The “Curse of Eve”—Is Pain Our Punishment? Part I by Stacia Guzzo
Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project
I have been involved in several interesting discussions lately involving friends asking me what I thought of the... more
I have been involved in several interesting discussions lately involving friends asking me what I thought of the so-called “Curse of Eve.” This “curse,” which is generally used in reference to the pain of childbirth, is assumed from the text of Genesis 3:16a. On one side, I have had friends and colleagues argue that the pains of labor are a direct result of Eve’s sin, and thus all women who bear children will suffer them as a reminder of their inherent sinful nature. On the other hand, I have had friends question this interpretation: Why, they ask, would God use such an incredible event to punish us? And what about women who don’t experience any pain in childbirth at all? Or who do not have children? Is God’s punishment reserved for those who procreate? This doesn’t seem to make much sense in a larger spiritual framework.
Some additional questions have arisen from these discussions. I had a friend recently ask me, “If a woman is supposed to feel pain in childbirth, is she going against God’s will if she uses medication to ease her discomfort?” Another friend brought up the fact that God’s actions are seldom (if ever) random; therefore, what is the transformation that God is expecting from such a punishment? What does Eve’s “punishment” have to say about how we interact with, communicate with, and love God (and likewise)?
Dentro del paraiso, en conpania de los angeles formada': Eve and the Dignity of Women in Juan Rodriguez del Padron's Triunfo de las donas
by John Flood
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 79:1 (2002), pp. 33-43. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 79:1 (2002), pp. 33-43.
‘The Doctor’s Wife, (by the Blessing of God) helps Barrenness’: Gender and Infertility Treatments in Early Modern England.
Accepted for inclusion in the provisionally entitled, Gender, Health and Medicine in Historical Perspective edited by Sarah Toulalan.
The tensions and relationships between male medical knowledge and female medical understanding and practice have... more
The tensions and relationships between male medical knowledge and female medical understanding and practice have been examined by many scholars. In particular the development of man-midwifery and the contest between male physicians and female midwives has been extensively scrutinised. Similarly research has been conducted on domestic medicine and the role of women in treating illness within the home. This chapter will contribute to the debate surrounding the gendered nature of obstetric and gynaecological medicine in the early modern period. It will address issues relating to the nature and extent of women’s medical practice in this area. This research will examine the similarities and disparities between barrenness remedies offered in printed, male authored, medical texts and those recorded in the manuscript receipt collections kept by women. Moreover, it will assess a selection of advertisements to establish the extent to which male physicians and female practitioners were willing to publically offer treatments for fertility problems. It will highlight the many ways that, alongside men and independently, women were actively involved in the treatment of generative disorders both inside the home and in the broader medical market place of early modern England.
‘Gentle Purges corrected with hot Spices, whether they work or not, do vehemently provoke Venery’: Menstrual Provocation and Procreation in Early Modern England
Social History of Medicine, 25/1 (February 2012), 2-19.
Throughout the early modern period, medical writers described a plethora of remedies designed to provoke menstruation.... more Throughout the early modern period, medical writers described a plethora of remedies designed to provoke menstruation. This article will address the close relationship these substances had with provokers of lust. Historians have often viewed emmenagogues as covert expressions of abortive drugs. While they acknowledge that some women utilised these treatments for their intended purpose, to restore a regular menstrual cycle, they have more frequently asserted that they were more likely to be employed to remove an unwanted pregnancy. This article asserts that this understanding is in need of reappraisal and argues that these substances can be viewed as a key component of early modern fertility and sexual health care. This article demonstrates that provokers of venery and emmenagogues shared similar humoral virtues and that many compound remedies designed to restore purgation contained potent aphrodisiacs. By promoting a healthy menstrual cycle these substances ensured that the female reproductive system was fecund.
In Pursuit of Toyen: Feminist Biography in an Art-historical Context
forthcoming in Journal of Women's HIstory
“Donne quacchere nel XVII secolo,” Studi Storici, 40 (1999): 585-611.
[Quaker Women in the Seventeenth Century]. The article describes the central role of women in the origin and... more [Quaker Women in the Seventeenth Century]. The article describes the central role of women in the origin and development of the Quaker movement from the 1640s to the 1660s, noting how their zealous missionary activity and insistence that women be permitted to preach the gospel met with violent reactions throughout Europe and the New World. Following their persecution and imprisonment in England during the 1650s, many Quakers traveled to New England, where they also faced persecution, arrest, violent penalties, and often expulsion from the colonies. Some Quaker women undertook missions in Ireland and throughout the Mediterranean, undaunted by the violent repression of the Counter-Reformation. A survey of public and theological reactions to the early Quaker movement suggests that the public activity of women was one of the primary reasons for open hostility toward the movement. Following the Restoration, male leaders began to consolidate the movement and restrict women’s activities to more peripheral duties. Despite this shift, the early Quaker emphasis on egalitarianism and the participation of women irrevocably shaped the fundamentals of Quakerism.
“Una quacchera a Lisbona. I viaggi e gli scritti di Ann Gargill,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa – Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, serie IV, IV, 1 (1999): 247-281.
[A Quaker in Lisbon: the Travels and the Writings of Ann Gargill]. Anne Gargill was born in Swine (East Riding) in... more [A Quaker in Lisbon: the Travels and the Writings of Ann Gargill]. Anne Gargill was born in Swine (East Riding) in 1625. In January 1656 she published the short pamphlet A Warning to all the World. Shortly afterwards she went to Plymouth with the intention of going to Spain to evangelise, writing a letter to Fox prior to her departure from London. Her ship Lisbon at the end of April and upon landing Gargill directed herself to the King’s palace, but when she discovered that he wasn’t there she returned to the ship. On 2 May, two Inquisition officials went aboard the ship and spoke with her. Three days later she was brought to the Inquisition palace in Lisbon and interrogated. The Inquisition decided to release her, fearing that her detention would cause diplomatic problems with England, but ordered her to set out for England with the first ship. In September 1656 Ann Gargill published A brief discovery of that which is called the Popish Religion. In 1659, Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers told the Maltese Inquisitor that Anne Gargill had founded Quaker congregations in Spain. In the spring of 1657 Anne Gargill was in Holland where she caused discord and dissent in the Quaker community of Amsterdam, and for this reason was disowned by the Quaker leaders. In the following months a small group formed around her in Amsterdam. A woman of strong spirituality and keen intelligence she probably opposed the process of organisation of Quakerism that followed Nayler’s entry into Bristol. The story of Gargill is extremely interesting because it symbolizes some of the contradictions of early Quakerism. A movement that emerged as the supreme instance of freedom of the Spirit, original Quakerism experienced in the protagonism of women as Gargill one of its characteristics. The organizational process, a direct result of increasing repression, forced the more reasonable leaders of the movement to abandon some of the characteristics of its early early days and to define a Quaker theology that would not limit itself to the enthusiastic action of the Spirit within every man and every woman. Some people of more intense spirituality opposed this development, and were marginalized or expelled by the movement; this was the case of Anne Gargill. It is significant that among those who opposed the hierarchicalization of the movement a significant number were those, like Gargill, had excelled in the missionary activity (Villani also cites Perrot who, after having been a prisoner of the Roman Inquisition would lead a schism among the Quakers on the issue of the freedom of the Spirit). For those who had risked their lives to preach the free gospel of Inner Light it was intolerable to think that their movement would progressively structure along the lines of other churches with a hierarchy, a Church discipline, and a defined credo. Gargill’s prudent and cautious responses to the Portuguese inquisitors – examined by Villani in the article – would suffice to prove that not everyone who can be considered part of this extreme wing of Quakerism were frantics, led by their intransigence to risky headlong rush. However, it is highly probable that if they had taken over the movement leadership and not the more prosaic common sence of George Fox and his supporters, the movement would hardly have escaped unscathed the storm of the Restoration. The price that Quakerism paid to the marginalizing and expulsion of these restless spirits, however, was undoubtedly that of a radical transformation. If at the beginning of the movement the only article of belief was that you had to listen to “that something of God” present in every man and woman, Quakerism gradually became a true Church to which members must conform, not to risk excommunication and expulsion. And so, it is not coincidental that among those who most vigorously opposed to this outcome there were people like Gargill who had risked their lives to assert the freedom of conscience in Catholic countries.
“Donne quacchere tra Luce Interiore e Bibbia,” in La Bibbia nell’interpretazione delle donne. Atti del Convegno di studi del Centro Adelaide Pignatelli (Istituto Universitario “Suor Orsola Benincasa”) con la collaborazione della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Napoli 27-28 maggio 1999, edited by Claudio Leonardi, Francesco Santi, Adriana Valerio (Firenze: Il Galluzzo, 2002), 107-126.
[Quaker Women between Light Within and Bible]. This essay has been published among the proceedings of the conference... more [Quaker Women between Light Within and Bible]. This essay has been published among the proceedings of the conference on The Bible in the Interpretation of the Women held at Napoli in May 1999. The Quaker concept of the Inner Light led to an underestimation of the Scriptures whose reading was considered useful only if it was made with the same spirit with which they were written. The essay reconstructs the dialectic relationship between the reading the Bible and the action of the Spirit among the women of the Quaker movement in the seventeenth century. It also examined Women’s Speaking Justified of 1666 where Margaret Fell claims women’s right to speak and to preach through the use of scriptural evidence and The Sayings of Women Which Were Spoken Upon Sundry Occasions in Several Places of the Scriptures to Shew How the Poured Out His Spirit Upon Lord the Whole House of Israel, not only on the Male, but Also on the Female of 1683 in which Elizabeth Bathurst writes a sort of female bible choosing scriptural passages that see women on the foreground. The ‘gender’ reading of these early Quaker texts shows the importance of the female intellectual presence in the early years of the movement.
“Donne inglesi a Livorno nella prima età moderna,” in LUCIA FRATTARELLI, OLIMPIA VACCARI, Sul filo della scrittura. Fonti e temi per la storia delle donne a Livorno (Pisa: Plus, 2005), 377-399.
[English Women in Early Modern Leghorn]. The article deals with the history of the British community of Livorno in a... more
[English Women in Early Modern Leghorn]. The article deals with the history of the British community of Livorno in a gender perspective. Reconstructing the history of an early modern foreign mercantile community usually means telling a history of men and about men. All the leading figures of the community – consuls, diplomats, ministers of religion – are men. And, of course, the merchants are men who went abroad, often leaving their families at home. When women appear on the scene they are, in general, wives and daughters of merchants, and often the documentation leaves only a faint trace, perhaps only their names mentioned in a will or marked on a register of baptisms or marriages or on a tombstone. More rarely, the elements at our disposal allow us to reconstruct their stories, and when this happens, they are often characterized by unique and exceptional events. These are women who had problems with secular or religious authorities or came into conflict with their community or their family or otherwise, left their country, suffered reverses of fortune abroad. A history of the women of the English ‘nation’ in Livorno inevitably – for the most immediately accessible sources to the scholar – would be so a history of autonomous women, often women involved in some scandal, meaning female figures atypical both for their country of origin and for that in which they lived. In addition to some case-studies (such as that of Lady Baltimore, Charlotte Lee, wife of Benedict Leonard Calvert, fourth Baron Baltimore) Villani reports the first results of a comprehensive study of the abjurations of Protestant people preserved among the Inquisition papers of the Archiepiscopal Archive of Pisa (the fund of the Inquisition is composed of 32 files with documents ranging from 1574 to 1734, but to date only a dozen of them are indexed and calendared). As for the British, often were sailors and small traders who abjured. Very few women: a first survey, but that must be confirmed by more systematic research, we can estimate that, apparently, of about 150 British abjurations preserved in the papers of the Inquisition of Pisa, those by women are fewer than 20. The examination of these documents provide a glimpse into the lives of many Catholic British (or Anglo-Italian) families who lived in Livorno indulging in petty trade and crafts in general, although there are families where the husband was a sailor or a soldier and the wife was a servant or a prostitute. The men of these families, being neither merchants nor factors, were not part of the British Factory, a sort of merchant guild which gathered all the British merchants that was formed in Livorno probably during the 1600s, was very well structured by the 1700s. Generally not fully integrated with the Italians and on the edge of the English “nation” with which they maintained close ties, these British Catholics had apparently a double identity as they were watched with suspicion and little sympathy both by English because they were Catholics and by Catholics because they were former Protestants. Since the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century there were some cases of conversions to Catholicism of young British women that often agitated relations between the British residents in Livorno and the Tuscan political and religious authorities. It is difficult to explain this phenomenon. If there is a strong feeling that many of the abjurations documented in the papers of the Inquisition were motivated by a desire for integration rather than by a true religious crisis, these eighteenth-century cases seem to have originated primarily as conflicts between the girls and their family of origin. The passage to Catholicism was, firstly, the rejection of the family religion. But it can not be excluded that the attraction to a Church that in those years was developing what has been called a “feminization” of devotional practices also played some role. The gender approach has allowed the author to investigate aspects so far ignored by all the historians who had dealt with the foreign presence in Italy in the seventeenth century.
“‘Grandissima Gratia’: The Power of Italian Renaissance Shoes as Intimate Wear”
Co-authored with Andrea Vianello, in _Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
In an age where women wear pants and men can fashionably sport kilts, it seems as though accessories are now a... more
In an age where women wear pants and men can fashionably sport kilts, it seems as though accessories are now a defining touch of gender expression, indicating gender boundaries with which an individual is either identifying or testing. Women wearing neckties or men carrying handbags are not out of the question in the early twenty-first century Western fashion system, but nevertheless there are few dress acts which are more immediately visually challenging to cultural expectations of gender roles. Thus, in a world of Manolo Blahniks, we are accustomed to footwear being one of these highly visible and very public representations of gender identification and/or expression. Yet in the premodern and early-modern fashion system, we argue that gender identification and expression though shoes were primarily based on degrees of their invisibility.
Premodern men and women's footwear were initially unisex and utilitarian in design, and women's shoes were distinguished primarily by the fact that they tended be to some of the less visible aspects of contemporary female costume. Indeed, with the advent of Renaissance conspicuous sartorial consumption, women's shoes would become even less readily visible, draped as they were in dresses constructed of layers of far more expensive fabric. Ironically, however, this is the very same period in which footwear styles of men and women would begin significantly to diverge for the first time. How to explain this apparent paradox?
A parallel development interestingly occurred simultaneously in what would come to be called lingerie. The deeper women's undergarments were buried under myriad strata of clothing, the more diverse (and eventually sexualized) they became. In this article, we will argue that early-modern footwear in this same way essentially became a kind of gendered intimate wear, the increased fascination with which relied on the power of what was usually unseen, but a glimpse of which might be granted to or stolen by the viewer.
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Review: Women, Texts and Authority in The Early Modern Spanish World, by Marta V. Vicente y Luis R. Corteguera (eds.)
published in “Hispania” (2005) LXV/2, pp. 739-744.
Review: Estefanía Carròs y de Mur (ca. 1455-1511), by Teresa Vinyoles y Mireia Comas
published in “Hispania” (2006) LXVI/2, pp. 379-381.
Empty Pleasures The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda
Review of Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda. By Carolyn de la Peña. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. x+279. $32.50.
“Life without saccharin would be dreadful.” “Life without saccharin would be dreadful.”
Daria Berg. "Cultural Discourse on Xue Susu, a Courtesan In Late Ming China" IJAS 6.2 (2009), 171-200.
by Daria Berg
International Journal of Asian Studies, 6, 2 (2009), pp. 171–200. Reproduced with the publisher's permission.
This paper investigates perceptions of courtesans, gender and power from various perspectives, using both literary and... more This paper investigates perceptions of courtesans, gender and power from various perspectives, using both literary and non-literary sources and reconstructed lost books. Analysis focuses on representations of the celebrated courtesan, poet and painter Xue Susu (fl. 1575–before 1652) by writers of different backgrounds, gender and class. In late Ming times women participated in elite culture in unprecedented numbers. Courtesans gained prominence in the literati arts, playing a formative role in shaping cultural ideals. Late imperial Chinese discourse embeds the image of the courtesan in the formation of new beauty ideals and social negotiations of gender roles and power. Paradoxes abound, linking the courtesan with notions of chivalry, chastity and loyalism and depicting her in the context of national politics and warfare. The Ming/Qing texts reflect not only current perceptions of women and courtesans, but also the social and cultural aspirations, dreams, anxieties and desires of their authors.
Le role des femmes dans l'evangelisation protestante de Tahiti et des iles "adjacentes"
2011, French Historical Studies volume 34 n° 1, p. 57-86
The accounts of the eighteenth-century explorers have forged the Tahitian myth by describing the great sexual freedom... more The accounts of the eighteenth-century explorers have forged the Tahitian myth by describing the great sexual freedom enjoyed by Polynesians. While these explorers were inclined to praise it, the Protestant missionaries strongly disapproved it. This article firstly examines how the British Protestant missionaries from the London Missionary Society (1797-1863) and then the French missionaries from the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris have contributed to the elaboration of new sexual norms, which are exemplified in the marriage obligation. In a second part, the article looks at the missionary literature in order to shed light on the active role played by both Western and Polynesian women in the evangelization of Tahiti and its “adjacent islands”. It shows how this women dynamism sometimes worried the Western male missionaries who, as part of their “civilizing mission”, aimed to maintain the gender and racial hierarchies.
Jutta von Sangerhausen (13. Jahrhundert) – eine ‚neue Heilige’ im Gefolge der heiligen Elisabeth von Thüringen?, in: Zeitschrift für Thüringische Geschichte 63 (2009), S. 39-73
Jutta of Sangerhausen. A ‘new saint’ in the wake of Elizabeth of Thuringia?
Jutta of Sangerhausen... more
Jutta of Sangerhausen. A ‘new saint’ in the wake of Elizabeth of Thuringia?
Jutta of Sangerhausen (Thuringia/Germany) is a less known representative of the religious movements of the 13th Century Western Europe, a lay woman who spent the last four years of her life as anchoress in the neighborhood of the town Kulm in Prussia (today: Poland) and probably died in 1260. There is no reference to her neither in HERBERT GRUNDMANN’s standard work about the “Religious movements in the Middle Ages” (Berlin 1935/Darmstadt 1977) nor in the books written by KURT RUH and BERNARD MCGINN about the history of mysticism in Western Europe (see Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, Vol. 2, München 1993 and The Flowering of Mysticism, New York 1998). Not even ANNEKE B. MULDER-BAKKER mentioned Jutta in her recent publication about the “Lives of the anchoresses” (Philadelphia 2005). The reason for this ignorance may be the lack of a modern edition of the sources about Jutta. Now, that a new edition appeared last year (ed. by PETER GERLINGHOFF, Sangerhausen 2006) we finally have the opportunity to situate Jutta in her historical context. Some scholars are of the opinion that Jutta modelled herself on the Hungarian princess and Thuringian countess Elizabeth, a contemporary and compatriot of Jutta who died in 1231 and was canonized as early as 1235. The purpose of this paper is to prove the validity of this claim. My methodological procedure will be a textcritical one. Such an approach is inevitable because all the sources came from the 16th and 17th century. The question is: Couldn’t have been Jutta a ‘new Elizabeth’ before the 17th century? Or do we have to do with a ‘falsification’? In other and less provocative words: Is Jutta a ‘sainte construite’?