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Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance. In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine. Sharon ...
In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the republican city-state of Florence--birthplace of the Renaissance--failed. In its place the Medici family created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty examines how this transition occurred from the perspective of the Florentine patricians who had dominated and controlled the republic. The book analyzes the long, slow social and cultural transformations that predated, accompanied, and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject. More than a chronological narrative, this analysis covers a wide range of contributing factors to this t...
Overcoming Mediocrity is a project, developed by Christie Lee Ruffino and the Dynamic Professional Women's Network, Inc., intendedto provide women with a platform to share their stories of encouragement, inspiration, and prosperity. This eighth book in the series is a unique collection of stories from fearless women who have overcome great odds to create their own lives of significance. These stories are sure to inspire and encourage women of all ages, to realize their true potential.
Overcoming Mediocrity is a project, developed by Christie Lee Ruffino and the Dynamic Professional Women's Network, Inc., intended to provide women with a platform to share their stories of encouragement, inspiration, and prosperity. This tenth book in the series is a unique collection of stories from empowered women who have overcome great odds to create their own lives of significance. These stories are sure to inspire and encourage women of all ages, to realize their true potential.
Antonfrancesco Grazzini’s plays, La Spiritata (The Possessed Girl) and La Strega (The Witch), are available in English for the first time, with notes and an “Introduction.” These plays deal with witchcraft, superstition, sexuality, and abortion. The context for such themes is analyzed in the “Introduction.” Grazzini enhanced literary drama with elements from popular performances. He influenced other playwrights, including in England, where The Possessed Girl was adapted as the Elizabethan comedy, The Bugbears. Writer and linguist John Florio used Grazzini’s plays in his lexicon of Italian for English learners. Grazzini celebrated artistic and popular traditions of Renaissance Florence; he is significant for writing and preserving many literary genres, especially the burlesque and carnivalesque. He participated in Florentine spectacle and theater, as a writer of plays, a composer of interludes, and a chronicler of festive events. His importance to the development of the Italian language is evident in his plays.
In Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England Patricia Phillippy examines the crucial literal and figurative roles played by women in death and mourning during the early modern period. By examining early modern funerary, liturgical and lamentational practices, as well as diaries, poems and plays, she illustrates the consistent gendering of rival styles of grief in post-Reformation England. Phillippy emphasises the period's textual and cultural constructions of male and female subjects as predicated upon gendered approaches to death. She argues that while feminine grief is condemned as immoderately emotional by male reformers, the same characteristic that opens women's mourning to censure enable its use as a means of empowering women's speech. Phillippy calls on a wide range of published and archival material that date from the Reformation to well into the seventeenth century, providing a study that will appeal to cultural as well as literary historians.
Through a collection of essays by leading scholars on women's history and gender history, Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation questions conventional chronologies while reassessing the relationship between gender, agency, continuity and change. Celebrates 20 years of the publication of the journal Gender & History Reflects the extent to which gender analysis suggests alternatives to conventional periodisation. For example, whether the European Renaissance can be classified as the same period of great cultural advance when viewed from the perspective of women Offers innovative historiographical and theoretical reflection on approaches to gender, agency, and change
A radical new perspective on the dynamics of urban life in Renaissance Italy The cities of Renaissance Italy comprised a network of forces shaping both the urban landscape and those who inhabited it. In this illuminating study, those complex relations are laid bare and explored through the lens of contemporary urban theory, providing new insights into the various urban centers of Italy’s transition toward modernity. The book underscores how the design and structure of public space during this transformative period were intended to exercise a certain measure of authority over its citizens, citing the impact of architecture and street layout on everyday social practices. The ensuing chapters demonstrate how the character of public space became increasingly determined by the habits of its residents, for whom the streets served as the backdrop of their daily activities. Highlighting major hubs such as Rome, Florence, and Bologna, as well as other lesser-known settings, Street Life in Renaissance Italy offers a new look at this remarkable era.
Deals with the history of eyeglasses from their invention in Italy ca. 1286 to the appearance of the telescope three cent. later. "By the end of the 16th cent. eyeglasses were as common in western and central Europe as desktop computers are in western developed countries today." Eyeglasses served an important technological function at both the intellectual and practical level, not only easing the textual studies of scholars but also easing the work of craftsmen/small bus. During the 15th cent. two crucial developments occurred: the ability to grind convex lenses for various levels of presbyopia and the ability to grind concave lenses for the correction of myopia. As a result, eyeglasses could be made almost to prescription by the early 17th cent. Illus.