This article considers Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009), a novel that tells the stories of a hunger striking suffragette and four generations of her female descendants. Tracing feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert’s historiographic metafiction helps us think through the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have long dominated feminist historiography. Critically engaging with what has arguably become a feminist family drama, the novel makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary feminist theory and (...) feminist historiography, illustrating of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating and yet inescapable and useful. (shrink)

In spite of a large and diverse body of research on the topic, the relationship between Christianity and modernity is still an open question and a nodal point for our understanding of Western civilization. This paper aims at providing an original contribution to this debate by bringing into play the impact of gender-related views and practices. In particular, it focuses on Catholic Modernism, and analyzes this phenomenon and its repression by the Vatican hierarchy from the understudied perspective of female (...) historiography by way of an exemplary case study: the life and work of Maude Petre. Maude Petre (1863–1942) was a British Roman Catholic, member of a female religious community, a leading figure of Catholic Modernism, and one of its first historians. Because of the long-term patterns of gender imbalance which shaped the Catholic establishment and milieu, Petre's position as an active female modernist intellectual gave her a truly unique perspective on the confrontation between tradition and change within Western Christianity. Her work offers an outstanding opportunity to revise existing definitions of Catholic Modernism, while also opening new avenues to interpret the religious entanglements of the Western intellectual tradition at large. (shrink)

For the past century French intellectuals have increasingly censured Athénaïs Michelet as an "abusive widow" who mutilated the work of her husband. This article explores the role such censure, often vituperative and emotionally charged, has played in the development of French historiography and argues that it has been crucial in constructing the revered figure of Michelet. Further, the figure of Michelet is itself central to the more important trajectory of historiography that depends on the establishment of "authors" as (...) focal points of disciplinary power. Because the authorship of Michelet is so reliant on the scientific scholarship deployed to prove that Athénaïs Michelet was no author herself, the historiographic enterprise of establishing authorship is more than a little tainted with gender--not immune to it, as the profession claims to be. To the contrary, Michelet scholarship, like other historiographical debates, has taken great pains to establish the priority of the male over the female in writing history. If, as Howard Bloch as noted, this pointing to a male "original" and a female "copy" is the archetype of misogyny, then, the paper asks, is not scientific history so grounded? (shrink)

For Augustin Thierry, rewriting the story of the past was, until 1830, explicitly a way of making the future, and after 1830, implicitly a way of justifying the present. In subverting traditional historiography perceived as a legitimation of royal authority Thierry did not follow the Enlightenment strategy of opposing history and reason. Writing after 1789, he discovered reason in history. Constant and the Saint-Simonians had already distinguished two ages of history an age of conquest or violence, and an age, (...) just beginning, of commerce and reason but these appeared as discontinuous. Thierry's aim, especially after 1830, was to reveal history as a continuous, providential unfolding of reason, culminating in the bourgeois nation state. The violence of history was thus to be subsumed by reason. Historiographically, narrative and commentary were not to be discontinuous, as in Enlightenment historiography; meaning was to emerge instead from the narrative itself. Correspondingly, the historian's role was to be construed as a mediating, not a constructive one. The historian is the mouthpiece of history, as the bourgeois, the true hero of history, uniting in himself conquered and conqueror, re-presents what in history was divided the nation. In neither case is control to be viewed as a mark of division or violence; historian and hero are alike agents or representatives of totality . Violence reasserts itself thematically, however, in the stark, unresolved opposition of conquered and conqueror, subject and lord, female and male, victim and executioner, which structures Thierry's most successful historical narratives. (shrink)

In the ninth book of his Ἀτθίς the Athenian historian and religious expert Philochorus related an omen about which he had himself been consulted in the late fourth centuryb.c.e.(FGrHist328 F 67).When this year was done and the next was beginning, there occurred on the Acropolis the following prodigy: a female dog, having entered the temple of Athena Polias and made its way into the Pandroseion, got up on the altar of Zeus Herkeios, which is under the olive tree, and (...) lay down. It is an ancestral custom among the Athenians that no dog go up on the Acropolis. Around the same time, a star was evident for a while even in the daytime sky, when the sun was out and the weather was clear. And when we were asked about what the portent and the phenomenon meant, we said that both predicted the return of the exiles and that this would happen not as a result of a political change but rather in the existingpoliteia. And this interpretation actually came to pass. (shrink)

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft's travels to Scandinavian cities gave her new perspectives on the English and Continental bourgeois cultures with which she was acquainted. Her notions of the city as a source of inspiration for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are echoed in the epistolary writings of the Norwegian author Camilla Collett (1813–1895) and the novels of her countrywoman Amalie Skram (1846–1905). Collett and Skram were both frequent visitors to different European capital cities, and incorporated their impressions and experiences (...) of these cities. This resulted in innovative texts, with the individual in a new, modern environment, the city, as one of the central themes. For Collett, who can be regarded as a city correspondent avant la lettre, the city was also a yardstick for cultural progress. In her novels, Skram used the European city as a sort of laboratory of the modern era. Nevertheless, Collett's and Skram's ‘city texts’ are not the ones that have ensured that these two authors found their way into the literary canon. Collett became famous as the author of the first Norwegian feminist novel, whereas Skram is known as a Norwegian naturalist. Until recently, the prose texts in which Collett and Skram processed their urban experiences were either not discussed in Norwegian literary historiography, or were labelled as contributions to the morality debate that raged in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, I shall propose that Collett and Skram contribute to a distinctive yet unrecognized genre – female urban prose – which proffers new modes of thinking and writing about women's experience of contemporaneous bourgeois culture. (shrink)

From 1848-50, the British government sent 4,175 famine-stricken orphan girls from Ireland to Australia to give them a better life and fulfill population needs in the colony. The controversy surrounding the orphan emigration scheme suggests that prejudices against the Irish and their poverty were easily exported to a colonial setting. The girls’ physical appearance and ignorance, largely a result of poverty and terrible conditions in workhouses, were taken as racial deficiencies, while their religion was viewed as a threat. This orphan (...) scheme is thus a valuable case study for historians seeking to explore the limits of colonial citizenship in the British Empire and to reinvigorate historiography concerning Anglo-Irish relations in the Famine era. (shrink)

Historiography of education is not only a question of construction but also of selection. In 19th century “history of education” was typically a genre of “great educators”, mostly male and only marginally female. This construct is influential up to now, at least in popular contexts of educational reasoning. The article discusses in the introductory section problems of selection of names and meanings within history of education, and then three types of historiographical writing that are not only concerned with (...) “great educators” but have larger Philosophical impact. The first type is Herman Nohl’s history of German progressive education, the second one is Emile Durkheim’s history of Higher Education in France, and the third one is George Herbert Mead’s Movements of Thought in 19th Century. The article compares them and discusses their implications for further development of historical writing in education. (shrink)

This article explores the process of female self-fashioning in two previously neglected petitions dated 1786-87 by using signatures to analyse their texts and construct their contexts. In them, Helen Timberlake revises the account of frontier and Cherokee life her husband, Henry Timberlake, had published in his Memoirs. Her intense maternal voice, focused on loss, entangles her history with that of the Cherokee chief Ostenaco, providing a grounded but often untrue narrative of shared family life and a persona tailored to (...) evoke a history intertwined with that of George III. This article explores the mystery of Helen Timberlakes origins, while connecting the rhetoric of her petitions to the gendered emergence of sentimentalism, narratives of Indian captivity, and the historiography of ‘the Atlantic’. (shrink)

The history of science is increasingly directing its attention to the diachronic examination of women's involvement within spaces dedicated to scientific inquiry. While this field of study boasts rich and meticulous historiography, delving into the sixteenth century leaves the impression of encountering either a noticeable absence of women in the realm of natural history or an underexplored period in this regard. Undoubtedly, within the Italian context of the time, the cultural milieu shaped by the Counter-Reformation further heightened the social (...) challenges faced by women.Notwithstanding these challenges, a noteworthy female figure emerges in the latter half of the sixteenth century – Francesca Fontana, the second wife of the natural history scholar Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). From an overall view of the sources, Fontana seems to assume a pivotal role in the realization of collections and works attributed to the eminent naturalist. This study aims to delineate the role played by Fontana within Aldrovandi's ‘officina naturale.’ By examining the available documents in a chronological order, my aim is to provide insights into the evolution of her education and her practical and technical skills, harnessed in the pursuit of her husband's enterprises and scholarly contributions. (shrink)

The origin and the development of scientific disciplines has been a topic of reflection for several decades. The few extensive case studies support the thesis that scientific disciplines are not monolithic structures but can be characterized by distinct social, organizational and scientific–technical practices. Nonetheless, most disciplinary histories of genetics confine themselves largely to an uncontested account of the content of the discipline or occasionally institutional factors. Little attention is paid to the large number of researchers who, by their joint efforts, (...) ultimately shaped the discipline. We contribute to this aspect of disciplinary historiography by discussing the role of women researchers at the Institute for Heredity Research, founded in 1914 in Berlin under the directorship of Erwin Baur, and the sister of the John Innes Institute at Cambridge. This paper investigates how and why Baur built a highly successful research programme that relied on the efforts of his female staff, whose careers, notably Elisabeth Schiemann's, are also assessedin toto. These women undertook the necessary ‘technoscience’ and in some cases innovative work and helped increase the prestige of the institute and its director. Together they played a pivotal role in the establishment of genetics in Germany. Without them the discipline would have developed much more slowly and along a divergent path. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century British historian Lucy Aikin's ambitious four-part poem Epistles on Women (1810) marks both her first important contribution to women's historiography and a compelling example of Enlightenment feminist historiography. To some extent, Aikin is building on the work of male Enlightenment historians who had evaluated the status of women in different times and places and correlated it to social progress. However, she not only restricts her focus exclusively to women, but also makes a concerted effort to resolve (...) some of the tensions apparent in previous accounts of the relationship between women and social progress. Especially striking is her mediation of two distinct historical models of femininity, which I have called the republican and commercial models of femininity, the outlines of both of which we can trace in the work of male Enlightenment historians. By suggesting that through proper education women might combine the best aspects of each model, Aikin strategically advances the project of controversial feminists like Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had taken inspiration from the republican model of femininity in their demands for improvements to female education. ☆ Revised for the History of European Ideas, October 2, 2004 by Kathryn Ready. (shrink)

The essay examines precolonial, colonial, academic, and post-independence African voices that describe and promote special versions of the past in one part of eastern Africa. By studying the connections among African intellectuals, local discursive and political constraints, and overseas discursive and political constraints which emerged between 1890 and the present, the article outlines many of the themes that constitute academic African history.With this critical historiography at hand, we may see how struggles for control of discourse on the African past (...) are breaking free of an essentially European-derived conceptual framework by attending to local and regional forms of historical action. Both male and female competent speakers participate, often in radically different ways. Studying them, and those who listen to them and support them, will historians of Africa a sense of African actors' historical creativity as well as their arts of resistance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 325-327 [Access article in PDF] Introduction John F. Donahue The present special issue of the American Journal of Philology takes as its focus dining in the Roman world. It grew out of the APA/AIA Joint Panel on that subject, which was part of the annual meeting held in Philadelphia in 2002. The topic is both timely and engaging. Indeed, owing largely to its (...) perishability, its diversity, and the ease with which it can be manipulated for any number of social or political ends, food has proven to be an especially amenable topic for scholarly analysis of all sorts.The articles gathered in this special issue further illuminate the nature and function of this elemental yet highly complex social practice, offering a variety of approaches—historical, sociological, literary, cultural, and material—to food and dining in the Roman world.In the first article, "The Way We Used to Eat: Diet, Community, and History at Rome," Nicholas Purcell shows clearly that food and dining can be profitably approached from a cultural perspective. Here, Purcell explores Roman self-consciousness about nutrition and the way in which diet (and implicitly agriculture) were transformed into a narration of historical change. The process is evident in the "comestible historiography" of the elder Pliny, in which the simple foods associated with earlier Roman history provide insight into the ways in which the Romans thought about time and change by focusing on food. Especially influential in this type of approach was Varro and, before him, Dicaearchus. Thus for the Romans, food played a notable role in the relationship of the present to various pasts; in the process it becomes an important marker in helping us to map the intellectual and cultural history of the Republican period.Turning to Roman literature, John Wilkins, in "Land and Sea: Italy and the Mediterranean in the Roman Discourse of Dining," reminds us that Roman dining was linked both to the ideology of the early Imperial period and to the mythography of the agricultural base of Republican politics. The result is a body of texts that moralize against luxury and excess, however much this viewpoint may be at odds with actual Roman practice. In a refreshing departure from the Latin texts that typically treat these themes, the author points to the Greek writers of the second [End Page 325] century C.E., namely, Athenaeus and Galen. Both were interested in eating and dining, but from a much broader perspective than the moralizing approach typical of so much of Roman dining literature.While approaches of this sort help to illuminate both the universality of the dining experience and its uniquely Roman aspects, the sharing of food also intersects in interesting ways with gender and the body. Matthew Roller, in his article "Horizontal Women: Posture and Sex in the Roman Convivium," examines literary texts, Roman urban funerary monuments, and Campanian wall painting in order to understand more completely the complexities of female posture at Roman convivia. On a historical level such evidence argues for women assuming a reclining posture; on an ideological level, the reclining woman symbolizes many of the same things that a reclining posture symbolizes for men—otium, privilege, and pleasure. Even so, the matter of female sexual propriety is never far below the surface, especially in the non-literary sources.John Donahue, in "Toward a Typology of Roman Public Feasting," examines public banqueting during the Principate against the background of modern typologies of commensality in order to understand not only the form but also the deeper social function of public dining. Donahue assembles a wide cross section of Roman testimonia and weaves them into a coherent (if imperfect) framework of festal typologies, while employing a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, in this instance from French sociology. The Roman evidence is categorized into useful typologies, which, in turn, enrich our understanding of public dining and its place in Roman daily life.Not to be overlooked within the Roman festal landscape were servants, the "human props" of the elite-sponsored banquet, as John D'Arms appropriately characterized them. 1 Here, in the final entry, Katherine M.D. Dunbabin... (shrink)

This essay investigates the constitution of the principal research question on women in ancient Greece, namely, the status of women in ancient Athens, and attempts to formulate a historiography for it under three headings. "Patriarchy and Misogyny" reviews the history of the question, from the time of its canonical formulation by A. W. Gomme in 1925, back to its initial constitution as a scholarly question by K. A. Böttiger in 1775, and up to its conceptualization in contemporary and feminist (...) scholarship. This section concludes with a statement on the historiographical inadequacy of this research question, and suggests that a historiographically appropriate formulation must be based on a reconsideration of the ideology which informed the initial constitution of the research issue."Women in Civil Society" investigates the ideological underpinnings of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarly orthodoxy, concluding that it was founded on a historiographical tautology--with the example of women in ancient Athens providing the basis for eighteenth-century views on women's exclusion from civil society, and with the latter serving as the foundation for the investigation of women in ancient Greece. This section concludes with a discussion of some recent work in which the areas of investigation have been reformulated, but notes the overall exclusion from this work of issues having to do with race and sexuality."Race, Culture, and Sexuality" takes up the treatment of women in ancient Greece by Christoph Meiners who, in 1778, was one of the earliest to bring together considerations of cultural particularity with that of women's status. This section goes on to show how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformulations of ancient medical theory generated the notions of race and sex as biological essences, and invented also, and also with reference to ancient Greece, a theory of sexual degeneracy. This section concludes with a discussion of the current debate in the scholarly literature of the nature of sexuality, and in particular, of homosexuality, in Greek antiquity, and notes that this discussion has inadequately integrated questions having to do with female sexuality in antiquity and modernity. (shrink)

The Cistercian order, which had its origins in the late eleventh century, transformed the spiritual landscape of western Europe. The order's insistence on a return to the austerity and simplicity that had originally informed Benedictine life reenergized monasticism, spawning hundreds of new abbeys within decades. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians dominated monastic life, surpassing their black-robed predecessors in terms of popularity and replacing them among patrons as favored recipients of donations. Yet, while a sizable body of (...) historiography exists concerning the ability of men's houses to translate this appeal into spiritual and material success, questions remain regarding the order's female members. In particular, some scholars have constructed a narrative of financial difficulties and eventual decline for Cistercian nunneries, one that began in the thirteenth century and accelerated throughout the late Middle Ages. According to this narrative, such difficulties, by-products of the secondary status of religious women, manifested themselves in small monastic complexes and limited patrimonies. In her work on English Cistercians, Sally Thompson argues that religious women were dependent upon men because of their inferior position in medieval society and generally lacked a true religious vocation, characteristics that led to smaller, impoverished houses. Cistercian nunneries are portrayed in monastic histories as constantly struggling and are often “lumped together as being poor, scandalous, passive institutions which were eschewed by medieval patrons.” The majority of their houses are characterized by modern historians as enjoying a perilous existence at best, permanently poised on the brink of extinction and beset by a host of financial and spiritual difficulties. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while there is (...) a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

The Guggenheim’s spring retrospective of the seminal Swedish painter, Hilma Af Klint, has, naturally, evoked a multitude of art critics and visual culture scholars who laud her radical abstraction which, at the beginning of the 20th century, preceded Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. Yet, where much attention has been given to the symbology and motifs riddling Klint’s work – bold, private, untethered and nonrepresentational as they are – there has been a modicum of nuanced thought on how, exactly, esotericism and theology fomented (...) Klint’s pedagogical projects. Jillian Steinhauer, for instance, has underscored Klint’s naturalistic watercolors; featuring flowers and lifelike drawings of women; Summer Landscape (1888) suggests Klint’s technical aptitude for rendering light. Jadranka Ryle, in a clever article titled “Reinventing the Yggdrasil,” invokes Klint’s motif of the Yggdrasil, or the holy tree of Norse mythology, as a political axle for Nordic romanticism. Ryle makes the claim that by redirecting the Yggdrasil towards androgynous abstraction, Klint’s engagement with Norse mythology subverts the nationalist and patriarchal romanticism that previously characterized the nineteenth century’s use of the Yggdrasil. Others have adroitly uncovered biographical fragments from Klint’s life, detailing how she and four friends formed De Fem (“the Five”), an exclusively female coven that met weekly, praying, meditating, and holding seances to commune with spiritual guides. Rather than poise the Swedish maverick within the cannon of abstraction qua a political praxis, feminist subject-being, or historiography – projects that have been exhaustively overwrought, to the point of rendering Klint’s work both mute and reductively technical– I would like to take this time to closely examine simply one of Klint’s paintings and foreground it as an axiomatic modernist injunction between metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, (...) musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology. (shrink)

While less common than narratives about their male counterparts, accounts of female avengers are scattered throughout Chinese literature and historiography. Nevertheless, despite being included in a variety of genres and modes of writing, the extant corpus of Tang and pre-Tang female avengers appear to share remarkably similar tropes, tensions, and outcomes. In this article, I will explore how three tensions are apparent across Tang and pre-Tang female avenger accounts through the case study of narratives about Xie (...) Xiao’e 謝小娥, a woman who seeks revenge after her father and husband are killed by bandits. Supernatural elements, cross-dressing, and judicial proceedings all seek to reduce the power and autonomy of the heroine, presenting us with a fascinating and rich example of the limits of revenge. It has been previously assumed that this is the sole example of a female avenger account preserved in two modes of writing, but this is not the case. A detailed comparison of the versions relating to Xie Xiao’e will act as a springboard to recategorize the corpus of female avenger accounts and in turn more amply reveal the variety of methods used to curtail, control, and Confucianize these women. (shrink)

Aux périodes archaïques et classiques, les femmes grecques pourvoyaient des soins aux moments les plus importants de la vie, comme la naissance et la mort : pourtant ce n’est pas ce care qu’a mis en avant l’historiographie de la médecine, mais bien le cure masculin des médecins hippocratiques. À rebours, cet article met en avant ce care féminin. Fondée sur les documents textuels, épigraphiques et iconographiques, l’étude aborde la figure d’Hécamède, femme pourvoyeuse de soins efficaces mais non techniques aux guerriers (...) de l’Iliade d’Homère. La deuxième partie analyse le travail de care invisible et dévalué des femmes libres et esclaves au sein de l’oikos. Le soin des malades, des enfants et des vieilles personnes y échoit aux femmes adultes. Une troisième partie s’intéresse aux soignantes aux fortes compétences techniques parfois rémunérées, à mi-chemin entre care et cure : sages-femmes et femmes médecins de la période classique, jamais très éloignées du care puisque spécialisées dans les soins d’entretien de la vie : accouchement, soin des enfants et des femmes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata by Brian BlackKrishna Mani Pathak (bio)In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata. By Brian Black. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. xii + 2158. Paperback £38.99, isbn 978-0-367-43600-1. Brian Black's In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata is a brilliant book that exhibits three distinct features which can certainly help an inquiring mind understand not only the structure and nature of the text of the Mahābhārata but also (...) the meanings contained in it, alongside aspects of Hindu historiography. It investigates the text through literary, philosophical, and social perspectives that Black argues emerge in the dialogues over strī-dharma, puruṣa-dharma, and the social identity and status of women (see for example, pp. 117, 124, 130, 140). The work's literary character can be seen in Black's analysis of the text and its epical narratives. In this book, the story of the Mahābhārata is presented by Black as a web of narratives wherein every verbal encounter and dialogue among all the participating interlocutors refers to a specific meaning and (deterministic) role played by these divine and terrestrial characters as interlocutors: "All the main human characters are incarnations and/or descendants of divine figures…and [experience] intense emotional reactions to their own situations and the actions of others" (p. 5). For instance, most male and female characters in the narratives of the Mahābhārata, including Vyāsa (the author), who is said to have "the power of omniscience," and Kṛṣṇa, who is God Himself, help the readers extrapolate how the entire series of trailing events in the Mahābhārata is destined to happen. This is what Black highlights when he writes that "as author of the narrative, [Vyāsa's] appearances within it often move the story along, as well as offer lenses through which to understand its cosmic implications" and that he "draws on his omniscience to provide an explanation of the marriage that transcends the knowledge of ordinary humans" (p. 61). Further, Black emphasizes destiny's (active) role when he writes that "the story of Draupadī's previous birth invites reading the Mahābhārata as a karmic narrative in which the actions and decisions of characters create the conditions for subsequent events in the central story" (p. 76). Perhaps for this reason, Black highlights his methodological approach to the text and its literary character in the beginning of the book to explain that the Mahābhārata is more like a complex narrative than any other Hindu legend or mythology and is difficult to understand without contextualizing its dialogues and [End Page 1] their historical connections. Besides, the temporal aspect of the conversations between the characters is another literary condition to connect various sub-narratives to the main story. Black uses the term "dialogue" in three different ways while examining the text of the Mahābhārata, and this is how he proposes the text should be explored by the inquisitive mind:I understand the term "dialogue" in three main ways: (1) as verbal encounter: the conversations, discussions, and debates between characters within the text; (2) as intra-textuality: the relationship between different dialogues in different sections of the text; and (3) as hermeneutics: my interpretive approach to the text. In most of the remainder of this Introduction, I will prepare the way for the subsequent chapters by discussing each of these three understandings of dialogue and how they are related to the book as a whole. (p. 4)Black observes that most scholars, both from the East and the West, have tried to understand the text of the Mahābhārata and its embedded stories from different perspectives, taking them merely as dialogues or a product of dialogical relations, and hardly anyone has explored the most fundamental aspect of dialogue in the Mahābhārata, i.e., "the verbal exchanges between characters" that he takes as the book's starting point (p. 1). Black's literary perspective has made the book an interesting and illuminating read, despite the fact that most of the characters of the Mahābhārata have either a divine origin... (shrink)

Despite the importance of the “historiographical revolution” in Kuhn’s work, he did not carry out a specific study about it. Without a systematic investigation into it, he even affirms that the “old” historiography of science (OHS) is unhistorical, suggesting its summary disqualification in the face of his “new historiography” of science (NHS). My wider project, of which this paper is a part, is to better discuss the issue of the justification of the NHS. In this paper, I discuss (...) the justification (and the genesis) of the OHS, focusing on Condorcet and Comte and resorting especially to Koyré. This will allow us to understand that the relation between the OHS and the NHS is a new instance of inter-theoretical incommensurability. And, indeed, that the NHS is not stricto senso a new historiography. It is the same historiography used for other disciplines (art, philosophy), which in the twentieth century begins to be applied to science as well. (shrink)

The WHO, American Academy of Pediatrics and other Western medical bodies currently maintain that all medically unnecessary female genital cutting of minors is categorically a human rights violation, while either tolerating or actively endorsing medically unnecessary male genital cutting of minors, especially in the form of penile circumcision. Given that some forms of female genital cutting, such as ritual pricking or nicking of the clitoral hood, are less severe than penile circumcision, yet are often performed within the same (...) families for similar reasons, it may seem that there is an unjust double standard. Against this view, it is sometimes claimed that while female genital cutting has ‘no health benefits’, male genital cutting has at least some. Is that really the case? And if it is the case, can it justify the disparate treatment of children with different sex characteristics when it comes to protecting their genital integrity? I argue that, even if one accepts the health claims that are sometimes raised in this context, they cannot justify such disparate treatment. Rather, children of all sexes and genders have an equal right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to decide whether their own ‘private’ anatomy should be exposed to surgical risk, much less permanently altered, for reasons they themselves endorse when they are sufficiently mature. (shrink)

Building on the notion that organizations are congruence seeking systems, this study investigates the impact of green investing on corporate environmental violations (CEVs). The research sample consists of China's A-share-listed companies for the period 2009–2020. The study employs a robust analytical framework that integrates least squares dummy variable approach, different proxies for regressors and moderators, and instrumental variable technique. Based on the rigorous methods, empirical analysis reveals that green investing helps mitigate CEVs, aligning with the theoretical premise of environmental strategic (...) congruence. The moderating results indicate that elevated CEO ability and a higher proportion of female directors on boards enhances strategic congruence and amplifies the alleviating effects of green investing on CEVs. Furthermore, cross-sectional analysis suggests that the mitigating effect of green investing on CEVs is more pronounced for firms in sensitive sectors, state-owned, and lacking internal controls for environmental, health, and safety. This research contributes nuanced insights on the role of strategic congruence in sustainable finance and governance and presents practical implications for policymakers, managers, and corporate leaders navigating the intricate landscape of environmental responsibility within an emerging market. (shrink)

Around 1900, historiography of philosophy faced the challenge of opening itself to scientific, social, and cultural history, without giving up what is unique to philosophy: its exclusive claim to i...

Growing evidence suggests the presence of a female leadership advantage (FLA), such that women leaders tend to be associated with more effective outcomes in uncertain conditions. However, mechanisms linking women's leadership to effective outcomes are less well understood. We integrate FLA insights with ethics of care philosophical framework to conceptualize how women leaders achieve effective outcomes in the context of the urban revitalization crisis in the United States. We propose and empirically test the mediating role of ethics of care (...) leadership in the relationship between women mayors and economic health of their cities. We used data from the Urban Institute that includes 272 United States cities and measures of variables in our conceptual model at five points in time spanning 36 years (_n_ = 1185 city-year observations). We capture ethics of care leadership focused on racial inclusion with an index measure of a city’s racial spatial segregation, homeownership gap, poverty gap, and education gap, and we capture economic health with an index measure of a city’s employment growth, unemployment rate, housing vacancy rate, and median family income. We found that female-led cities were associated with better economic health, and this association was mediated by female-led cities’ association with greater racial inclusion. Ethics of care leadership appears to be one pathway through which a FLA manifests itself in the context of the urban revitalization crisis. This underscores the importance of city leadership that balances social and economic prerogatives. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries By HanaokaMimi, xiii + 301 pp. Price PB £29.99. EAN 978–1107565838.

ArgumentBy breaking decisively with the predominantly apologetic and hagiographic literature on science during National Socialism and employing compelling terms such as “irresponsible purity” and “collaborative relations,” Herbert Mehrtens profoundly influenced both his contemporaries and the subsequent generation of historians working in this field.

No doubt most philosophers who spend time on the history of philosophy are familiar with that question asked to embarrass (and liable to be asked by scientists in particular) why the history of the subject should be thought a significant part of the subject itself. Either there is progress in philosophy, it is said, or there is not. If there is progress, why the laborious backward glances? How can the past be so important? Why aren’t philosophers like psychologists, given perhaps (...) a short historical orientation before being brought up to the nitty-gritty of the present? If, on the other hand, there is no progress, if we might as well be discussing Locke as Quine, doesn’t that imply that philosophy consists in a set of questions for which there is no way of establishing even that some answers are better than others? Wouldn’t it be more profitable to pursue questions to which at least provisional answers can be established, approximating to the truth? Wouldn’t it be better to be a scientist? (shrink)

The use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is based (...) on a misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward’s notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to criticisms by John Harris, contained in a commentary on my article “Harris, harmed states, and sexed bodies”, which appeared in the Journal of Medical Ethics, volume 37, number 5. I argue that Harris's response to my criticisms exposes the strong eugenic tendencies in his own thought, when he suggests that the reproductive obligations of parents should be determined with reference to a claim about what would enhance ‘society’ or ‘the species’.

The aim of this paper is to sketch an approach for integrating the historiography of the sciences and of philosophy. More precisely, the paper suggests a method for investigating interactions within transdisciplinary constellations of researchers working in philosophy and in the exact sciences. I start off by introducing specific notions of analogy, variation, and conceptual space which provide the main ingredients of this method. The notion of a conceptual space, as well as other characteristics of the present approach, are (...) adaptations from so-called constellation research. Originally, constellation research was developed for the historiography of philosophy – especially in the context of the origins of German idealism. However, as I will argue in the second half of the paper, it is adaptable to the historiography of science, especially of the exact sciences. To support this claim and to illustrate the integrative power of the present approach, I will compare the notions of a constellation and a conceptual space with Ludwik Fleck’s notions of a »thought collective« and a »style of thought«, critically evaluate the distinction between contexts of discovery and of justification in a historiographical context, and relate the notions of analogy and variation, as introduced in the first part of the paper, to current debates about what is sometimes called »invariantism« in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

There are two interrelated questions that I would like to explore in the context of Pleshette DeArmitt’s work. The first one pertains to the intellectual stakes in the eloquent style of her writing, its elegance and playfulness, which accompanies the philosophical order of argumentation. And the second one refers to the issue of female friendship. How can one discuss such friendship without resorting to merely biographical, historical, or autobiographical terms? Yet what kind of philosophical theories of female friendship (...) could I possibly refer to? Perhaps to none. DeArmitt, whose life has created so many friendships, did not live long enough to write about friendship, at least not directly. And yet I would like to suggest that her captivating—the adjective that I use here deliberately—book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-possible Self-Love, leaves us traces of female friendship in her philosophical argument that narcissistic self-love is inseparable from the love of another. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 487-498, September 2022.

The use of female AI agents, such as vocal assistants, chatbots and robots, is on the rise, but the indiscriminate feminization of these AI agents poses novel ethical concerns about their impact on gender relations in society. This conceptual article argues that AI agents, even virtual ones, can display sexed cues (bodies, faces, and voices) beyond mere gendered cues (e.g., names, pronouns, hairstyle) and questions how assigning artificial female gender and sex to AI agents can harm women and (...) transform gender power dynamics. Grounded in the Social Shaping of Technology and Technofeminism with an existentialist feminist lens, this work parallels the scrutiny that the use of gendered and sexed cues in female advertising models has faced over past decades to critique the deceptive practice of linking artificial gender and sex in female AI agents. It suggests that by restricting a narrow view of gender to a narrow view of biological sex, the use of female AI agents limits women’s self-concepts by binding their identities to deceptive, narrow body/face/voice-centric scripts, while facilitating covert manipulation, enforcing harmful stereotypes, amplifying objectification, and exacerbating gender power imbalances. This research offers ethical guidelines for the further development of AI agents based on transparency, justice, and care, addressing this new form of surveillance capitalism and sexual oppression, and providing insights to create a more authentic, equitable, and caring technological landscape. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century BritainMark Salber PhillipsQuando mia figlia era molto piccola si divertiva a entrare nel mio studio e a chiedermi con finta gravità: “Signore papà che cosa hai concluso?” La sua domanda mi è tornata in mente molte volte più tardi, e mi ritorna nella mente anche oggi. Concludere non è facile, in qualsiasi lingua. E io per (...) natura preferisco proporre problemi.—A. Momigliano, “Epilogo senza conclusione”The question is: can we save for ourselves and for our successors this immemorial tradition, this long-standing delight, of talking to past historians as if they were our senior colleagues?—A. Momigliano, “Polybius Between the English and the Turks”More than any other historian of this century, Arnaldo Momigliano shaped our understanding of the evolution of Western historiography from the ancient to the modern world. Fundamental to this continuity, as Momigliano saw it, was the revival in the Renaissance of the classical division of history into two distinct genres. The first (often called, without further qualification, “history”) is the narrative of public events organized in linear [End Page 297] and causal fashion; the second, antiquities, is a more diverse body of writing that neglects political narrative for philosophical, literary, topographical, and other concerns. After the Reformation antiquarianism took on new tasks in response to the religious controversies of the age, but it remained distinct from the narrative tradition. Only in the eighteenth century did a convergence begin that has finally been completed in the historical methods of our own time. 1This identification of the eighteenth century as the time when historical narrative and antiquarian research converged gives Momigliano’s views their particular interest to students of this period. His terms, however, are always far wider than any single century. In fact his argument constitutes a genealogy of modern historical method, since the merging of the two traditions—first witnessed in the erudite historiography of Edward Gibbon—was a precondition of modern practice. On these foundations, a modern historical discipline has grown up in which systematic research has become indivisible from the task of representing the past in narrative, with the consequence that the ancient separation of history and antiquities has at last been transcended.This essay is intended as a sketch of an alternative approach to the study of historical thought and writing in eighteenth-century Britain. In my view an essential point of departure is the interest of eighteenth-century writers in the structures and experiences of private life, their desire to explore the inward lives of individuals and the everyday life of societies. This revaluation of private life challenged the classical conception of history in fundamental ways, resulting in a fruitful tension between the social and sentimental interests of the age and its inherited view of history. At stake, in the very [End Page 298] broadest terms, was the need to find forms of historical narrative that met the needs of a commercial society and recognized the values and activities of a non-aristocratic audience.In the eighteenth century antiquarian erudition was far from the only genre bordering on the territory of political narrative. Conjectural history, religious history, history of manners, history of sciences and of literature, biography, memoir, and novel all defined themselves in relation to a traditional conception of history and claimed the attention of readers for their own rival narrative spaces. More particularly, these related genres ranged themselves against history’s strict identification with public life, with all the assumptions about audience, gender, and intellectual authority that accompanied the public domain. Without ever displacing the national narrative in the hierarchy of literatures, these other genres offered a variety of alternative histories whose common ground was their resistance to the assumed priority of politics. 2For a generation Momigliano’s dialectic of history and antiquarianism has served as an organizing principle for a good deal of teaching and writing on early modern historiography. 3 It is time, I believe, for a revaluation of this conceptual scheme. The wider consideration of genres I am urging would greatly enlarge the framework of discussion and give us a sharper sense of the interests of eighteenth-century historians and their... (shrink)

Complex training (CT) is a combination training method that alternates between performing high-load resistance training (RT) and plyometric training within one single session. The study aimed to examine the effects of CT on lower-limb strength and power of elite female modern pentathlon athletes under the new modern pentathlon format and competition rules. Ten female participants (age: 23.55 ± 2.22 years, weight: 60.59 ± 3.87 kg, height: 169.44 ± 4.57 cm, and training experience: 6.90 ± 2.08 years) of the (...) national modern pentathlon team completed 8 weeks of RT as followed by 8 weeks of CT, with 2 weeks of break. Then, the participants conducted 8 weeks of CT, which included RT combined with plyometric training (e.g., drop jump and continuous jump). All stages of training were designed by the linear strength training period theories, requiring participants to train twice for the first 4 weeks and three times for the second 4 weeks. The one-repetition maximum (1RM) of squat, isometric mid-thigh pull (IMTP), counter-movement jump (CMJ), squat jump (SJ), pre-stretch augmentation percentage (PSAP), and reaction strength index (RSI) were assessed before and after both RT and CT training. One-way repeated-measure ANOVA models revealed that the 1RM of squat was significantly improved (p < 0.001) after RT as compared to pre-RT. No significant improvement in IMTP (p = 0.055), CMJ (p = 0.194), SJ (p = 0.692), PSAP (p = 0.087), and RSI (p = 0.238) was not observed. After CT, 1RM of squat (p < 0.001), IMTP (p < 0.035), CMJ (p < 0.001), SJ (p < 0.008), RSI (p < 0.006) were significant improved as compared to pre-RT, post-RT and pre-CT, while significant improvements in PSAP were observed as compared to pre-RT (p = 0.003) and pre-CT (p = 0.027), but not to post-RT (p = 0.156). This pilot study showed the promise of CT following RT to improve lower-limb strength and power in elite female modern pentathlon athletes. The findings are worthwhile to be confirmed in future studies with larger sample size and randomized design. (shrink)

If one is interested in studying the role women played in radical circles and in the development of radical thought during the early modern period, one is confronted with the curious fact that ther...