You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Introduction: picturing pregnancy -- Part I: Early printed birth figures (1540-1672). Using images in midwifery practice; Pluralistic images and the early modern body -- Part II: Birth figures as agents of change (1672-1751). Visual experiments; Visualizing touch and defining a professional persona -- Part III: The birth figure persists (1751-1774). Challenging the Hunterian hegemony -- Conclusion.
Friends, Neighbours, Sinners demonstrates the fundamental ways in which religious difference shaped English society in the first half of the eighteenth century. By examining the social subtleties of interactions between people of differing beliefs, and how they were mediated through languages and behaviours common to the long eighteenth century, Carys Brown examines the graduated layers of religious exclusivity that influenced everyday existence. By doing so, the book points towards a new approach to the social and cultural history of the eighteenth century, one that acknowledges the integral role of the dynamics of religious difference in key aspects of eighteenth-century life. This book therefore proposes not just to add to current understanding of religious coexistence in this period, but to shift our ways of thinking about the construction of social discourses, parish politics, and cultural spaces in eighteenth-century England.
This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine. It provides an array of interpretive strategies while also highlighting new trends in the field. Each chapter serves as a study of a different type of source, including the benefits and limitations of that source and what it can reveal about the history of medicine. Contributors provide practical strategies for locating and interpreting sources, putting texts and objects into conversation, and explaining potential contradictions. A wide variety of sources, including account books, legal records, and personal letters, provide new opportunities for und...
An Artistic Autoethnography on the Public Fetus explores artistic work with the iconic image of the fetus and the personal consequences of the image by analyzing the so-called public fetus within a feminist approach. This book develops a deeply interdisciplinary body of research, engaging with feminist debates on reproductive technology and imagery, art theory, visual histories of anatomical imagery, cultural critiques of the myth of the artistic genius, Gestalt understandings of perception and memory, and anthropological theories of liminality. Through blurring the artistic with the scientific, it explores the potential of autoethnography to serve as a form of conscious raising through which to create new images and stories that counter the public fetus in support of reproductive autonomy and social justice. This book will be useful to feminist scholars who work with issues related to gender, reproduction, sexuality, and autoethnography. At the same time, the book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students in gender studies as an example of how an autoethnographic process can make unrecognized experiences of gender known to a person.
'An important, fascinating and frequently shocking read.' BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quackery, Confinement is the untold history of pregnancy and childbirth in Victorian Britain. During the nineteenth century, having children was frequently viewed as a woman's central function and destiny – and yet the pregnant and postnatal body, as well as the birthing room, are almost entirely absent from the public conversation and written histories of the period. Confinement corrects this omission by exploring stories of pregnancy and motherhood across this period. Drawing on a range of contemporary sources, Jessica Cox charts the maternal experiences of women, examining fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, maternal mortality, unwanted pregnancies, infant loss, breastfeeding, and postnatal bodies and minds. From the royal family to inhabitants of the workhouse, this absorbing history reveals what motherhood was truly like for the women of nineteenth-century Britain.
In this timely and richly illustrated book, a group of multidisciplinary scholars explores the uses and handlings of fetuses, still-born, reproductive organs, and pregnant bodies for knowledge production, including the development of vaccines and pharmaceuticals, in Sweden over five hundred years. By examining the conflicted values and balancing acts of a variety of actors, such as medical experts, legal officials, policymakers, media professionals, disability organizations, and women’s movements, it demonstrates how the uses of aborted fetuses for research generated public controversy and became regulated by ethics and law in Sweden. Contributors are: Eva Åhrén, Annika Berg, Elisabet Björklund, Maria Björkman, Maja Bondestam, Isa Dussauge, Helena Franzén, Solveig Jülich, Francis Lee, Tove Paulsson Holmberg, Morag Ramsey, Anton Runesson, Helena Tinnerholm Ljungberg, and Anna Tunlid.
Representing Abortion analyses how artists, writers, performers, and activists make abortion visible, audible, and palpable within contexts dominated by anti-abortion imagery centred on the fetus and the erasure of the pregnant person, challenging the polarisation of conversations about abortion. This book illuminates the manifold ways that abortion is depicted and narrated by artists, performers, clinicians, writers, and activists. This representational work offers nuanced and complex understandings of abortion, personally and politically. Analyses of such representations are urgently needed as access to abortion is diminished and anti-abortion representations of the fetus continue to domin...
Winner of the Third Neu-Whitrow Prize (2021) granted by the Commission on Bibliography and Documentation of IUHPS-DHST Additional background information This book provides bibliographic information, ownership records, a detailed worldwide census and a description of the handwritten annotations for all the surviving copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. It also offers a groundbreaking historical analysis of how the Fabrica traveled across the globe, and how readers studied, annotated and critiqued its contents from 1543 to 2017. The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius sheds a fresh light on the book’s vibrant reception history and documents how physicians, artists, theologians and collectors filled its pages with copious annotations. It also offers a novel interpretation of how an early anatomical textbook became one of the most coveted rare books for collectors in the 21st century.
Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550–1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.