Sunday, October 07, 2012

For Lisbon

In Cascais:
Casa Das Historias - Paula Rego
 Museu Condes de Castro

Mafra and nearby village Ericeira

Museums in Lisbon:
Palacio da Ajuda
Sao Roque
Jeronimos
Palacio de Belem
Museu National de Arte Antigua
Palacio Fronteira (Benfica)
Museu do Azulejos
Gulbenkian


Neanderthals - Homo Sapiens - Celts - Romans - Visigoths (5th C) - Moorish Rule (711-) - Battle of Sao Mamede (1128) - Afonso I (1179) - Reconquista completed 1250 - Lisbon becomes capital 1255  - John I conquers Ceuta 1415 - Henry the Navigator  (1394-1460) - Treaty of Tordesillas 1494 - Massacre of "new christians" 1506 - Sebastiao (1554-1578) - Spanish Rule 1580 - 1640 - Duke of Braganza becomes John IV 1640 -  Sebastião de Melo, Marquis of Pombal (17-17) - Lisbon earthquake 1755 - Treaty of Paris 1763 (end of Seven Years War) - Brazil declares independence 1822 - 1890 British Ultimatum - Assassination of King Carlos I 1908 - King Manuel II is forced into exile and the First Republic declared 1910 - 1926 the coup d'etat that puts Salazar in power and leads to the Second Republic; Estado Novo - Salazar dies in 1969 and Caetano takes over - The Carnation Revolution that begins the Third Republic 1974 - Macao handed back to China 1999





Readings:
Rebordelo manuscript
Cecil Roth, "The Religion of the Marranos," The Jewish Quarterly, Vol. XXII, July 1931.
Eduardo Dias, UCLA, Portugal's Secret Jews - The end of an Era, Peregrinacao Publications.
Fontes, Manuel da Costa. "Mais Orações Criptojudias de Rebordelo" Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 1992.

The largest Jewish community of about 300 can be found in Lisbon, where there are two synagogues, one Sephardic, Shaare Tikva and one Ashkenazi, Ohel Yaacov (Ohel Jacob). Lisbon's Jewish community is centered around the Comunidade Israelita de Lisboa, or the Jewish Community of Lisbon, a community center that houses Shaare Tikva.
Ohel Jacob is the only Ashkenazi synagogue in the Iberian Peninsula and was originally established as an Orthodox congregation. The synagogue was inactive for a period, but following its reconstitution in the 1990’s the Bnei-anussim, or children of Marranos, who were interested in returning to Judaism, were welcomed at the Ohel Jacob synagogue.
Ohel Jacob is housed on the second floor of a rundown building at Avenida Elias Garcia 110.  Ohel Jacob will be rededicated on December 17th, 2006. This will be the first synagogue dedication in Portugal since the opening of the Belmonte synagogue in 1997.
Jewish visitors to Lisbon may be interested in visiting the remains of the medieval Jewish quarter and Rossio Square, the site of the Palace of the Inquisition, where 1,300 Jews were burned at the stake. A collection of Jewish tombstones, with inscriptions written in Hebrew, can be found at the Archaeological Museum.
A Jewish community lived in Obidos between the fifth and seventh centuries, when the city was occupied by the Visigoth. Another Jewish community lived there between the eighth and twelfth centuries, while it was under Arab rule. In Obidos’s Jewish quarter, a synagogue can be found that dates to the end of the 12th century.
Also in the Costa de Prata region, in the city of Tomar, an ancient 15th century Jewish synagogue and mikveh, one of the two surviving monuments of medieval Jewish heritage, can be found. The synagogue has become a national museum and features historic remains of medieval Portugese communities.

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Marriage in 18th C Britain

Articles and images and monographs:

George Booth, Earl of Warrington, "Considerations upon the Institution of Marriage"
John Gregory "A Father's Legacy to His Daughters" London 1774
Jonathan Swift "Cadenus and Vanessa" 
Stoops to Conquer - School for Scandal -

Marriage à-la-mode - the Rake's Progress - the Harlot's Progress

"Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France" Christine Roulston
"Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840" by Alan Macfarlane. Blackwell, 1986
"Family Fictions and Family Facts: Harriet Martineau, Adolphe Queteley and the population question in England 1798-1859" Brian Cooper. Routledge.
 Lawrence Stone: 
   An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (1984) with Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, 
   Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987 (1990) 
   Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England, 1660-1753 (1992) 
   Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857 (1993)

Daily Life in 18th C England Kirstin Olsen (pages 46-49 or so)


Check parliamentary discussions and articles on:

Marriage Act of 1753
(An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage - 26 Geo. II. c. 33) better known as Lord Hardwicke's Act.

Royal Marriages Act 1772 
(An Act for the better regulating the future Marriages of the Royal Family - 12 Geo 3 c. 11) Requires the king's consent for a Royal to marry, if consent is not given royal can declare intent to marry after one year and unless both houses of Parliament disagreed, the marriage would be legal.

King George III's brother Prince Henry had married a commoner in 1771 - the king's son George married Fitzherbert in 1785.

Lord Bishop of Landaff 's bill for the preventing of adultery. 

Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 - 20 & 21 Vict., c. 85
made divorce possible without a private act of parliament or an annulment
Check Tatler and Spectator for comments on marriage and reviews of novels discussing marriage 
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/

Thomas Salmon "A Critical Essay Concerning Marriage" 1724
"The Honorableness of Marriage Adjusted and Defended" 1740 ECCO

Canadian Bar Journal, Volume 2, 1959, page 175
Law Notes, Volume 54, 1935, page 355
Check Turner v. Vaughan (2 Wils. 339)




snippets from Jonathan Swift's 'Cadenus and Vanessa' :

---
That modern love is no such thing
As what those ancient poets sing;
A fire celestial, chaste, refined,
Conceived and kindled in the mind,
Which having found an equal flame,
Unites, and both become the same,
In different breasts together burn,
Together both to ashes turn.
But women now feel no such fire,
And only know the gross desire;
Their passions move in lower spheres,
Where'er caprice or folly steers.
A dog, a parrot, or an ape,
Or some worse brute in human shape
Engross the fancies of the fair,
---
Hence we conclude, no women's hearts
Are won by virtue, wit, and parts;
Nor are the men of sense to blame
For breasts incapable of flame:
The fault must on the nymphs be placed,
Grown so corrupted in their taste.

---
She made a speech in open court;
Wherein she grievously complains,
"How she was cheated by the swains."
On whose petition (humbly showing
That women were not worth the wooing,
And that unless the sex would mend,
The race of lovers soon must end);
"She was at Lord knows what expense,
To form a nymph of wit and sense;
A model for her sex designed,
Who never could one lover find,
She saw her favour was misplaced;
The follows had a wretched taste;
She needs must tell them to their face,
They were a senseless, stupid race;
And were she to begin again,
She'd study to reform the men;
Or add some grains of folly more
To women than they had before.
To put them on an equal foot;
And this, or nothing else, would do't.
This might their mutual fancy strike,
Since every being loves its like.
END

 

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Friday, April 20, 2012

Humanism

One of the major intellectual currents in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Began in Italy, possibly as a result of a growing commercial class. Developing an instrumental view of education as a means to learn good decision making and leadership skills, rather than a desire to search for abstract truth, humanist scholars saw rhetoric as more important than logic. In a narrow sense humanism entails a shift in educational focus from an old curriculum emphasizing religion and law, to topics like grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. This focus on literary and rhetorical skills did not mean that critical thinking and truth were abandoned. Rather the opposite, scholars went back to the sources, and back to desiring a context for those sources, understanding that they existed in a specific time and culture and that the reader needed to understand that context to understand the text. This sort of reading led to a new understanding of time and change over time. It also led Lorenzo Valla to the conclusion that the Donation of Constantin, giving the legacy of Rom to X, had been a fraud.
Humanism has been described as competing with scholasticism, but it is probably more correct to say that humanism was more practically oriented and simply found scholastic methods less useful.
Politics - politically changes in Italian society encouraged humanism - increasing the demand for educated civil servants. The ideal life was no longer contemplative, but civic. So Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" on how to educate a ruler ...
Antiquity - unclear what influenced what, but there is a renewed interest in greek and roman art and thought. Aristotle was well integrated but Plato was new - and very iteresting. Art beoomes less focused on god and heaven, mroe on people and nature.
Religion - made the afterlife less important (it could be after the plagues were over and population growth well on its way again) - there were religious strains of Humanism, applying different logic and more science.
This started in Italy but moved north and shifted as it went. ???
Humanists influential in England:
Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), John Colet (1467-1519), William Lilly (1468?-1522)
In Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546), and Roger Ascham (1515–68), English humanism bore fruit in major literary achievement. Ben Jonson is also one of the gang, as is much of Henry VIII and Elizabethan culture.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Women warriors

Info from http://www.lothene.org/others/women18.html

sources:
"Women All on Fire" - Alison Plowden - Sutton Publishing - 0-7509-2552-3
"Female Tars" - Suzanne Stark - Pimlico - 0-7126-660-5
"Damn Rebel Bitches - Women of the '45" - Maggie Craig - Mainstream Publishing - 1-85158-962-7
 "Amazons of Black Sparta : The Women Warriors of Dahomey" - Stanley B. Alpern - New York Univ Pr - 0814706789
 "Hannah Snell, The Secret Life of a Female Marine" - Matthew Stephens - Ship Street Press - 0-9530565-0-3
"The Duel" - Robert Baldick - Spring Books - 0 600 32837 6

names:
 Angelique Brulon - awarded the French Legion of Honor. She defended Corsica in seven campaigns between 1792 and 1799. At first she fought disguised as a man, by the time her gender was discovered she had proved so valuable in battle that she was allowed to remain in the military fighting openly as a woman.
 Jean (Jenny) Cameron of Glendessary raised 300 men and led them to the raising of the Jacobite standard in Scotland on 19th August 1745
 Phoebe Hessel (1713-1821) was born in Stepney and joined the army at the age of 15 served for many years as a private soldier in the 5th Reg't of Foot (or Northumberland Fusiliers) in different parts of Europe including Montserrat and in 1745 at Fontenoy.
 Theroigne de Mericourt commanded the third corps of the army of the Faubourg, during the French Revolution.
  Virginie Ghesquiere was awarded the French Legion of Honor in the 18th century.

Marie Schellinck, a Belgian received the French Legion of Honor and a military pension in 1808
Nadezhda Durova joined the Russian calvary and served with distinction as an officer for nine years disguised as a man. She published a diary called "The Cavalry Maiden"
Sylvia Mariotti served as a private in the 11th Battalion of the Italian Bersaglieri from 1866 to 1879.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Witchcraft IV - notes

Witchcraft -
The facts:
a) early medieval view - belief in witch craft was illegal
b) change in 15th c - lots of reasons
c) waves over next 300 years - total 40,000 - 60,000 dead
d) mostly, but not all, women
e) different patterns in different countries but some parallels - so England versus the continent (but no, it is not that simple either). Give two different examples - Mora and one from Thomas.
f) settles down in 18th c both in practice and with new legislation

DIFFERENCES:
a) religious or secular court
b) evil or deluded
c) if evil, pact with devil (heresy) or simply ill willed
d) kinds of evidence used - and torture or not?
e) individuals or groups
f) burned (heresy) or hanged (felony)

Historical issues
a) different sources give different stories - legislation, trial records, witch hunters' manuals, confessions, forged stories (making Catholics the bad guys), limited focus (make women exclusive victims)
b) different explanations - women got too powerful, the Catholic Church was power hungry and went after heretics and dissenters, enclosures, the protestant churches were paranoid, Christians were punishing wiccans, it was really social tension, it was a result of the Black death, or wars of religion, it was about ideas, or theology, or power, or food shortages, or fear of disease ... (so depending on what you think you check different sources)
c) the end in question - did the Enlightenment and scientific revolution end fear of magic and witchcraft or did they lead parallel lives? Bowker says in her review that "The rise of science does not explain the demise of magic of whatever kind: the two co-exist, and empiricism itself did not become a basic and permanently accepted theory of natural science even in the eighteenth century"
d) used as evidence that the church is evil - but most of the death penalties were in secular courts

Things to decide:
a) what is witchcraft?
b) what is a witch (someone who is deluded or someone who is criminally using power from the devil)?
c) when did it start and when did it end? how do we count high and low points?
d) why did it happen?
e) what were the consequences?

Different stories from different historians:
a) trevor roper
b) Thomas
c) the feminists
d) religious historians
e) current ideas

check out:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/feminist/gibbons_witch.html

Magic - beliefs and practices regarding supernatural powers outside organized religion - helped people cope and manipulate powers to stay safe. Not a religion, not a whole, but a collection of tools and creatures and behaviors. Not initially seen as a threat to the church, because it existed WITH religion. Cunning men (and women) were thought to have special knowledge and sometimes power - medicine with rites and herbs were common, diagnosis of and protection from witchcraft, recovery of lost and stolen goods, and fortune telling. Provided REAL services. - Clashed with church ideas that misfortune was result of divine punishment, and that only God could make it good again.
Popular magic had been there for long, and remained for long [my stories]. Witchcraft was something a bit different - maleficium. Late 15th and early 17th c things got really bad - popular superstition and ecclesiastic fantasy combined to cause a perfect storm. Connected ALL witchcraft with the devil - witches were not merely dabblers in magic, but members of an organized malevolent cult, enemies of god.
Wrightson says - religious zeal basis for witch-hunts and it died down only when secular authorities, judges, stepped in. Spanish Inquisition were among the first, in 1610, and the French Parlement in 1640, abandoned prosecution of this sort of case.
The religious zeal was both protestant and Catholic .... but not in England people say. Authorities in England never fully bought into the central European notions of witchcraft and their laws reflect it. Witchcraft was never prosecuted as a heresy in England - first act in 1542 made it a felony to practice witchcraft for unlawful purposes - law only lasted five years, then disappeared with nothing else in its stead. In 1563 new Act made it a felony to invoke evil spirits and if someone died as a result, execution was the punishment. 1604 Act made it felony to bewitch someone either to death or to injure them - for lesser forms of sorcery imprisonment was the punishment. .. you can see influence of continental ideas in that it is made illegal to dig up bodies for witchcraft purposes, and it was made illegal to feed or consult with an evil spirit. The diabolical connection was still limited, and the crime was primarily seen as antisocial (Thomas). In English trials there are few references to diabolical pacts, no witches Sabbaths or flying and very little sex with the devil. They did had familiars. English trials focused on evildoing. In England trials were rarely instigated from above - no evidence that the authorities wanted a witch hunt, with one exception. Usually individual victims brought issue to trial. They were sporadic and limited. Torture was not used and so no tortured confessions and suspects did not therefor implicate others.Lots of cases in Essex ...
Big spike during last quarter of 16th century - decline after 1620, justices of the peace and assize judges had trouble with evidence (they thought it happened but how could you prove it) and people increasing wondered if it was possible, maybe it was a fantasy brought on by hysteria - and the people who thought they had powers were deluded.
But why the rise? Keith Thomas and Alan McFarland explored the evidence and said - witches were usually elderly and usually women, and they were usually accused of bewitching neighbors, not strangers, and they were usually poorer than their accusers. Scenario: quarrel that ended with witch going away cursing and muttering - victim suffers mishap - talks to friends - witch is accused as cause of mishap. It is possible that the witch used the setup to frighten neighbors.This explains the classic pattern (although there were plenty of exceptions), but it does not explain the timing?
a) loss of the protective "magic" of the medieval church
b) unusual tensions in society and economic distress - - people who had refused charity could shake the responsibility by charging the Other with witchcraft - this has been widely accepted as the sociological explanation
c) then focus on gender, most of the witches were women - Thomas says most of the needy were women ... Wrightson says that one must pause at claiming this was organized repression - certainly it was the case that the association of witchcraft with women came out of misogynist attitudes. Women were seen as morally weaker and more likely to get back at neighbors. But it was not that simple - many of the accusers were women. And conversely, many male juries acquitted suspects. So gender is there - but complicated. Or,as Christine Larner puts it,"witchcraft was not sex-specific, but it was sex-related".
Two questions arise in the English case
a) why were these statutes passed? first two at beginning of new regimes (symbolism? acts passed as part of propaganda of new regime giving legitimacy) - also perhaps political contingency, responding to plots against the monarch? First happened after a plot against Elizabeth where sorcery was supposedly involved and Cecil realized there was not legal recourse. The laws made witchcraft prosecutions possible, but there was no coordinated effort to use them.
b) why so many cases in Essex? 1566, 1582, 1589 saw three celebrity cases that made a big stink and stir - there were groups going on trial rather than individuals and there was lots of publicity.

1645 Matthew Hopkins - witchfinder general
http://histor.ws/hexen/eng/gale-prozes.htm
http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2871/Early-Modern-England/14
http://www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html


Wednesday, January 18, 2012

On Witchcraft III - Lecture

History:

Canon Episcopi (also capitulum Episcopi)  passage found in medieval canon law, first recorded by Regino of Prum in 906,  and incorporated in Gratian's canon law ca. 1140.

Black Death - Plague:

  • 1347 75 million
  • 1352 50 million 
  • The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. According to Biraben, plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671. The Second Pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667.

Johannes Nider, Formicarius (the Ant Hill), circa 1437

Papal Bull, Summis Desiderantes, 1484

 Malleus Malleficarum, 1486

Secular medieval tradition in pagan nations had laws against sorcery. Christians did not believe in such superstitions, as evidenced by Agobard of Lyon, Pope Gregory VII, and canon law - that has a description of the errors of "certain wicked women" (quaedam sceleratae mulieres), who deceived by Satan believe themselves to join the train of the pagan goddess Diana. The text emphasizes that the heretic belief is to hold that these transformations occur in the body, while they are in reality dream visions inspired in the mind.
Then things changed (in some way thanks to St Thomas Aquinas) and evil sorcery and witchcraft became connected with Satan - and with heretical beliefs. It was now claimed that the women were not deceived by, but actually had powers from and were in cahoots with the devil.
In 1320 Pope John XXII authorized the inquisition to persecute witchcraft as a type of heresy. ..."the first real witch trial in Europe," the accusation of Alice Kyteler in 1324, occurred in 14th century Ireland, during the turmoils associated with the decline of Norman control. Trials moved from secular to theological courts. 1450-1750 or so, between 40.000 - 60.000 people (mostly women) were put to death.
The Witchcraft Act of 1735 (9 Geo. 2 c. 5) marked a complete reversal in attitudes. Penalties for the practice of witchcraft as traditionally constituted, which by that time was considered by many influential figures to be an impossible crime, were replaced by penalties for the pretense of witchcraft. 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Lots of different ways of looking at this - consider who was tried and killed and realize women were in the majority, - consider what reasons the accusers had to be angry with the accused and realize they were people on the margins and sometimes people with land disputes, - consider a local or national development and see that in Salem they had lost the charter and had no safe administration, no good rules for how to be, - consider a society scarred by the Black Death and continuing plagues that killed people and animals at will, - consider the religious tensions that became the Reformation and the Wars of Religion and see the need to determine and vilify heretical beliefs, - consider changing gender roles and a new need to restrain female power and determine epistemological hierarchy (who can know),- consider the Ice Age that made the very nature around people unreliable and punishing.


Bibliography:

Barstow, Anne Llewellyn  Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. San Francisco: Pandora, 2004.
Behringer, Wolfgang. Witches and Witch-hunts: a Global History. Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Hinson, "Historical and Theological Perspectives on Satan", Review & Expositor (89.4.475), (Fall 1992).
Hutton, Ronald.  The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991)
..... The Triumph of the Moon (1999)
Levack, Brian. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (2nd ed, 1995)
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1973.
Waite, Gary. Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe.

Explanations:

A Convergence of Psychological and Sociological Explanations of Witchcraft
by Dennison Nash _ Current Anthropology, Vol. 14:5, December 1973 (545-

1. Evans Pritchard (1937) said WC arises out of or expresses social conflict
2. Kluckhohn (1944) argues some psychological conflict resulting from oppressive social conditions

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe by Stuart Clark
Review by: Steve Hindle The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 211-212
What Clark offers is in fact a history of 'witch-hating' (p. ix). Rejecting the
ethnographic tradition that witch beliefs were an exotic and marginal aberration,
he sets out to demonstrate that demonism was coherent and, in its own terms,
rational.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


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Peter Binsfeld's 1592, Tractatus de confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum