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"In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, especially in Holland, England and Germany, so many women chose to dress and live as men that an underground tradition of female transvestism within the popular culture can be detected. This study, based on 119 well-documented Dutch cases of female transvestism, is the first of its kind and tells us how these women adapted to male life and why, once discovered, reactions to them were both fierce and varied. It also explores the reasons why they chose to change gender. Special attention is devoted to transvestism by one partner as the only way in which lesbian love was conceivable in this period."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Between the 17th and 19th centuries auto-biographers and diarists invented new ways to write about childhood and children. At the same time, pedagogical ideas about child-rearing changed. This book looks at the connection between these developments. Egodocuments can bring the past alive, and allow us to sketch six intimate portraits. The second part of the book concentrates on the changes. Childhood became more highly valued as a phase of life. Children were taken more seriously. This is shown in chapters on child's play, punishment, wet-nursing and independence. Around 1800, in diaries, parents more openly grieved about the loss of a child, which indicates both a change of literary conventions and changes in the way emotions were felt and expressed. Finally, autobiographers wrote more and differently about their early years, and developed new memory strategies. Autobiographical texts are discussed within a wider cultural setting, using paintings, poetry, pedagogical tracts and novels. This book makes clear how changes in autobiographical style, the concept of childhood and the working of human memory are connected.
Based on analysis of a diary kept by Constantijn Huygens Jr, the secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, this book proposes a new explanation for the invention of the modern, private diary in the 17th century. At the same time it sketches a panoramic view of Europe at the time of the Glorious Revolution and the Nine Years' War, recorded by an eyewitness. The book includes chapters on such subjects as the changing perception of time, book collecting, Huygens's role as connoisseur of art, belief in magic and witchcraft, and gossip and sexuality at the court of William and Mary. Finally this study shows how modern scientific ideas, developed by Huygens's brother Christiaan Huygens, changed our way of looking at the world around us.
This book explores new questions and approaches to the rise of autobiographical writing since the early modern period. What motivated more and more men and women to write records of their private life? How could private writing grow into a bestselling genre? How was this rapidly expanding genre influenced by new ideas about history that emerged around 1800? How do we explain the paradox of the apparent privacy of publicity in many autobiographies? Such questions are addressed with reference to well-known autobiographies and an abundance of newfound works by persons hitherto unknown, not only from Europe, but also the Near East, and Japan. This volume features new views of the complex field of historical autobiography studies, and is the first to put the genre in a global perspective.
"This edition can therefore be regarded as the most important republication of a Mandeville text in the last few decades, and should be required reading for anyone seriously concerned to understand the growth of his challenging ideas. " —Professor Irwin Primer in History of Political Thought Volume XXI Issue 4 "Mandeville's contributions to The Female Tatler are almost unknown but they are of fundamental importance for understanding The Fable of the Bees and a social theory that was to be of central importance to the Enlightenment's conception of modernity. The letters belong to the polemical world of early eighteenth-century journalism and have the energy, intelligence and gaiety characte...
In Mapping the ‘I’, Research on Self Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, the contributors, working with egodocuments (autobiographies, diaries, family chronicles and related texts), discuss various approaches to early modern concepts of the person and of personhood, the place of individuality within this context, genre and practices of writing. The volume documents the cooperation between the Berlin and Basel self-narrative research groups during its first phase (2000-2007). Next to addressing crucial methodological issues, it also demonstrates the richness of egodocuments as historical sources in contributions concentrating, for example, on the body and illness, on food, as well as on the early modern economy, group cultures and autobiographical considerations of one's own suicide. Contributors include Andreas Bähr, Fabian Brändle, Lorenz Heiligensetzer, Angela Heimen, Gabriele Jancke, Gudrun Piller, Sophie Ruppel, Thomas M. Safley, Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Patricia Zihlmann-Märki.
A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind. Information is often characterized as facts that float effortlessly across time and space. But before the nineteenth century, information was seen as a process that included a set of skills enacted through media on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these mediated facts and skills learned? Concentrating on manuscripts created by students in Scotland between 1700 and 1830, Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks functioned as workshops where notekeepers learned to judge the accuracy, utility, and morality of the data they encountered. He show...
Children Remembered discusses the relationship between parents and children in the past. It focuses on the ways in which adults responded to the untimely deaths of children, whether and how they expressed their grief. The study engages with the hypothesis of ‘parental indifference’ associated with the French cultural historian Philippe Ariès by analysing the changing risk of mortality since the sixteenth century and assessing its consequences. It uses paintings and poems to describe feelings and emotions in ways that are not only highly original, but also challenge traditional disciplinary conventions. The circumstances of infant and child mortality are considered for France and England...
Winner of the Caforio prize for the best book in armed forces and civil-military relations published between 2015 and 2016 In On Military Memoirs Esmeralda Kleinreesink offers insight into military books: who were their writers and publishers, what were their plots, and what motives did their authors have for writing them. Every Afghanistan war autobiography published in the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands between 2001 and 2010 is compared quantitatively and qualitatively. On Military Memoirs shows that soldier-authors are a special breed; that self-published books still cater to different markets than traditionally published ones; that cultural differences are clearly visible between warrior nations and non-warrior nations; that not every contemporary memoir is a disillusionment story; and that writing is serious business for soldiers wanting to change the world. The book provides an innovative example of how to use interdisciplinary, mixed-method, cross-cultural research to analyse egodocuments.