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Women played a crucial role in 1488-9 during the war of the Flemish cities against Maximilian of Austria, the regent of count Philip the Fair. They were key figures in communication networks, carrying letters between different cities and their militias. Moreover, as spies they also provided intelligence on the position of enemy armies. This article shows how various women from Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges travelled almost invisibly, alone or in pairs, between towns, and also inside and outside enemy camps. These towns developed a sophisticated communication network that relied heavily on women as messengers or spies. As a result women played a more important role in such military conflicts than is generally assumed.

The authors study the institutionalization of midwife specialization among women in Russia in the period from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. The main sources are legislative acts, clerical documents, as well as reports on the activities of medical institutions and maternity departments. The authors use the approaches of gender history, and the concept of professionalization as developed by E. Freidson. Midwifery was the first area of womens work that was officially recognized by the state. There were three main stages on the way to professionalizing the midwifery profession among women. The first stage (covering the 18th century) is associated with attempts to study and systematize the activities of midwives. The practical experience of midwifes was actively sought by doctors whose theoretical knowledge was limited. The second stage of professionalization (corresponding to the first half of the 19th century) was associated with the normative regulation of midwife work and the formation of a professional hierarchy in midwifery. The third stage (comprising the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century) saw a restriction of the midwives spheres of activity, as well as the active inclusion of male doctors in practical obstetrics and their rise to a dominant position. With the development of obstetric specialization, operative obstetrics, and the opening of maternity wards, midwives were relegated to a subordinate position in relation to doctors. In contrast to the United States and Western European countries, Russia did not have professional associations of midwives. Intra-professional communication was weak, and there was no corporate solidarity. In Soviet medicine, finally, the midwives subordinate place in relation to doctors was only cemented.

This article sheds light on male identities in interwar Belgian Congo by using the colony’s largest palm oil concession as a case study. Based on colonial archives and oral testimonies, it shows how vernacular and colonial understandings of masculinity interplayed and keep on influencing ways to ‘be a man’ in the present. This article is divided into four parts. First, it highlights how vigorous male bodies supposedly constituted entry points in the colonial ‘civilizing mission’. Second, it addresses the convergences between coming-of-age rituals and of palm oil labour as markers of adulthood. Third, it nuances the association of dominant masculinity with brute force by showing how the ‘strongest’ palm oil workers were suspected to use witchcraft. Fourth, it addresses the apparent contradiction between recollection of colonial labour as an experience of hardships and paternalist ‘pampering’.

By looking at the itineraries of specific individual Indian and Swiss actors going back and forth between India and Switzerland during the first half of twentieth century, the book explores the history of cultural relations between both countries. The itineraries studied here are those of Frieda Hauswirth, who searched for ways to contribute to the Indian freedom struggle; of Eva Lombard and Elisabeth Petitpierre, who went to India in order to practice medicine and save souls; of Jakob Urner, a missionary who developed an elective affinity for the Lingayat religious literature; of Selvarajan Yesudian, who teamed up with the esotericist Elisabeth Haich, and taught in Switzerland an idiosyncratic conception of yoga; and of Lizelle Reymond who published a widely read book recounting her encounter with the samkhya master Sri Anirvan., ISBN:978-3-7965-4774-4, ISBN:978-3-7965-4773-7

The social impact of Allied Forces on the Australian home front is central to research on World War II gender relations but is often overlooked in South Australia. The arrival of 20,000 American se...

В статье представлена рецензия на монографию Хелен Раппапорт «Дневники княжон Романовых. Загубленные жизни». Реконструкция биографий дочерей Николая II Ольги, Татьяны, Марии и Анастасии осуществлена через призму «истории детства» и «гендерной истории». Отмечается как методологическая новизна подхода автора книги, так и противоречивость некоторых суждений и выводов. The article presents a review of the monograph by Helen Rappaport ‘The Diaries of the Romanov Princesses. Ruined lives’ [‘The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra’]. The reconstruction of the biographies of the four daughters of Nicholas II was carried out through the prism of ‘childhood history’ and ‘gender history’. Both the methodological novelty of Rappaport's approach and the inconsistency of some of the author's judgments and conclusions are noted.

The article retraces how the notion of cultural singularity in sexuality was constructed and weaponized in the most popular French illustrated periodical of the First World War. It argues that La Vie Parisienne’s sublimation of romantic love, sex, and Frenchness worked as a cultural tactic that, while helping the readership cope with a devastating historical disruption, undermined at the same time claims for social change. The close analysis of works by illustrator Chéri Hérouard uncovers how nationalism and anxieties of sexual dispossession contributed to integrate a fraught notion of women’s sexual consent to a broader claim of cultural superiority. This article provides a critical approach to popular and visual representations of heterosexual and non-conjugal norms of desire, seduction, and sexuality in wartime France. It also offers a historical example of how the racialization and nationalisation of gender relations, discussed as ‘Gallic singularity’ in recent scholarship, trivialises masculine aggression and produces the ambivalence long associated with the notion of women’s sexual consent in France.

Neither archives nor museums are neutral. They reflect particular sets of priorities: those of the institution; the collectors and curators within them; and those of their intended audiences. In th...

The Barros family, has, for centuries, administered the morgado of Real, the chapel of Senhora da Graça and a hospital in the city of Braga that harboured poor women. This hospital, named the Hospital de Santiago and the Hospital das Velhas (hospital for elderly women), was founded in the Late Middle Ages and continued to function until the 19th century. The current study analyses how aid to the poor, in an urban context, served as a catalyser of the prestige of the family that administered it. Using manuscript, printed and iconographic sources, processed by a multidisciplinary methodology, this investigation discusses the main patrimonial, social and symbolic coordinates that allowed the survival of the morgado and of the hospital in the long term., This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under Grant 2020.04746.BD., Esta publicação tem o apoio do Financiamento Plurianual do Laboratório de Paisagens, Património e Território (Lab2PT), Ref.ª UID/04509/2020, financiado por fundos nacionais (PIDDAC) através da FCT/MCTES.

More often than not, a broad-brush approach has been taken in describing the past, and large sectors of society have been portrayed on the basis of simple stereotypes rather than trying to reflect ...

Self-avowedly influenced by the postmodernist critique of nineteenth-century ‘positivism’, Jesse Spohnholz's ambitious and multiple prize-winning 2017 The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition speaks at once to the political and institutional history of the Reformed churches of the Netherlands and northwestern Germany, to the role of archiving practices in shaping historical understanding, and to the nature of historical study. This review offers both an extended synopsis and a critique of the book. While recognizing its considerable achievement, it questions its framing of its findings about the Reformation era with reference to the ‘confessionalization’ debate, its reliance on a prefabricated narrative about archives as instruments of power and marginalization, and its mischaracterizations of post-Rankean historical practice and theory. Implications of the book’s findings for further research into the politics and personalities of the Reformation in the Low Countries are also suggested.

The masculine façade of the music Conservatoire belies the extent to which these establishments fostered close relationships between women. This article analyses the student cohorts of the Paris and St Petersburg Conservatoires in the early twentieth century, to show that women made up a formidable presence and created supportive communities within these institutional frameworks. It argues that these relationships not only facilitated women’s involvement in public cultural life, but also impacted their private experience of music and listening, as illustrated by the close musical bond between sisters and conservatoire alumnae, Lili and Nadia Boulanger.

Scholarship on transnational correspondence networks has until recently tended to focus on men’s intellectual endeavours. While the first phase of feminist scholarship focused on recovery of women’...

The 1920s and 1930s in Mexico were an important moment of transition for women’s sport, as women’s interests in sport as spectators and participants increased, giving rise to social debate. Much of these debates formed part of a broader discussion about the emergence of the ‘modern woman’ or, in the case of Mexico, la chica moderna. By focusing on the representation of the modern woman boxer in Mexican newspapers and popular media, this article analyses the socio-cultural construction of femininity through the discourse of sport in the postrevolutionary context of the 1920s and 1930s. This work considers how authors and publications with close ties to the postrevolutionary regime allocated the modern boxing woman a place within the postrevolutionary project, which provided the project a progressive appeal that argued for a true social equality. However, commentators also went to great lengths to reconcile the transgressive and modern character of women boxers with the state’s more traditional discourses on acceptable femininity and clear limits remained in place for women. Nevertheless, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a remarkable opening up of possibilities for alternative types of femininities in a context that sought to establish a new national citizen in terms of gender.

In this discussion of BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review Philip Benedict reviewed Jesse Spohnholz’s book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 2017). While Benedict praises Spohnholz’s research and contributions as they pertain to the religious history of sixteenthcentury Europe, he criticizes Spohnholz for borrowing from scholarship associated with the ‘archival turn’ and postmodernist critiques of constructivist empiricism. In this response, Spohnholz defends his approach and its relevance for questions about writing the history of the Reformation in the twenty-first century. Spohnholz stresses the shared historical and methodological perspectives between himself and Benedict (and others), comments on the historical significance of his study, and clarifies the book’s intended audiences.

Contains fulltext : 232171.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Convictions for sodomy were rare in eighteenth-century Antwerp. Nevertheless, the scarce trial records offer a fascinating insight into the urban perception of sodomy as a foreign phenomenon. A sodomy trial involving several Dutch migrants infused anxieties about sodomite conspiracies across the city. Although early modern sodomy has mainly been studied from a local or national point of view, this article shows that a transregional perspective regarding the repression of sodomy can shed new light on attitudes towards early modern deviant sexuality. 20 april 2021 19 p.

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the daily life of female workers of the Ishim shoe factory No. 4 during the Great Patriotic War. To study the everyday life of women during the war years, the office documents of the factory and local authorities, as well as documents of personal origin, are used. The study is based on a historical and anthropological approach to the past. Descriptive method and oral history method are applied. The author comes to the conclusion that thanks to the efforts of women, who were the main labor force of the factory, in a short time the evacuated enterprise not only began to function in a new place, but also became a model for other enterprises of the Ishim region. The women not only over fulfilled the plan for sewing shoes, but also fully met the production needs of the enterprise: they prepared peat and firewood organized vegetable gardens and stored vegetables for the factory canteen. In addition, women were actively involved in social work taking care of the evacuees, collecting money, food and warm clothes for the needs of the front. Along with the development of new social roles by women, they retained their traditional responsibilities related to maintaining a home and raising children. Similar transformations in the social behavior of women occurred against the background of a deterioration in living conditions, a reduction in living standards, a lack of nutrition, and complications of the epidemiological situation. With the complication of her social roles, a woman during the war years carried an important social function associated with the creation of a special spiritual atmosphere, simultaneously reconciling with the brutal military reality and maintaining the hope of a return to peacetime

The social composition of women-depositors of Kyiv monasteries is analyzed. The main source – preserved descriptions of the sacristy of the monasteries, which were concluded in the 18th century and contain information about the donations of the second half of the 17th–18th centuries. The author tries to answer the question: who were the women-depositors, what social status did they represent, to which monasteries and what liturgical items were donated? The gender features of sacrifice, social and spatial boundaries of the spread of Kyiv monasteries’ spiritual influences are investigated.It has been established that women donated in Kyiv monasteries together with men, or, more often than not, independently. The main depositors were women nuns, queens or women widows from various social classes. Powerful donationsors were abbesses and nuns of the Kyiv-Voznesensky Florivsky monastery, wives of hetmans, Russian queens and women from noble families. The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, St. Sophia of Kyiv and St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery look elite in terms of the number of donors, which is explained by the concentration of revered shrines and the status of monasteries. Women donated a variety of liturgical items, but more often gave liturgical vestments or individual items, or whole sets; there was also a practice when it was not a ready-made thing that was sacrificed, but, for example, expensive material for its production. Especially high percentage of women donations is recorded in the Kyryl’s Holy Trinity Monastery. Records in the sacristy descriptions of Kyiv monasteries of the 18th century convincingly demonstrate that Kyiv shrines exerted a spiritual influence and were important to women-depositors from Kyiv, the Hetmanate, Slobozhanshchyna and the Russian Empire.Keywords: monasteries, church donation, gender history, Kyiv metropolitanate, Hetmanate, the 17th–18th centuries

In this article, I discuss three central peritexts included in French poet Louise Labé’s Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize, printed by Jean de Tournes in Lyon in 1555: the title page, the royal privilege, and a collection of celebratory poems. Arguing that the Early Modern book provided a space where women authors and their editors could engage with ongoing debates about women and their artistic capabilities, I analyse how the author figure Louise Labé is presented in these peritexts, tying that image to the contents of the book as well as to prevalent views on women authors. Highlighting the critique that a woman who published in print was likely to face, I argue that the peritexts can be connected to specific, sometimes traditional, sometimes unconventional, marketing strategies that correlate to Labé’s poetry and preface. In addition, I highlight the commercial aspects of the book, arguing that the peritexts were used to entice multiple types of readers (and buyers) to invest in the book.

Children were central to Dutch and Belgian colonial projects. Children and youth were the objects of colonial interventions issued by missionaries and officials. However, children could also become actors who produced change in a colonial context. Crucial in colonial policies towards children was the separation of children from their parents, communities and/or culture (‘child separation’) in all kinds of forms – temporary or permanent, far from home or close by, in contact with their own community or cut off from it – and to various degrees of coercion (voluntary, from a situation of dependence, enforced with punishment or violence). Child separation projects could involve adoption, foster parenting, ‘apprenticeships’ serving a household, boarding schools or day schools. It could concern children from the local elite, but also children who ended up on the margins of their own communities or were even bought out of slavery. Child separation was never about education only, but always imposed specific morals and life styles on its subjects as well. It caused profound fault lines in colonised families and communities. For colonial politics, it was key to controlling, influencing and disciplining the colonised population (‘governmentality’). In the case of children of ethnically mixed descent, child separation often involved policing hierarchical racialised boundaries in the colony; in the case of indigenous children, it aimed at transforming the colonised population. Christian missions were pivotal in child separation projects. This special issue, therefore, pleads for a more central place of Catholic and Protestant missions in the analysis of Dutch colonial history, comparable to Belgian historiography. Finally, it is precisely these (missionary) colonial projects, often labeled as ‘soft’ or ‘civilising’, that have passed unnoticed into post-colonial discourses, organisations and practices, such as transnational adoption or surrogacy, and countless development projects in which children, detached from their own family and context, must be ‘saved’. Without proper scholarly attention for Christian missions in colonial history, these traces of the colonial past in the postcolonial present will not be recognised as such. Kinderen stonden centraal in Nederlandse en Belgische koloniale projecten. Kinderen en jongeren waren daarbij het object van koloniaal handelen van missionarissen, zendelingen en ambtenaren, maar zij konden ook zelf actoren worden die in een koloniale context veranderingen veroorzaakten. Cruciaal in deze koloniale projecten was het scheiden van kinderen van hun ouders, van hun gemeenschappen en van hun cultuur (child separation) in allerlei vormen – tijdelijk of voorgoed, ver van huis of dichtbij, in contact met de eigen gemeenschap of volledig daarvan afgesneden – en in diverse gradaties van dwang (vrijwillig, vanuit een situatie van afhankelijkheid, afgedwongen met straffen of geweld). Concreet kon het gaan om adoptie, pleegouderschap, het in huis nemen van werkende ‘leerjongens en -meisjes’, kostscholen of dagscholen. De kinderen zelf waren afkomstig uit de lokale elite, of het waren juist kinderen die in de marge van hun eigen gemeenschappen terecht waren gekomen, of zelfs door missionarissen uit slavernij werden gekocht. De doelstellingen van deze praktijken betroffen nooit alleen onderricht, maar altijd ook het aanleren van een bepaalde levenswijze en moraal. Niet alleen veroorzaakten de scheiding en heropvoeding ingrijpende breuklijnen in gekoloniseerde families en gemeenschappen; voor de koloniale politiek waren deze kinderen de sleutel tot het controleren, beinvloeden en disciplineren van de gekoloniseerde bevolking (governmentality). In het geval van kinderen van etnisch gemengde komaf ging het vaak om het bewaken van de hierarchische geracialiseerde grenzen in de kolonie; in het geval van lokale kinderen meer om het transformeren van de gekoloniseerde bevolking. Van veel instellingen voor opvoeding en onderwijs van deze kinderen vormden christelijke missie- en zendingsorganisaties de spil. In en met dit themanummer wordt daarom ook een lans gebroken voor de integratie van missie en zending in het analyseren van de Nederlandse koloniale geschiedenis, in navolging van de Belgische historiografie. Tot slot zijn het juist deze vaak als ‘zacht’ of ‘civiliserend’ aangemerkte koloniale projecten die ongemerkt zijn overgegaan in postkoloniale discoursen, organisaties en praktijken, zoals transnationale adoptie of draagmoederschap, en talloze ontwikkelingsprojecten waarin kinderen, losgezongen van hun eigen familie en context, ‘gered’ moeten worden. Zonder gedegen wetenschappelijke aandacht voor de rol van christelijke missie- en zendingsorganisaties in de koloniale geschiedenis zullen deze sporen van het koloniale verleden in het postkoloniale heden niet als dusdanig worden herkend.