Download or read book Pazze di Lui Mad for Him Hagiographic Stereotypes Mental Disturbances and Anthropological Implications of Female Saintliness in Italy and Abroad from the 13th to the 20th Century written by Mattia Zangari and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2024-06-17 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to investigate the delicate relationship between female sanctity and madness, in a time-frame extending from medieval until contemporary times. Constellated by visions, ecstatic raptures, morbid rituals, stigmata and obsessions, the complex phenomenology of female mysticism appears in fact to be articulated and polymorphous, traversed by 'representations' that it seems possible to link to the wide spectrum of mental disorders, as well to the hagiographic stereotypes and anthropological implications. Male and female scholars from different disciplines (from history to philology, from anthropology to art history, from theology to literary criticism, from psychiatry to psychoanalysis) try to outline a thematic and problematic itinerary, intended to examine, step by step, potential pathological aspects and contexts of reference for the purpose of attempting to reconstruct the complex evolutionary trajectory of female mystical language.
Download or read book Pazze di Lui Mad for Him Hagiographic Stereotypes Mental Disturbances and Anthropological Implications of Female Saintliness in Italy and Abroad from the 13th to the 20th Century written by Mattia Zangari and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2024-06-17 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to investigate the delicate relationship between female sanctity and madness, in a time-frame extending from medieval until contemporary times. Constellated by visions, ecstatic raptures, morbid rituals, stigmata and obsessions, the complex phenomenology of female mysticism appears in fact to be articulated and polymorphous, traversed by 'representations' that it seems possible to link to the wide spectrum of mental disorders, as well to the hagiographic stereotypes and anthropological implications. Male and female scholars from different disciplines (from history to philology, from anthropology to art history, from theology to literary criticism, from psychiatry to psychoanalysis) try to outline a thematic and problematic itinerary, intended to examine, step by step, potential pathological aspects and contexts of reference for the purpose of attempting to reconstruct the complex evolutionary trajectory of female mystical language.
Download or read book Paternal Tyranny written by Arcangela Tarabotti and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) yearned to be formally educated and enjoy an independent life in Venetian literary circles. But instead, at sixteen, her father forced her into a Benedictine convent. To protest her confinement, Tarabotti composed polemical works exposing the many injustices perpetrated against women of her day. Paternal Tyranny, the first of these works, is a fiery but carefully argued manifesto against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. Denouncing key misogynist texts of the era, Tarabotti shows how despicable it was for Venice, a republic that prided itself on its political liberties, to deprive its women of rights accorded even to foreigners. She accuses parents of treating convents as dumping grounds for disabled, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted daughters. Finally, through compelling feminist readings of the Bible and other religious works, Tarabotti demonstrates that women are clearly men's equals in God's eyes. An avenging angel who dared to speak out for the rights of women nearly four centuries ago, Arcangela Tarabotti can now finally be heard.
Download or read book Book for the Hour of Recreation written by María de San José Salazar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: María de San José Salazar (1548-1603) took the veil as a Discalced ("barefoot") Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, María fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, María demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and Maria's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as her tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, Book for the Hour of Recreation also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations. A detailed introduction and notes by Alison Weber provide historical and biographical context for Amanda Powell's fluid translation.
Download or read book From Sin to Insanity written by Jeffrey Watt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500–1800, 11 authors combine elements of social, cultural, legal, and intellectual history to trace important changes in the ways Europeans experienced and understood voluntary death. Well into the seventeenth century, Europeans viewed suicide as a terrible crime and an unforgivable sin resulting from demonic temptation. By the late eighteenth century, however, suicide was rarely subject to judicial penalties, and society tended to blame self-inflicted death on insanity rather than on the devil. From Sin to Insanity shows that early modern Europe witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide: increasing in frequency, self-inflicted death became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, viewed as a regrettable but not shameful result of reversals in fortune or physical or mental infirmity. The ten chapters focus on suicide cases and attitudes toward self-murder from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in geographical settings as diverse as Scandinavia and Hungary, France and Germany, England and Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.
Download or read book Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice written by Jutta Gisela Sperling and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late sixteenth-century Venice, nearly 60 percent of all patrician women joined convents, and only a minority of these women did so voluntarily. In trying to explain why unprecedented numbers of patrician women did not marry, historians have claimed that dowries became too expensive. However, Jutta Gisela Sperling debunks this myth and argues that the rise of forced vocations happened within the context of aristocratic culture and society. Sperling explains how women were not allowed to marry beneath their social status while men could, especially if their brides were wealthy. Faced with a shortage of suitable partners, patrician women were forced to offer themselves as "a gift not only to God, but to their fatherland," as Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo told the Senate of Venice in 1619. Noting the declining birth rate among patrician women, Sperling explores the paradox of a marriage system that preserved the nobility at the price of its physical extinction. And on a more individual level, she tells the fascinating stories of these women. Some became scholars or advocates of women's rights, some took lovers, and others escaped only to survive as servants, prostitutes, or thieves.
Download or read book Nuns Behaving Badly written by Craig A. Monson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.
Download or read book Demonic Possession and Exorcism written by Sarah Ferber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original study of possession by demons and their exorcism, Sarah Ferber offers a challenging study of one of the most intriguing phenomenon of early modern Europe. Looking also at the present day, she argues that early modern.
Download or read book Believe Not Every Spirit written by Moshe Sluhovsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism—popular with women—emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture, women, who had surrendered their souls to divine love, were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. So how then, asks Moshe Sluhovsky, were practitioners of exorcism to distinguish demonic from divine possessions? Drawing on unexplored accounts of mystical schools and spiritual techniques, testimonies of the possessed, and exorcism manuals, Believe Not Every Spirit examines how early modern Europeans dealt with this dilemma. The personal experiences of practitioners, Sluhovsky shows, trumped theological knowledge. Worried that this could lead to a rejection of Catholic rituals, the church reshaped the meaning and practices of exorcism, transforming this healing rite into a means of spiritual interrogation. In its efforts to distinguish between good and evil, the church developed important new explanatory frameworks for the relations between body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and the natural and supernatural.
Download or read book The Great Pox written by Jon Arrizabalaga and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century and a half after the Black Death killed over a third of the population of Western Europe, a new plague swept across the continent. The Great Pox - commonly known as the French Disease - brought a different kind of horror: instead of killing its victims rapidly, it endured in their bodies for years, causing acute pain, disfigurement and ultimately an agonising death. The authors analyse the symptoms of the Great Pox and the identity of patients, richly documented in the records of the massive hospital of 'incurables' established in early sixteenth-century Rome. They show how the disease threw accepted medical theory and practice into confusion and provoked public disputations among university teachers. And at the most practical level they reveal the plight of its victims at all levels of society, from ecclesiastical lords to the poor who begged in the streets. Examining a range of contexts from princely courts and republics to university faculties, confraternities and hospitals, the authors argue powerfully for a historical understanding of the Great Pox based on contemporary perceptions rather than on a retrospective diagnosis of what later generations came to know as 'syphilis'.
Download or read book Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence written by William J. Connell and published by Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. This book was released on 2005 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. His punishment was severe, even for the times, and the crimes with which he was formally charged, gambling, blasphemy and attempted suicide, did not normally warrant the death penalty. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode. The authors show how the political and religious context of Renaissance Florence resulted both in Rinaldeschi's death sentence and in the creation by the followers of Savonarola of a new religious devotion, in the heart of the city, commemorating the event. -- Amazon.com.
Download or read book Culture and Control in Counter reformation Spain written by Anne J. Cruz and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session
Download or read book Renegade Women written by Eric R Dursteler and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the stories of early modern women in the Mediterranean who left their birthplaces, families, and religions to reveal the complex space women of the period occupied socially and politically. In the narrow sense, the word “renegade” as used in the early modern Mediterranean referred to a Christian who had abandoned his or her religion to become a Muslim. With Renegade Women, Eric R Dursteler deftly redefines and broadens the term to include anyone who crossed the era’s and region’s religious, political, social, and gender boundaries. Drawing on archival research, he relates three tales of women whose lives afford great insight into both the specific experiences and condition of females in, and the broader cultural and societal practices and mores of, the early Mediterranean. Through Beatrice Michiel of Venice, who fled an overbearing husband to join her renegade brother in Constantinople and took the name Fatima Hatun, Dursteler discusses how women could convert and relocate in order to raise their personal and familial status. In the parallel tales of the Christian Elena Civalelli and the Muslim Mihale Šatorovic, who both entered a Venetian convent to avoid unwanted, arranged marriages, he finds courageous young women who used the frontier between Ottoman and Venetian states to exercise a surprising degree of agency over their lives. And in the actions of four Muslim women of the Greek island of Milos—Aissè, her sisters Eminè and Catigè, and their mother, Maria—who together left their home for Corfu and converted from Islam to Christianity to escape Aissè’s emotionally and financially neglectful husband, Dursteler unveils how a woman’s attempt to control her own life ignited an international firestorm that threatened Venetian-Ottoman relations. A truly fascinating narrative of female instrumentality, Renegade Women illuminates the nexus of identity and conversion in the early modern Mediterranean through global and local lenses. Scholars of the period will find this to be a richly informative and thoroughly engrossing read.
Download or read book Saints and Society written by Donald Weinstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saints and Society, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell examine the lives of 864 saints who lived between 1000 and 1700 and the perceptions of sanctity prevalent in late medieval and early modern Europe. They also provide a substantial body of information on the people among whom the saints lived and by whom they came to be venerated. In the first part, the authors give close consideration to what the saints' lives reveal about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; the impact of religious inspiration upon family bonds; and family influences upon religious behavior. The second part provides a composite picture of piety and its changing configuration in Latin Christendom. With the assistance of statistical analysis, the authors answer questions involving the popular perception of holiness, social class, and gender.
Download or read book Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman written by Nicole Loraux and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ordinary life an Athenian woman was allowed no accomplishments beyond leading a quiet, exemplary existence as wife and mother. In Greek tragedy, however, women die violently and, through violence, master their fate. Through her reading of these texts, Loraux elicits an array of insights into Greek attitudes toward death, sexuality, and gender.
Download or read book A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany written by H. C. Erik Midelfort and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magisterial work explores how Renaissance Germans understood and experienced madness. It focuses on the insanity of the world in general but also on specific disorders; examines the thinking on madness of theologians, jurists, and physicians; and analyzes the vernacular ideas that propelled sufferers to seek help in pilgrimage or newly founded hospitals for the helplessly disordered. In the process, the author uses the history of madness as a lens to illuminate the history of the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the history of poverty and social welfare, and the history of princely courts, state building, and the civilizing process. Rather than try to fit historical experience into modern psychiatric categories, this book reconstructs the images and metaphors through which Renaissance Germans themselves understood and experienced mental illness and deviance, ranging from such bizarre conditions as St. Vituss dance and demonic possession to such medical crises as melancholy and mania. By examining the records of shrines and hospitals, where the mad went for relief, we hear the voices of the mad themselves. For many religious Germans, sin was a form of madness and the sinful world was thoroughly insane. This book compares the thought of Martin Luther and the medical-religious reformer Paracelsus, who both believed that madness was a basic category of human experience. For them and others, the sixteenth century was an age of increasing demonic presence; the demon-possessed seemed to be everywhere. For Renaissance physicians, however, the problem was finding the correct ancient Greek concepts to describe mental illness. In medical terms, the late sixteenth century was the age of melancholy. For jurists, the customary insanity defense did not clarify whether melancholy persons were responsible for their actions, and they frequently solicited the advice of physicians. Sixteenth-century Germany was also an age of folly, with fools filling a major role in German art and literature and present at every prince and princelings court. The author analyzes what Renaissance Germans meant by folly and examines the lives and social contexts of several court fools.
Download or read book Madness Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe written by David Lederer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-04 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the ideological crucible of the Reformation emerged an embittered contest for the human soul. In the care of souls, the clergy zealously dispensed spiritual physic; for countless early modern Europeans, the first echelon of mental health care. During its heyday, spiritual physic touched the lives of thousands, from penitents and pilgrims to demoniacs and mad people. Ironically, the phenomenon remains largely unexplored. Why? Through case histories from among the records of over 1,000 troubled and desperate individuals, this regional study of Bavaria investigates spiritual physic as a popular ritual practice during a tumultuous era of religious strife, material crises, moral repression and witch hunting. By the mid-seventeenth century, secular forces ushered in a psychological revolution across Europe. However, spiritual physic ensconced itself by proxy upon emergent bourgeois psychiatry. Today, its remnants raise haunting questions about science and the pursuit of objective knowledge in the ephemeral realm of human consciousness.
