections address ghosts, vampires, and monsters individually, and each section includes a broad consideration of the ghost, vampire or monster in American culture. The section dedicated to ghosts examines the "spectral turn" of popular culture and the ghost's relation to justice and mourning, with particular attention to Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. In the vampires section, the author considers the undead bloodsucker's relationship to anti-Semitism, suicide, and cinema. The third section discusses monsters in relation to topics such as global pandemics, terrorism, mass shootings, "stranger danger," and social otherness, with attention to a range of popular culture texts including the films IT and It Follows.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century British Midwifery Part I vol 2 written by Pam Lieske and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gives readers an understanding of midwives, midwifery students, and women in labour. This twelve-volume collection comprises pamphlets, treatises, lectures for midwifery students, texts on the establishment of lying-in hospitals, and catalogues of obstetrical apparatuses collected by male-midwives.
Download or read book A Centaur in London written by Fabian Kraemer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A nuanced reframing of the dual importance of reading and observation for early modern naturalists. Historians traditionally argue that the sciences were born in early modern Europe during the so-called Scientific Revolution. At the heart of this narrative lies a supposed shift from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of things. The attitude of the new-style intellectual broke with the text-based practices of erudition and instead cultivated an emerging empiricism of observation and experiment. Rather than blindly trusting the authority of ancient sources such as Pliny and Aristotle, practitioners of this experimental philosophy insisted upon experiential proof. In A Centaur in London, Fabian Kraemer calls a key tenet of this master narrative into question—that the rise of empiricism entailed a decrease in the importance of reading practices. Kraemer shows instead that the early practices of textual erudition and observational empiricism were by no means so remote from one another as the traditional narrative would suggest. He argues that reading books and reading the book of nature had a great deal in common—indeed, that reading texts was its own kind of observation. Especially in the case of rare and unusual phenomena like monsters, naturalists were dependent on the written reports of others who had experienced the good luck to be at the right place at the right time. The connections between compiling examples from texts and from observation were especially close in such cases. A Centaur in London combines the history of scholarly reading with the history of scientific observation to argue for the sustained importance of both throughout the Renaissance and provides a nuanced, textured portrait of early modern naturalists at work.
Download or read book The Secret History of the Jersey Devil written by Brian Regal and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A product of innuendo and rumor, as well as scandal and media hype, the Jersey Devil enjoys a rich history involving land grabs, astrological predictions, mermaids and dinosaur bones, sideshows, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother, a cross-dressing royal governor, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
Download or read book The Body of Evidence written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When, why and how was it first believed that the corpse could reveal ‘signs’ useful for understanding the causes of death and eventually identifying those responsible for it? The Body of Evidence. Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine, edited by Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, shows how in the late Middle Ages the dead body, which had previously rarely been questioned, became a specific object of investigation by doctors, philosophers, theologians and jurists. The volume sheds new light on the elements of continuity, but also on the effort made to liberate the semantization of the corpse from what were, broadly speaking, necromantic practices, which would eventually merge into forensic medicine.
Download or read book Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary written by Frederika Elizabeth Bain and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.
Download or read book Sinister Aesthetics written by Joel Elliot Slotkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engrossing volume studies the poetics of evil in early modern English culture, reconciling the Renaissance belief that literature should uphold morality with the compelling and attractive representations of evil throughout the period’s literature. The chapters explore a variety of texts, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Richard III, broadside ballads, and sermons, culminating in a new reading of Paradise Lost and a novel understanding of the dynamic interaction between aesthetics and theology in shaping seventeenth century Protestant piety. Through these discussions, the book introduces the concept of “sinister aesthetics”: artistic conventions that can make representations of the villainous, monstrous, or hellish pleasurable.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Disgust written by Bradley J. Irish and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences written by Dana Jalobeanu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-27 with total page 2267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers a fresh, integrated and creative perspective on the formation and foundations of philosophy and science in European modernity. Combining careful contextual reconstruction with arguments from traditional philosophy, the book examines methodological dimensions, breaks down traditional oppositions such as rationalism vs. empiricism, calls attention to gender issues, to ‘insiders and outsiders’, minor figures in philosophy, and underground movements, among many other topics. In addition, and in line with important recent transformations in the fields of history of science and early modern philosophy, the volume recognizes the specificity and significance of early modern science and discusses important developments including issues of historiography (such as historical epistemology), the interplay between the material culture and modes of knowledge, expert knowledge and craft knowledge. This book stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and combines their approaches – particularly the history of science, the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of science, and intellectual and cultural history. It brings together over 100 philosophers, historians of science, historians of mathematics, and medicine offering a comprehensive view of early modern philosophy and the sciences. It combines and discusses recent results from two very active fields: early modern philosophy and the history of (early modern) science. Editorial Board EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Dana Jalobeanu University of Bucharest, Romania Charles T. Wolfe Ghent University, Belgium ASSOCIATE EDITORS Delphine Bellis University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Zvi Biener University of Cincinnati, OH, USA Angus Gowland University College London, UK Ruth Hagengruber University of Paderborn, Germany Hiro Hirai Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Martin Lenz University of Groningen, The Netherlands Gideon Manning CalTech, Pasadena, CA, USA Silvia Manzo University of La Plata, Argentina Enrico Pasini University of Turin, Italy Cesare Pastorino TU Berlin, Germany Lucian Petrescu Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Justin E. H. Smith University de Paris Diderot, France Marius Stan Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Koen Vermeir CNRS-SPHERE + Université de Paris, France Kirsten Walsh University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Download or read book Spectacle of Deformity written by Nadja Durbach and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's "missing link"; the "Last of the Mysterious Aztecs" and African "Cannibal Kings," who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British—at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.
Download or read book Disability in German Literature Film and Theater written by Eleoma Joshua and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh German Yearbook encourages and disseminates lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies. No other yearbook covers the entire field while addressing a focused theme in each issue. Volume 4 focuses on disability in German literature, film, and theater. Disability Studies is part of the broader discussion of difference and "otherness," of the politics of identity, human rights, ethics, and discrimination. It retrieves disabled figures from literature, film, and theater and discusses them vis- -vis "normalcy." Recently, Disability Studies has explored the binary of "able" and "disabled," strategies of exclusion, and the marginalization and suffering of the disabled body under social and medical structures of control. It is now entering a phase of positive reflection addressing the ontological politics of disability. Accordingly, this volume examines cultural representations of disability that raise questions about "the humane gaze" and posits disability as historically central to discussions of humanity, modernity, and social and moral behavior in German-language literature, film, and theater. Points of focus include blindness, physical deformity, injury, illness, and euthanasia. Contributors: Martin Brady, Pauline Eyre, Corinna H ger, Karin Harrasser, Urte Helduser, Eleoma Joshua, Susanne C. Knittel, Anna Kornbrodt, Siegfried Saerberg, Rosa Schneider. Eleoma Joshua is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Michael Schillmeier lectures in the Department of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.
Download or read book Disability in Medieval Christian Philosophy and Theology written by Scott M. Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the tools of analytic philosophy and close readings of medieval Christian philosophical and theological texts in order to survey what these thinkers said about what today we call ‘disability.’ The chapters also compare what these medieval authors say with modern and contemporary philosophers and theologians of disability. This dual approach enriches our understanding of the history of disability in medieval Christian philosophy and theology and opens up new avenues of research for contemporary scholars working on disability. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One addresses theoretical frameworks regarding disability, particularly on questions about the definition(s) of ‘disability’ and how disability relates to well-being. The chapters are then divided into two further parts in order to reflect ways that medieval philosophers and theologians theorized about disability. Part Two is on disability in this life, and Part Three is on disability in the afterlife. Taken as a whole, these chapters support two general observations. First, these philosophical theologians sometimes resist Greco-Roman ableist views by means of theological and philosophical anti-ableist arguments and counterexamples. Here we find some surprising disability-positive perspectives that are built into different accounts of a happy human life. We also find equal dignity of all human beings no matter ability or disability. Second, some of the seeds for modern and contemporary ableist views were developed in medieval Christian philosophy and theology, especially with regard to personhood and rationality, an intellectualist interpretation of the imago Dei, and the identification of human dignity with the use of reason. This volume surveys disability across a wide range of medieval Christian writers from the time of Augustine up to Francisco Suarez. It will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in medieval philosophy and theology, or disability studies.
Download or read book Zoology in Early Modern Culture Intersections of Science Theology Philology and Political and Religious Education written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-09 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of the different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. Early modern reading of the “Book of Nature” comprised, among others, the description of species in the literary tradition of antiquity, as well as empirical observations, vivisection, and modern eyewitness accounts; the “translation” of zoological species into visual art for devotion, prayer, and religious education, but also scientific and scholarly curiosity; theoretical, philosophical, and theological thinking regarding God’s creation, the Flood, and the generation of animals; new attempts with respect to nomenclature and taxonomy; the discovery of unknown species in the New World; impressive Wunderkammer collections, and the keeping of exotic animals in princely menageries. The volume demonstrates that theology and philology played a pivotal role in the complex formation of this new science. Contributors include: Brian Ogilvie, Bernd Roling, Erik Jorink, Paul Smith, Sabine Kalff, Tamás Demeter, Amanda Herrin, Marrigje Rikken, Alexander Loose, Sophia Hendrikx, and Karl Enenkel.
Download or read book Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages written by Keagan Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book Occult Knowledge Science and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage written by Mary Floyd-Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.
