Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Author: Sandra Cavallo

Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13:

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Bringing together new research on widowhood, this collection of essays looks at the experience of both widows and widowers. It challenges traditional stereotypes and illuminates the lives of women in England, Italy, France, Germany and Spain.


The Profession of Widowhood

The Profession of Widowhood

Author: Katherine Clark Walter

Publisher: Catholic University of America Press

Published: 2018-09-21

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0813230195

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The Profession of Widowhood explores how the idea of ‘true’ widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. The medieval figure of the Christian vere vidua or “good” widow evolved from and reinforced ancient social and religious sensibilities of chastity, loyalty and grief as gendered ‘work.’ The ideal widow was a virtuous woman who mourned her dead husband in chastity, solitude, and most importantly, in perpetuity, marking her as “a widow indeed” (1 Tim 5:5). The widow who failed to display adequate grief fulfilled the stereotype of the ‘merry widow’ who forgot her departed spouse and abused her sexual and social freedom. Stereotypes of widows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ served highly-charged ideological functions in pre-modern culture, and have remained durable even in modern times, even as Western secular society now focuses more on a woman’s recovery from grief and possible re-coupling than the expectation that she remain forever widowed. The widow represented not only the powerful bond created by love and marriage, but also embodied the conventions of grief that ordered the response when those bonds were broken by premature death. This notion of the widow as both a passive memorial to her husband and as an active ‘rememberer’ was rooted in ancient traditions, and appropriated by early Christian and medieval authors who used “good” widowhood to describe the varieties of female celibacy and to define the social and gender order. A tradition of widowhood characterized by chastity, solitude, and permanent bereavement affirmed both the sexual mores and political agenda of the medieval Church. Medieval widows—both holy women recognized as saints and ‘ordinary women’ in medieval daily life—recognized this tradition of professed chastity in widowhood not only as a valuable strategy for avoiding remarriage and protecting their independence, but as a state with inherent dignity that afforded opportunities for spiritual development in this world and eternal merit in the next.


Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Author: Sandra Cavallo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1317882776

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This new collection of essays brings together brand new research on widowhood in medieval and early modern Europe. The volume opens with an introductory chapter by the Editors which looks generally at the conditions and constructions of widowhood in this period. This is followed by a range of essays which illuminate different dimensions of widowhood across Europe - in England, Italy, France, Germany and Spain. A particular attraction of the volume is the attention given to widowers, and the comparisons made between the male and female experience of widowhood. It is an exciting reinterpretation of the subject which will do much to undo the traditional stereotype of the widow. Contributing to the volume are: Jodi Bilinkoff, Giulia Calvi, Sandra Cavallo, Isabelle Chabot, Julia Crick, Amy Erikson, Dagmar Freist, Elizabeth Foyster, Margaret Pelling, Pamela Sharpe,Tim Stretton, Barbara Todd, and Lyndan Warner.


Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe

Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe

Author: Lisa Hopkins

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789462987500

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This book examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, especially when they were expected to occupy the spheres society believed their gender should.


Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-03-12

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 900436076X

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In this volume, the authors bring fresh approaches to the subject of royal and noble households in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays focus on the people of the highest social rank: the nuclear and extended royal family, their household attendants, noblemen and noblewomen as courtiers, and physicians. Themes include financial and administrative management, itinerant households, the household of an imprisoned noblewoman, blended households, and cultural influence. The essays are grounded in sources such as records of court ceremonial, economic records, letters, legal records, wills, and inventories. The authors employ a variety of methods, including prosopography, economic history, visual analysis, network analysis, and gift exchange, and the collection is engaged with current political, sociological, anthropological, gender, and feminist theories.


Widows in European Economy and Society, 1600-1920

Widows in European Economy and Society, 1600-1920

Author: Beatrice Moring

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781783271771

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A deeply researched and geographically wide-ranging study that reveals that widows were much more economically and socially active than is often thought.


Worth and Repute

Worth and Repute

Author: Barbara J. Todd

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 9780772720795

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"This collection of essays shows the remarkable strides the study of gender has made in the decades since Barbara Todd helped reshape the field through her publications and teaching. In Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, gender conventions are examined in regard to men as well as women. Shaping and constraining behaviour as well as ways of thinking and feeling, gender conventions are used and manipulated so that women and men can manage their lives, make do as best they can, or advance. If gender conventions are often accepted, they are also on occasion defied, challenged, or simply ignored. The articles here give vivid illustration to these different possibilities and their precise historical contexts."--Publisher's website.


Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Author: Allison Levy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1351872982

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Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called 'minor arts,' including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.


Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: Susan Broomhall

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-07-21

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1137531169

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This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.


Mothers and Children

Mothers and Children

Author: Elisheva Baumgarten

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780691091662

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This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history. Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community. A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mothers and Children provides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.