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The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty
This book is the first on Chinese eunuchs in English and presents a comprehensive picture of the role that they played in the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. Extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary source material, the author provides significant and interesting information about court politics, espionage and internal security, military and foreign affairs, tax and tribute collection, the operation of imperial monopolies, judiciary review, the layout of the palace complex, the Grand Canal, and much more. The eunuchs are shown to be not just a minor adjunct to a government of civil servants and military officers, but a fully developed third branch of the Ming administration that participated in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
The Perfect Servant
The Perfect Servant reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium. Kathryn Ringrose uses the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time she explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries. This allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants. Written with precision and meticulously researched, The Perfect Servant will immediately take its place as a major study on Byzantium and the history of gender.
Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond
Eunuchism was a subject which both intrigued and embarrassed the ancient world. The special virtue attributed to the castrated male at court, of undistracted loyalty to his ruler, aided the promotion of numerous eunuchs to positions of great power. A literary discourse developed, reviling and sometimes defending the eminence of these 'half-men'. Here, thirteen new studies from an international cast explore how eunuchs were perceived, and also reconstruct the realities of eunuchs' lives in Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Eastern culture.
Inside the World of the Eunuch
The history of Qing palace eunuchs is defined by a tension between the role eunuchs were meant to play and the life they intended to live. This study tells the story of how a complicated and much-maligned group of people struggled to insert a degree of agency into their lives. Rulers of the Qing dynasty were determined to ensure the eunuchs’ subservience and to limit their influence by imposing a management style based upon strict rules, corporal punishment, and collective responsibility. Few eunuchs wielded significant political power or lived in a lavish style during the Qing dynasty. Emasculation and employment in the palace placed eunuchs at the center of the empire, yet also subjected...
Eunuchs, Caliphs and Sultans
The book covers a period from the beginning of Islam, up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and deals mainly with the eunuchs in the major centres of Islam in the East (Umayyads, 'Abbasids, Seljuks, Zengids, Ayyubids and Mamluks and to some extent, the Fatimids of Egypt). It is not a history of the eunuchs in that wide area but rather is mainly concerned with the power accumulated by the eunuchs, military, socially and even economically (especially as trustees of financial affairs and property). The ultimate aim of the study is to being out the close ties connecting it to the harem, the eunuchs and the Mamlkus. In all of these three areas, the dominant element had been slaves (Islami...
Chinese Eunuchs
This book traces the history of eunuchism from its very early days until November 5, 1924, when the system was finally banned and hundreds of eunuchs, "crying pitifully in high-pitched, feminine voices," were expelled from Tzu Chin Palace, thus ending a system that had endured over 2, 000 years and through 25 dynasties.
The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society
The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history and roles of eunuchs, making use of extensive comparative material, such as from China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as about castrato singers of the eighteenth century of Enlightenment Europe, and self-castrating religious devotees such as the Galli of ancient Rome, early Christians, the Skoptsy of Russia and the Hijras of India. The various roles played by eunuchs are examined. They are not just found as servile attendants; some were power...
Eunuchs and Castrati
A social history of the role of eunuchs in the households and courts of Greece, Rome, China, Byzantine, medieval Europe and the East, which aims to challenge traditional preconceptions about their duties.
The Roman Castrati
Introduction: Eunichs in the Roman Empire -- Eunuchs of the Great Mother: The Galli in Rome -- Greeks Bearing Gifts: Terence's The Eunuch -- Of Seed and Spring: Eunuch Slaves of Imperial Rome -- Born Eunuchs: The Case of Favorinus of Arles -- Eusebius and His Kind: Court Eunuchs of the Later Roman Empire -- 'Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven': Self-Castration and Eunuchs in Early Christianity -- Military Eunuchs: The Case of Narses.
Eunuchs and Castrati
Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended ...
