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This book reconstructs the history of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in Europe from antiquity to the 20th century, focusing on its most significant turning points: the emergence of a medical-scientific approach to delivery in Ancient Greece, the impact of Christianity, the establishment of the man-midwife in the 18th century, the medicalisation of childbirth, the emergence of a new representation of the foetus as "unborn citizen", and, finally, the revolution of reproductive technologies. The book explores a history that, far from being linear, progressive or homogeneous, is characterised by significant continuities as well as transformations. The ways in which a woman gives birth and ...
This book reconstructs the history of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in Europe from antiquity to the Twentieth century, focusing on its most significant turning points. It explores a history, that far from being linear, progressive or homogeneous, is characterised by significant continuities as well as transformations.
How did people of the past explain and deal with illness? This pioneering new book explores the wide range of healers and forms of healing in the southern half of the Italian peninsula that was the kingdom of Naples between 1600 and 1800. Drawing on numerous sources, the book uncovers religious and popular ideas about disease and its causation and cures--and uncovers new territory in the history of medicine.
The Enlightenment period, here understood as covering the years 1650 to 1789, is usually considered to be a period when religion was obliged to give way to rationality. With respect to medicine this means that the religious elements in the treatment and interpretation of diseases to all intents and purposes disappeared. However, there are growing indications in recent scholarship that this may well be an overstatement. Indeed it appears that religion retained many of its customary relations with medicine. This volume explores how far, and the ways in which, this was still the case. It looks at this multi-faceted relationship with respect to among others: medical care and death in hospitals, religious vocation and nursing, chemical medicine and religion, the clergy and medicine, the continued significance of popular medicine, faith healing, dissection and religion, and religious dissent and medical innovation. Within these significant areas the volume provides a European perspective which will make it possible to draw comparisons and determine differences.
This book is the first epoch-spanning study on Jewish participation in the Italian women’s movement, focussing in a transnational perspective on the experience of Italian-Jewish protagonists in Liberal Italy, during the First World War and the Fascist dictatorship until 1945. Drawing on ego-documents, contemporary journals and Jewish community archives, as well as records by the police and public authorities, it examines the tensions within the emancipation process between participation and exclusion. The book argues that the racial laws from 1938 did not represent the sudden end of an idyllic integration, but rather the climax of a long-term development. Social marginalization, the persecution of Jewish rights, and the assault on Jewish lives during fascism are analysed distinctly from the perspective of Jewish women. In spite of their significant influence on the transnational orientation of the Italian women’s movement, their emancipation as women and Jews remained incomplete.
This volume examines the evolution of reproductive law in Italy from the `far west' of the 1980s and 90s through to one of the most potentially restrictive systems in Europe. The book employs an array of sociological, philosophical and legal material in order to discover why such a repressive piece of legislation has been produced at the end of a period of substantial change in the dynamic of gender relations in Italy. The book also discusses Italian policy within the wider European policy framework.
Employing a rigorous methodological approach and analysing a vast body of sources from towns and regions in Italy, France and England over 300 years, this book hints at the extent of "routine" infanticide of newborns by married parents in early modern Europe, a practice ignored by contemporary tribunals. Death Control in the West 1500–1800 examines baptismal registers and ecclesiastical censuses across a score of communities in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Married women had little reason to hide their condition from priests, midwives, neighbours and friends; however, the practice of post-partum abortion was common everywhere, especially during times of hardship. By no means was it confined to the lower classes or to girls alone. Proposing a series of reflections on population control, this volume explores how families adopted a system of selective infanticide to manage resources and to safeguard social status, just like populations elsewhere around the globe. This study is an excellent tool for students and researchers interested in the demographic mechanisms of the age and social and familial relationships in early modern Europe.
The field of Venetian studies has experienced a significant expansion in recent years, and the Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 provides a single volume overview of the most recent developments. It is organized thematically and covers a range of topics including political culture, economy, religion, gender, art, literature, music, and the environment. Each chapter provides a broad but comprehensive historical and historiographical overview of the current state and future directions of research. The Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 represents a new point of reference for the next generation of students of early modern Venetian studies, as well as more broadly for scholars work...
Gathering the contributions of eleven contemporary Italian women thinkers who share a philosophical practice, Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers embraces a general interrelationality, fluidity, and overlapping of concepts for a border-crossing that affects what it means to be subjects that are embodied and participants in the life of their communities, thereby shaping a sense of belonging. Common threads are revealed through the exploration of radically diverse themes (the body, subjectivity, power, freedom, equality, liberation, the emotions, symbolism and metaphors, maternity, reproduction, responsibility, the political, the economic) and approaches (autobiographical styles, personal narratives, rootedness in the everyday, advancement of relationality, empathic responsibility, passions, and commitment to the flourishing of the polis). In their differences, these previously unpublished essays give the reader a glimpse of the fecund and articulated philosophical work of women in the Italian context—a context which has not been and still is not always benign toward women's distinctive originality and creativity.
This book seeks to contribute a multi-dimensional, multi-layered and gendered approach to the illicit economy in the historiography of early modern Europe. Using original source material from several countries, this volume concentrates on a border and transnational area—approximately the Lyon-Geneva-Turin triangle—located at the heart of European trade. It focuses on three products—salt, cotton and silk—all of which fuelled the black market between the last decades of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution. This volume offers an original contribution to wider studies of smuggling, illicit markets and women’s economic roles by taking into account the economic life of remo...