Modern Period (modern + period)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences

Kinds of Modern Period

  • early modern period


  • Selected Abstracts


    Theorizing Diaspora: Perspectives on "Classical" and "Contemporary" Diaspora

    INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 2 2004
    Michele Reis
    Cohen (1997) employed the term "classical" diaspora in reference to the Jews. Indeed, a vast corpus of work recognizes the Jewish people as examples of quintessential diasporic groups. However, a broader conceptualization of the term diaspora allows for the inclusion of immigrant communities that would be otherwise sidelined in the conventional literature on diaspora. This study is therefore a departure from the traditional diasporic literature, which tends to use the Jewish Diaspora as the archetype. It favours, rather, the classification of three principal broad historical waves in which the Jewish Diaspora can be interpreted as part of a classical period. The historicizing of diasporization for the purpose of this paper is achieved by an empirical discussion of the three major historical waves that influenced the diasporic process throughout the world: the Classical Period, the Modern Period, and the Contemporary or Late-modern Period. The paper discusses these three critical phases in the following manner: first, reference is made to the Classical Period, which is associated primarily with ancient diaspora and ancient Greece. The second historical phase analyses diaspora in relation to the Modern Period, which can be interpreted as a central historical fact of slavery and colonization. This section can be further subdivided into three large phases: (1) the expansion of European capital (1500,1814), (2) the Industrial Revolution (1815,1914), and (3) the Interwar Period (1914,1945). The final major period of diasporization can be considered a Contemporary or Late-modern phenomenon. It refers to the period immediately after World War II to the present day, specifying the case of the Hispanics in the United States as one key example. The paper outlines some aspects of the impact of the Latin American diaspora on the United States, from a socio-economic and politico-cultural point of view. While the Modern and Late-modern periods are undoubtedly the most critical for an understanding of diaspora in a modern, globalized context, for the purpose of this paper, more emphasis is placed on the latter period, which illustrates the progressive effect of globalization on the phenomenon of diasporization. The second period, the Modern Phase is not examined in this paper, as the focus is on a comparative analysis of the early Classical Period and the Contemporary or Late-modern Period. The incorporation of diaspora as a unit of analysis in the field of international relations has been largely neglected by both recent and critical scholarship on the subject matter. While a growing number of studies focus on the increasing phenomenon of diasporic communities, from the vantage of social sciences, the issue of diaspora appears to be inadequately addressed or ignored altogether. Certain key factors present themselves as limitations to the understanding of the concept, as well as its relevance to the field of international relations and the social sciences as a whole. This paper is meant to clarify some aspects of the definition of diaspora by critiquing the theories in the conventional literature, exposing the lacunae in terms of interpretation of diaspora and in the final analysis, establishing a historiography that may be useful in comparing certain features of "classical" diaspora and "contemporary" diaspora. The latter part of the paper is intended to provide illustrations of a contemporary diasporic community, using the example of Hispanics in the United States. [source]


    Trends in adult stature of peoples who inhabited the modern Portuguese territory from the Mesolithic to the late 20th century

    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OSTEOARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 6 2009
    H. F. V. Cardoso
    Abstract This study documents long-term changes in stature from the Mesolithic to the late 20th century in the territory of modern Portugal. Data utilised originated from published sources and from a sample of the Lisbon identified skeletal collection, where long bone lengths were collected. Mean long bone lengths were obtained from 20 population samples and compiled into nine periods. Pooled long bone lengths for each period were then converted to stature estimates. Results show three major trends: (1) a slow increase in stature from prehistory to the Middle Ages; (2) a negative trend from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century; and (3) a very rapid increase in mean stature during the second half of the 20th century. The political and territorial stability of the Kingdom of Portugal may have contributed to the greater heights of the medieval Portuguese, compared with the Roman and Modern periods. The negative secular trend was rooted in poor and unsanitary living conditions and the spread of infectious disease, brought about by increased population growth and urbanisation. Although the end of the Middle Ages coincided with the age of discoveries, the population may not have benefited from the overall prosperity of this period. The 20th century witnessed minor and slow changes in the health status of the Portuguese, but it was not until major improvements in social and economic conditions that were initiated in the 1960s, and further progress in the 1970s, that the Portuguese grew taller than ever before. Since the Middle Ages other European countries have experienced similar oscillations, but showed an earlier recovery in stature after the industrial period. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    Monetary circulation in Central Europe at the beginning of the early modern period: attempts to establish a shared currency as an aspect of the political culture of the 16th century (1524,1573) , By Petr Vorel

    ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2007
    Ian Blanchard
    No abstract is available for this article. [source]


    Patterns of morbidity in late medieval England: a sample from Westminster Abbey

    ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2001
    Barbara Harver
    A comparison between secular hospitals and monastic infirmaries introduces a discussion of the duration and seasonality of the illnesses of the monks of Westminster in two periods: 1297/8 to 1354/5 and 1381/2 to 1416/17. A change in the duration of illnesses is related to change in the conventions of treatment after the Black Death of 1348/9. The resemblance between the seasonal pattern of morbidity in this sample and that of mortality among male adults in the early modern period is discussed. It is suggested that the latter pattern may extend into the late middle ages. [source]


    Knightly Complements: The Malcontent and the Matter of Wit

    ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2010
    Ian Munro
    This essay uses John Marston's play The Malcontent to explore the social understanding and cultural practice of wit in the early modern period. Through the interactions between its various versions, The Malcontent charts the linguistic, stylistic, and cultural boundaries of early modern wit as both intrinsic class marker and promiscuous commodity. This duality of wit helps the play negotiate the complexities of its own theatrical genealogy that not only inform the larger context of wit in the period, but also inflect, in significant ways, the play's modern reception. (I.M.) [source]


    Britomart's Armor in Spenser's Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration

    ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 1 2009
    Judith H. Anderson
    In the early cantos of The Faerie Queene, Book III, Britomart is the figure of a young woman vested in armor that forms and masks, expresses and veils, protects and contains her, and she is further invested in finding Artegall, himself a figure vested in various armors. By the beginning of Book IV, Britomart, the armed but nubile virgin, not only Venus-Virgo but also Venus within Mars, has become a complex cultural signifier implicated in cultural conceptions of gender. Her figure indicates that a binaristic conception of gender is inadequate: there are four terms in play or at least two in each of the major amatory players of the books featuring Britomart. Venus-Virgo does not sufficiently represent this doubled perception. Unless seen as a cultural inflection of the composite Venus-Mars, Venus-Virgo conceals the truly Martian, martial, masculine nature of Britomart's figure and elides the hard questions that her armor presents, those involving combinations of nubility and firm resistance, incorporation and active agency, the kinds of questions involving what the early modern period typically perceived as masculinity. My essay explores how a doubled perception of Britomart's gender develops through a process of figuration in allegorical narrative: Britomart is an evolving figure, and her armor conspicuously participates in,figures,the development of her integrity and its loss. [source]


    Language, Duality, and Bastardy in English Renaissance Drama

    ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2004
    Nicholas Crawford
    By figuring language and thoughts as illegitimate, these locutions displace or confuse a discourse of blood lineage and social status with one that registers uneasiness about the derivation of ideas and their expression. This fantasized genealogy of bastard conceptions and their linguistic progeny signals the mind's growing alienation from the body and reveals an incipient Cartesian separation of the two. As the theater provides a spectacle of words bodied forth, it is often the drama of the early modern period that most strikingly enacts this developing duality so characteristic of modern subjectivity: the movement of language toward a realm imagined to be incorporeal. [source]


    Kings and sons: princely rebellions and the structures of revolt in western Europe, c.1170,c.1280*

    HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 215 2009
    Björn Weiler
    Uprisings by royal sons against their fathers were a common phenomenon in the politics of medieval Europe, but one that, so far, has not been fully explored in the context of the thirteenth century. This was, however, a period during which numerous norms and mechanisms were developed that continued to define the Latin West well into the early modern period. This article uses three case studies (England 1173; Germany 1234; and Castile 1282) to outline both shared features of medieval European politics at large, and characteristic differences between central regions of the medieval West. [source]


    Faith, hope and money: the Jesuits and the genesis of fundraising for education, 1550,1650*

    HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 214 2008
    Dame Olwen Hufton
    The Society of Jesus in the early modern period produced the largest network of schools the world had known and left an indelible mark on the structures of schooling in Europe into modern times. The distinctive schools were substantial and offered a mixture of civic humanism based on classical texts and theological studies but also, according to place, languages and mathematics, all offered without cost to parents. How was the money raised to build and sustain these institutions by a mendicant order? It is here argued that we see the first indications of the kind of fundraising activities practised by modern front-rank American universities, including building up significant friends, producing newsletters and publications, suppressing mention of failures and accentuating successes and involving a broad spectrum of influential people of both sexes in the expansion process. The author's intent is to argue for a more nuanced approach to the motives of donors than that current in recent historiography. [source]


    ,For refreshment and preservinge health': the definition and function of recreation in early modern England

    HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 211 2008
    Elaine McKay
    Society accepts that people need time for recreation, and that we are naturally inclined towards play and seeking pleasure. Recreation time helps us to recharge our batteries and relieve stress, and makes us more able to function within our respective social and economic roles. By using evidence taken from diaries written between 1500 and 1700 this article seeks to examine the role and function of recreation in English society within the context of the early modern period. This contemporary writing shows how language was employed to describe the functions of recreation and in particular its association with the concept of refreshment and regeneration in terms of mind, body and soul. [source]


    Edmund Gibson's Editions of Britannia: Dynastic Chorography and the Particularist Politics of Precedent, 1695,1722

    HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 182 2000
    Robert Mayhew
    Geographical writing has been linked with political discourse as ,advice literature' since the time of Strabo. In the early modern period, geography and related forms of spatial enquiry preserved this role. This article examines the political positioning of William Camden's massively influential chorographical work, Britannia, as updated by a team of scholars led by Edmund Gibson in 1695 and 1722. The 1695 edition is shown to have espoused loyalty to the Anglican church and the Williamite succession through its depiction of Camden and its treatment of the events of the Civil War. This political positioning is shown to have provoked criticism from Francis Atterbury as a minor theme in the convocation controversy. Finally, the second, 1722 edition of Britannia is shown to have shifted to a more blatant Hanoverian loyalism as Gibson and his colleagues grew more fearful of the Jacobites. [source]


    Taming Madness: Moral Discourse and Allegory in Counter-Reformation Spain

    HISTORY, Issue 315 2009
    MARÍA TAUSIET
    In the early modern period, madness assumed an important role in European thought and to a certain extent replaced the obsession with death which had characterized the preceding centuries. Like death before it, madness was seen as a means of accessing truth, but this was now an incomplete truth full of ambivalence and ambiguity since folly was being reclaimed as a relative form of reason. This article examines how this new vision of madness influenced Spanish thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Overall, it can be said that the positive and liberating view of madness, as conveyed by Erasmus, predominated in Spain until the end of the sixteenth century. Thereafter, the spirit of the Counter-Reformation tried gradually to constrain the omnipresent madness, associating it with the most reprehensible of vices, while understanding sanity to be the cultivation of Christian virtues. Despite attempts by a reductionist moral discourse to tame madness, however, it proved to be an unmanageable beast which continued to multiply and display a thousand and one difference faces. [source]


    2. PRESENCE ACHIEVED IN LANGUAGE (WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION GIVEN TO THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST)

    HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2006
    HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT
    ABSTRACT The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the "presence" of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence (the spatio-temporally located existence of physical objects and events). It also proposes two ideal types: meaning-cultures (in which the interpretation of meaning is of paramount concern, so much so that the thinghood of things is often obscured), and presence-cultures (in which capturing the tangibility of things is of utmost importance). In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be "amalgamated" with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the "house of being," now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the (physical) things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including,and of most interest to historians,the things and events of their past. [source]


    Kabbalah: A Medieval Tradition and Its Contemporary Appeal

    HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2008
    Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
    Popular culture today is suffused with kabbalah, an elitist, intellectual strand of medieval Judaism that claimed to disclose the esoteric meaning of the rabbinic tradition. While rooted in esoteric speculations in late antiquity, kabbalah emerged in the tenth century as an internal debate among Jewish theologians about the ontological status of divine attributes. At the end of the twelfth century speculations about the nature of God emerged among the Pietists of Germany and the ,masters of kabbalah' in Provence. During the thirteenth century kabbalah flourished in Spain where its self-understanding as redemptive activity was expressed in two paradigms , the ,theosophy-theurgic' and the ,ecstatic-prophetic'. Kabbalah continued to evolve in the early modern period, shaping both Jewish and European cultures. The modern period saw the rise of the academic study of kabbalah, but it was employed in two conflicting manners: in the nineteenth century scholars associated with the Enlightenment used historical analysis of kabbalah to debunk Jewish traditionalism, but in the first half of the twentieth century, the academic study of kabbalah was used to generate a secular, collective Zionist identity. Although scholarship on kabbalah has flourished in the twentieth century, kabbalah has become a variant of New-Age religions, accessible to all, regardless of ethnic identity or spiritual readiness. [source]


    Pollen-based biome reconstructions for Colombia at 3000, 6000, 9000, 12 000, 15 000 and 18 000 14C yr ago: Late Quaternary tropical vegetation dynamics

    JOURNAL OF QUATERNARY SCIENCE, Issue 2 2002
    Robert Marchant
    Abstract Colombian biomes are reconstructed at 45 sites from the modern period extending to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The basis for our reconstruction is pollen data assigned to plant functional types and biomes at six 3000-yr intervals. A reconstruction of modern biomes is used to check the treatment of the modern pollen data set against a map of potential vegetation. This allows the biomes reconstructed at past periods to be assessed relative to the modern situation. This process also provides a check on the a priori assignment of pollen taxa to plant functional types and biomes. For the majority of the sites, the pollen data accurately reflect the potential vegetation, even though much of the original vegetation has been transformed by agricultural practices. At 18 000 14C yr BP, a generally cool and dry environment is reflected in biome, assignments of cold mixed forests, cool evergreen forests and cool grassland,shrub; the latter extending to lower altitudes than presently recorded. This signal is strongly recorded at 15 000 and 12 000 14C yr BP, the vegetation at these times also reflecting a relatively cool and dry environment. At 9000 14C yr BP there is a shift to biomes thought to result from slightly cooler environmental conditions. This trend is reversed by 6000 14C yr BP; most sites, within a range of different environmental settings, recording a shift to more xeric biome types. There is an expansion of steppe and cool mixed-forest biomes, replacing tropical dry forest and cool grassland,shrub biomes, respectively. These changes in biome assignments from the modern situation can be interpreted as a biotic response to mid-Holocene climatic aridity. At 3000 14C yr BP the shift is mainly to biomes characteristic of slightly more mesic environmental conditions. There are a number of sites that do not change biome assignment relative to the modern reconstruction, although the affinities that these sites have to a specific biome do change. These ,anomalies' are interpreted on a site-by-site basis. Spatially constant, but differential response of the vegetation to climatic shifts are related to changes in moisture sources and the importance of edaphic controls on the vegetation. The Late Quaternary reconstruction of large-scale vegetation dynamics in Colombia allows an understanding of the environmental controls on these to be developed. In particular, shifts in the character of the main climatic systems that influence Colombian vegetation are described. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    THE IDEA OF DEFENSE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY THINKING ABOUT JUST WAR

    JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 4 2008
    James Turner Johnson
    ABSTRACT What is, or should be, the role of defense in thinking about the justification of use of armed force? Contemporary just war thinking prioritizes defense as the principal, and perhaps the only, just cause for resorting to armed force. By contrast, classic just war tradition, while recognizing defense as justification for use of force by private persons, did not reason from self-defense to the justification of the use of force on behalf of the political community, but instead rendered the idea of just cause for resort to force in terms of the sovereign's responsibility to maintain justice, vindicating those who had suffered from injustice and punishing evildoers. This paper moves through three major stages in the historical development of just war thinking, first examining a critical phase in the formation of the classical idea of just cause as the responsibility to maintain justice, then discussing the shift, characteristic of the modern period, to an idea of sovereignty as connected to the state and the prioritization of defense of the state as just cause for use of force, and lastly showing how this conception of the priority of defense became part of the recovery of just war thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. The paper concludes by noting recent changes in thought on international law that tend to emphasize justice at the expense of the right of self-defense, suggesting that the roots of just war thinking imply the need for a similar rethinking of contemporary just war discourse. [source]


    The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

    JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 2 2003
    Stuart Clark
    Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement , essentially visual in character , about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement , this visual identification , became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world. [source]


    MODERN SOVEREIGNTY IN QUESTION: THEOLOGY, DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM

    MODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 4 2010
    ADRIAN PABST
    This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation-state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between "the one" and "the many". Modernity fuses juridical-constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, "biopolitical" account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual are the object of politics and are subject to state control (section 1). The origins of this dialectic go back to changes within Christian theology in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, these changes can be traced to Ockham's denial of the universal Good in things, Suárez's priority of the political community over the ecclesial body and Hobbes's "biopolitical" definition of power as state dominion over life (section 2). At the practical level, modern sovereignty has involved both the national state and the transnational market. The "revolutions in sovereignty" that gave rise to the modern state and the modern market were to some considerable extent shaped by theological concepts and changes in religious institutions and practices: first, the supremacy of the modern national state over the transnational papacy and national churches; second, the increasing priority of individuality over collectivity; third, a growing focus on contractual proprietary relations at the expense of covenantal ties and communal bonds (section 3). By subjecting both people and property to uniform standards of formal natural rights and abstract monetary value, financial capitalism and liberal secular democracy are part of the "biopolitical" logic that subordinates the sanctity of life and land to the secular sacrality of the state and the market. In Pope Benedict's theology, we can find the contours of a post-secular political economy that challenges the monopoly of modern sovereignty (sections 4,5). [source]


    Reconsideration of Economic Views of a Classical Empire and a Nation-State During the Mercantilist Ages

    AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
    Article first published online: 3 JUN 200, Mehmet Bulut
    While the main aim of the economic policies of European nation-states was to use the power of the state to promote trade and economic growth and to build up national industries and manufacture, the Ottoman Empire continued to follow its provisionist, fiscalist, and traditional economic policies of land expansion in the early modern period. In Western Europe, this experience gave birth to a new class that gradually improved its trade ability and expanding industries and markets under a capitalist system. The Ottoman imperial policy was mostly concerned about the continuity of strong central authority and land expansion, which never meant improving the industry or trade concerns. Instead, the economic policies of the Ottomans were subsistence of the people, provisioning the major population centers, collection of taxes, and maintaining freedom of trade. The balance and stability in society explain the priority for the Ottomans in the economy. However, commercialization and profit explain the priority for the Dutch nation in the economy. This article elaborates the economic views of the Dutch Republic and the Ottoman Empire in the mercantilist ages. [source]


    The antique heroines of Elisabetta Sirani

    RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 1 2002
    Babette Bohn
    The painter Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665), a pivotal figure in promoting the prominence of women artists in her native city of Bologna, was innovative in her portrayals of heroines from classical antiquity. Avoiding the eroticism generally employed by male contemporaries like Guido Reni, Sirani characterized such figures as Portia, Timoclea, and Cleopatra by virtues more commonly associated with men than women during the early modern period in Italy. Sirani's unusual approaches to antique subjects, grounded in her knowledge of pertinent texts, mark the emergence of women's specialization in history painting in Bologna, a development that must be understood in the context of Bolognese humanism and contemporary advances by Bolognese women in the fields of music and literature. [source]


    GLAZED CERAMIC MANUFACTURING IN SOUTHERN TUSCANY (ITALY): EVIDENCE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CONTINUITY THROUGHOUT THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD (10TH,14TH CENTURIES),

    ARCHAEOMETRY, Issue 1 2008
    C. FORTINA
    Archaeometric investigation allowed the characterization of two important classes of ceramics: ,vetrina sparsa' and ,invetriata grezza'. Their archaeological peculiarity makes them particularly suited for tracing the evolution of glaze manufacturing in southern Tuscany throughout the medieval period (10th,14th centuries). These ceramics were found in different sites of historical importance, and also from a mining perspective. Local copper, lead, zinc and iron mineralizations supported the growth of several settlements in the vicinity of the mines. The many castles and different archaeological finds (ceramics, glazed ceramic, slag etc.) attest to the intense mineral exploitation of the area from at least the first millennium bc up to the modern period. In light of these geological and archaeological characteristics, archaeometric investigation was intended to provide insight into ancient technical knowledge of ceramic glazing and to determine the source area for raw materials in the medieval period (10th,14th centuries). Ceramic bodies were analysed through OM, XRDp, SEM,EDS and XRF, while coatings were investigated through SEM,EDS. Mineralogical, petrographic and chemical analyses revealed slightly different preparation and firing processes for the two classes of ceramics. These data suggest the continuity through the centuries of the ,vetrina sparsa' and ,invetriata grezza' production technology. The mineralogical phases, such as monazite, xenotime, zircon, barite, Ti oxide, ilmenite, titanite, tourmaline and ilvaite, and the lithic (intrusive and volcanic) fragments detected within the ceramic bodies suggest a source area in the vicinity of the Campiglia mining district. Lastly, the presence of Cu,Zn,Pb (Ag) and Fe sulphide mineralizations (materials used to produce glaze) in the area supports the hypothesis of local manufacture. [source]


    Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England

    GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2000
    S. H. Rigby
    This review article of Mavis Mate's Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350,1535 (1998) locates Mate's work within the broader context of the debate about changes in women's social position caused by the collapse in population following the Black Death. Was demographic decline accompanied by growing social and economic opportunities for women or should historians emphasise the continuity of female work as low-skilled, low-status and low-paid throughout the late medieval and early modern periods? How did women's role in the labour market affect the age of marriage, fertility rates and long-term population change? In general, Mate's conclusions offer support to the ,pessimists': women's work was vital to the household but economic centrality did not bring a commensurate social power or legal rights and the ideology of female subordination remained firmly in place. The main problem with Mate's case is, inevitably, a lack of evidence, for family structure, for the sexual division of labour and, above all, for affective relations. Nevertheless, this detailed, empirically based local study shows how successfully women's history has moved into the historical mainstream. [source]


    The evolution of the study of anatomy in Japan

    CLINICAL ANATOMY, Issue 4 2009
    R. Shane Tubbs
    Abstract The following review focuses on how the study of anatomy in Japan has evolved throughout the centuries; specifically, we investigate anatomical knowledge during the primitive, ancient, feudal, and early modern periods of Japanese history. Early vague and mythical anatomical concepts derived from China prevailed for many centuries in Japan. Kajiwara wrote one of the earliest anatomical works in 1302. As a science, anatomy was the first basic science to be established in Japan, beginning simplistically during the 1600s and flourishing more recently with the onset of Meiji Restoration. As a result, Japan has produced several of the most influential anatomists of the 20th century, including Buntaro Adachi, who added detail to our knowledge of the vascular system and its variations; and Sunao Tawara, who discovered the atrioventricular node. Herein, we discuss the ways in which Japan has added to and promoted the anatomical sciences. Clin. Anat. 22:425,435, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]