In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of distraction, the most common term for the ...condition in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Distracted Subjects shows how changing ideas of madness that circulated through medical, dramatic, and political texts transformed and gendered subjectivities. Supernatural causation is denied, new diagnoses appear, and stage representations proliferate. Drama sometimes leads and sometimes follows other cultural discourses—or forges its own prophetic figures of distraction. The Spanish Tragedy first links madness to masculine tragic self-representation, and Hamlet invents a language to dramatize feminine somatic illness. Innovative women's melancholy is theorized in medical and witchcraft treatises and then elaborated in the extended portrait of the Jailer's Daughter's distraction in The Two Noble Kinsmen . Lovesickness, newly diagnosed in women, demands novel cures, and allows expressions of transgressive sexual desire in treatises and in plays such as As You Like It. The rituals of possession and exorcism, intensely debated off stage, are mocked and exploited on stage in reiterated comic scenes of confinement that madden men to enhance women's power. Neely's final chapter provides a startling challenge to the critically alluring analogy between Bedlam and the early modern stage by documenting that Bethlem hospital offered care, not spectacle, whereas stage Bedlamites served metatheatrical and prophylactic, not mimetic, ends. An epilogue places this particular historical moment within the longer history of madness and shows how our own attitudes toward distraction are haunted by those earlier debates and representations.
This collection of essays contains a wealth of information on the nature of the family in the early modern period. This is a core topic within economic and social history courses which is taught at ...most universities. This text gives readers an overview of how feminist historians have been interpreting the history of the family, ever since Laurence Stone's seminal work FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800 was published in 1977.The text is divided into three coherent parts on the following themes: bodies and reproduction; maternity from a feminist perspective; and family relationships. Each part is prefaced by a short introduction commenting on new work in the area.This book will appeal to a wide variety of students because of its sociological, historical and economic foci.
This is the first scholarly study in which the production, trade and political effects of opium and its derivatives are shown over many centuries, and in many countries (China, India, Indonesia, ...Japan, all Southeast Asian countries and some in Europe and the Americas). Starting in the 16th century, slavery and opium became the two means with which the bodies and souls of men and women in the tropics were exploited in western imperialism and colonialism. The first waned with the abolition movement in the 19th century, but opium production and trade continued to spread, with the associated serious social and political effects. Around 1670 the Dutch introduced opium as a cash crop for mass production and distribution in India and Indonesia. China became the main target in the 19th century, and only succeeded in getting rid of the opium problem around 1950. Then it had already been transformed from an “Eastern” into a “Western” problem.
Castaways ALVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA
04/2023
eBook
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of
the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author
of Castaways ( Naufragios ), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca, was a ...fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an
expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's
Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful
of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with
Hernán Cortés. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native
peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and
serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight
years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his
compatriots. In his writing Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest
in the cultures of the native peoples he encountered on his
odyssey. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing
their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found
himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion
with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected. Cabeza de
Vaca's gripping narrative is a trove of ethnographic information,
with descriptions and interpretations of native cultures that make
it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. Frances M.
López-Morillas's translation beautifully captures the
sixteenth-century original. Based as it is on Enrique Pupo-Walker's
definitive critical edition, it promises to become the
authoritative English translation.
Simon Forman (1552-1611) is one of London's most infamous astrologers. Whilst he was consulted thousands of times a year for medical and other questions he stood apart from the medical elite as he ...boldly asserted medical ideas that were at odds with most learned physicians. In this fascinating book, Lauren Kassell vividly recovers the world of medicine and magic in Elizabethan London.
Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to ...produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, Vernacular Bodies looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.
Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of ...the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City. The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca. This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.
À l’instar de l’Odyssée d’Homère, Naufragios d’Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542-1555) retrace, entre de multiples autres angles d’approche, un voyage qui s’apparente à un parcours initiatique, ...c’est-à-dire un cheminement vers une conversion intérieure profonde. Cette transformation ontologique passe par trois étapes ou séquences (phases de séparation, de marge et d’agrégation) que cet article se propose d’analyser à la lumière, notamment, des apports de l’anthropologie. Si l’écriture de l’œuvre relève essentiellement d’une entreprise d’auto-glorification de son auteur à travers, notamment, une “héroïsation” et une “messianisation” discursives d’Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, une lecture symbolique s’attachant aux structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire permet de montrer que certains des composants de l’initiation affleurent à la surface du texte comme dans un palimpseste.
En este artículo propongo una lectura de los Naufragios (1542) de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca que se ciña a los términos del debate moral y político imperante en la España en que el explorador ...jerezano redactó su historia. A la luz de la Relectio prior de Indis recenter inventis (1538) de Francisco de Vitoria, se comprueba cómo el bagaje espiritual e ideológico de Cabeza de Vaca no fue fruto exclusivo de su periplo americano, sino más bien de su familiaridad con las coordenadas éticas propias de la España oficial de su tiempo: la que puso los cimientos de una incipiente legalidad internacional.
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