This unorthodox biography explores the life of an extraordinary
Enlightenment woman who, by sheer force of character, parlayed a
skill in midwifery into a national institution. In 1759, in an
effort ...to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame
Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout
France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women.
For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly
forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She
wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin
for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's
demographic upswing after 1760. Who was the woman, both
the private self and the pseudonymous public celebrity? Nina
Rattner Gelbart reconstructs Madame du Coudray's astonishing
mission through extensive research in the hundreds of letters by,
to, and about her in provincial archives throughout France. Tracing
her subject's footsteps around the country, Gelbart chronicles du
Coudray's battles with finance ministers, village matrons, local
administrators, and recalcitrant physicians, her rises in power and
falls from grace, and her death at the height of the Reign of
Terror. At a deeper level, Gelbart recaptures du Coudray's interior
journey as well, by questioning and dismantling the neat paper
trail that the great midwife so carefully left behind. Delightfully
written, this tale of a fascinating life at the end of the French
Old Regime sheds new light on the histories of medicine, gender,
society, politics, and culture.
The region of Bhutan is thought to be the only segment of the Himalayas not having experienced a major earthquake over the past half millennium. A proposed explanation for this apparent seismic gap ...is partial accommodation of the India‐Asia convergence further south across the Shillong Plateau, yet the seismic behavior of the Himalayan megathrust in Bhutan is unknown. Here we present historical documents from the region reporting on an earthquake in 1714 A.D. and geological evidence of surface rupture to constrain the latest large event in this area. We compute various earthquake scenarios using empirical scaling relationships relating magnitude with intensity, source location and rupture geometry. Our results constrain the 1714 A.D. earthquake to have ruptured the megathrust in Bhutan, most likely during a M7.5–8.5 event. This finding reclassifies the apparent seismic gap to a former information gap and implies that the entire Himalayan arc has a high level of earthquake potential.
Key Points
New historical and paleoseismological data are analyzed jointly
The approach constrains the 1714 A.D. earthquake in Bhutan with a magnitude around 8
The entire Himalaya can generate megathrust earthquakes; there are no seismic gaps
Wedding poetry was an important genre in early modern literature and a way to congratulate and praise a newlywed couple on their wedding day. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, war ...emerged as a central topic of wedding poems in the kingdom of Sweden. By applying the concept of repertory poetry, referring to poetry as a system based on the circulation of literary material, I examine how the war was discussed in wedding poems and how poems articulate common understandings and personal experiences of war, military occupation, and life as a refugee.
Polish queen Marie Casimire Sobieska, French by birth, left the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the death of her husband king John III and settled in Rome in 1699. Supported by her son, Prince ...Aleksander Sobieski, the queen dowager created at her Roman residence in Palazzo Zuccari one of Rome’s most important opera theatres. She used music and drama to uphold her social status and political plans, satisfy her aesthetic needs, and provide entertainment for the granddaughter under her care, along with her ever more ailing son. This is the first monograph about Sobieska’s music patronage. The book describes works by such eminent artists as Carlo S. Capece, Filippo Juvarra, and Domenico Scarlatti, along with the atmosphere of Rome of that time, the sociopolitical role of the festa, and the music theatre genres it employed.
Everyone’s a Winner? von Hagen, Sarah
Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift,
11/2022, Letnik:
81, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Im Sommer 1707 belagerte eine kombinierte Streitmacht aus einer habsburgischen Armee und einer britisch-niederländischen Flotte im Zuge des Spanischen Erbfolgekrieges (1701–1714) den französischen ...Marinestützpunkt Toulon. Obwohl die Stadt von den Franzosen gehalten wurde, verkündeten nicht nur diese, sondern auch die belagernden Parteien einen erfolgreichen Abschluss der Operation. Von diesen Erfolgsmeldungen ausgehend, deckt die vorliegende Untersuchung auf, dass die Durchführung der Belagerung von Normenkonkurrenzen geprägt war, die nach dem Ende der Operation jeweils die plausible Proklamation eines erfolgreichen Abschlusses ermöglichten. Während der Belagerungshandlungen rivalisierten Normen der Seekriegführung mit denen der Landkriegführung, in denen wiederum unterschiedliche Elemente des militärisch-adeligen Ehrenkodexes miteinander konkurrierten. Die missglückte Vereindeutigung dieser Normen ermöglichte im Nachgang des Ereignisses die Narration dreier unterschiedlicher Ausgänge der Belagerung, die, den Darstellungen der Akteure folgend, in einer konsequent multiperspektivischen Nahsicht der Belagerungshandlungen nachgezeichnet werden.
Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was the mastermind behind the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, and a lifelong rival of Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir ...Robert Walpole. He is also known for his political use of history based on the saying of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: 'history is a philosophy teaching by examples'. While much scholarly attention has been paid to Bolingbroke's historical criticism of Walpole's Whig oligarchy, his discussion of European international history has been treated as a mere vindication of the Treaty of Utrecht, thus not meriting further investigation. This article reconstructs Bolingbroke's writings on European politics as a history of British foreign policy. Arguing that his focus was on Britain's role in maintaining the balance of power, this article demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Bolingbroke attacked the Hanoverian government not for its involvement in European politics per se but for its abandonment of the Old System of William III against France. Bolingbroke believed history was repeating itself. As the Stuarts had helped France achieve hegemony half a century ago, the Hanoverians enabled France to regain supremacy in their pursuit of private interests, re-disrupting the European balance of power.
Today, the names Bach and Mozart are mostly associated with Johann
Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But this volume of
Bach Perspectives offers essays on the lesser-known
musical figures ...who share those illustrious names alongside new
research on the legendary composers themselves. Topics include the
keyboard transcriptions of J. S. Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther;
J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart's freelance work; the sonatas of C. P.
E. Bach and Leopold Mozart; the early musical training given J. C.
Bach by his father and half-brother; the surprising musical
similarities between J. C. Bach and W. A. Mozart; and the latest
documentary research on Mozart's 1789 visit to the Thomasschule in
Leipzig.
An official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach
Perspectives, Volume 14 draws on a variety of approaches and a
broad range of subject matter in presenting a new wave of
innovative classical musical scholarship.
Contributors: Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Yoel Greenberg, Noelle M.
Heber, Michael Maul, Stephen Roe, and David Schulenberg
Late Pleistocene Ice Age spotted hyena remains are described from the “Unicorn holotype skeleton” gypsum karst site Quedlinburg‐Sewecken‐Berge, Germany (Central Europe). The hyena population consists ...of adolescent to late adult individuals (96% of hyena NISP; 15% of megafauna NISP) indicating a commuting den site type. The comparisons to other European bone assemblages support hunting specialization on woolly rhinoceros (19% of NISP) and horses (27% of NISP). Specialization on bovids (Bison/Bos) can be added for this site. The megafauna contain few Eemian warm period remains of a large horse Equus ferus fossilis. Most (95%) of the megafauna is attributed to the Late Pleistocene glacial (Weichselian/Wuermian). Horse bones are dominated by distal leg elements from the smaller Przewalski horses Equus ferus przewalskii (26% of NISP). The Unicorn “holotype” skeleton originates from a composed horse skull, vertebrae and front legs, whereas the elephant remains added to this biologically not valid species must have been a straight‐tusked elephant tusk.
Catalonia has, from the nineteenth century to the present day, promoted a distinct culinary tourism. Travel and tourism practices have, as early as the eighteenth century, worked as powerful agents ...of Spanish nation-building and self-identification. In the case of Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular, gastronomic promotion via touristic forums became a key outlet for the expression of such nationalist sentiment. Tracing the process from the earliest mass-tourism guide-books to Barcelona, passing through the regressive understanding of culinary and broader cultural difference during the Franco dictatorship, this essay recognizes the firm linking of food and Catalan identity. By the 1960s we can identify the reassertion of a Catalan gastronomic identity in the proliferation of gastronomic guides to the region and culinary tourism enterprises such as the recent 'Ruta 1714' campaign. Along the way, this essay examines the role of the Generalitat, the Catalan language, the mining of local history and various touristic entities and gastronomic figures in cementing the identification between Catalonia and gastronomy that has ultimately helped strengthen the region's broader political and cultural recognition abroad.
PDF
