Past Imperfect (Journal)
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Book Review: Prescott, Cynthia Culver. Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory.: (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019)
No full text“Where do these warrish hands and heart of Venus come from?” Statius’ subversion of Ovidian militia amoris in the Thebaid
No full textStatius’ Thebaid has long been recognized as a highly allusive epic, but one system of its allusions— that which engages with Latin love elegy—has received less study than others. To address this oversight, I argue in this article that Statius makes marked references to techniques and tropes of Ovidian elegy in his use of love language throughout the Thebaid. After cataloguing a range of the epic’s Ovidian elegiac intertexts, I argue that Statius sustains an allusion to Amores book one in Thebaid book five. In Thebaid book five, Hypsipyle provides an inset narrative of Venus’ intervention in Lemnos: under the influence of the spurned love goddess, the Lemnian women slaughter the entire male population. In my reading, Hypsipyle’s narrative represents a characteristically Statian subversion of his literary models. In book one of the Amores, Ovid develops the ‘warfare of love’ (militia amoris) trope as a tongue-in-cheek revision of both previous epicists’ and elegists’ more morose and austere poetics. Statius, conversely, recasts the light and humorous elements of Ovid’s militia amoris into his own aesthetic mould, whereby love becomes as horrifying and destructive a force as war in the cosmos of the Thebaid. That is, Statius mirrors Ovid’s own techniques of subversive allusion to mark his poetics also as both indebted to and an innovating of elegiac precursors. But in Statius’ case, the world of elegaic amor becomes graver rather than lighter, more severe than humorous. In sum, Statius’ subversive allusions to Ovidian elegy in his Thebaid, particularly in book five, transform Ovid’s levis love (Am. 3.1.41) into its most monstrous counterpart
Book Review: Shipley, Tyler. Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination.: (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2020)
No full textHygiene, Morality, and Power: The Linen Shift as a Colonial Tool in an Ursuline Convent in Seventeenth-Century Quebec
No full textIn seventeenth-century colonial New France, an Ursuline convent was established with a mission to convert Indigenous girls to Christianity and assimilate them into French society. The linen chemise, a simple T-shaped undergarment worn across Europe, played an essential role in the nuns’ efforts towards the goals French colonization. Laden with cultural ideas of the body, cleanliness, and purity, the chemise was necessary to make a person Christian as well as culturally and physically French. While ultimately unsuccessful in establishing the physical and cultural uptake of the chemise or French culture in Indigenous communities, the efforts of the Ursuline nuns contributed to the groundwork for imperial justification and future attempts at assimilation of the Indigenous peoples of Canada
Book Review: Bridger, Emily. Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa\u27s Liberation Struggle.: (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, James Currey, 2021)
No full textConstructing the Infant Body: The Intervention of the Educated, Male Physician in Eighteenth-Century Infant Diet
No full textDrawing on medical advice literature, this paper examines the cultural history of the body in infancy in eighteenth-century England. This period saw the increasing professionalization of the medical field, particularly regarding children’s health, as an emerging profession of educated, male physicians sought to establish their exclusive authority on the medical market. As England’s medical market of the time was largely unregulated, these educated physicians competed with apothecaries, midwives, and female nurses for paying customers. Physicians argued that the disorderly, undisciplined nature of the infant body was incongruent with Enlightenment virtues, and therefore required a greater degree of medical management. Emerging out of this discourse were popular advice books which emphasized preventative measures in already-healthy infant patients. They were authored by a growing profession of educated, medical experts and were addressed to a lay audience of parents and child caretakers. This paper examines three immensely popular pamphlets authored by three physicians, Thomas Beddoes, George Armstrong, and William Cadogan. All three emphasized in their tracts the importance of maternal breastfeeding to the infant diet, citing Enlightenment ideals, humoral theory, and even the supernatural elements of breastmilk to support this claim. To bring the child body firmly under the control of the medical establishment, they argued that uneducated, lay practitioners, who were overwhelmingly female, received no formal education in the sciences and thus possessed little understanding of the nuances and complexities specific to the infant body. Parents were also incapable and deficient, at least to some degree, in the formal knowledge necessary to prevent illness in their infant children, and thus should rely on the physician’s expertise regarding the care of the infant body
Book Review: Denis, Jeffrey. Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations. : (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2020)
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Examining Women’s Roles in the Publication of Medical Texts During The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
No full textMany obstacles prevented women from fully participating in medical professions throughout Early Modern England. Women could not learn about medicine at formal institutes, including Oxford and Cambridge, since contemporary scholars believed that women were incapable of the abstract thinking necessary to practice the science. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Royal College of Physicians prosecuted female medical practitioners for what they deemed to be unsanctioned activity in the medical field. Writing and publishing medical texts was also a difficult profession for women to pursue. Although women’s ability to produce documents of this nature improved for a time as a consequence of the decrease in print censorship following the English Civil War (1642-1651), male-authored books published on the subject continued to question their knowledge publicly.
Despite these numerous obstacles, females did participate in medical publications. Women evaded the Royal College of Physicians’ sanctions and participated in the world of medical publications through disclosing their treatments to male-physician authors, publishing almanacs, and using metaphors to conceal the medical advice in their texts. In three sections, this article highlights various ways women were involved in the publication of medical texts. The first component will examine the gender dynamics of medical publishing, focusing on how male authors utilized women’s knowledge to help sell their own texts. The second two sections examine how women were involved in medical literature in their own right and the strategies they employed to participate in medicine while simultaneously avoiding public scrutiny