Writing doctors, body work and body texts in the French Revolution

This paper explores the construction of the identities of Philippe Curtius and his protégé Marie Grosholtz, known as Madame Tussaud, as providers of medical and health services, body workers, and entrepreneurs in key works that charted their experiences during the volatile period of the French Revolution. As purveyors of entertainment that derived its attraction from perceived close rendering of the likenesses of noteworthy individuals, modellers in wax required attentive discernment of bodies, or at least the capacity for imaginative descriptive skills, establishing a professional language for body work. Moreover, Tussaud's account explicitly foregrounds complex gender dynamics as a young woman interacting with the bodies of male and female clients. This essay explores how important eighteenth-century gendered conceptualizations of body work are revealed in the body texts produced in this period

Deathly Hallows Swedish-style : The gloves of Charles XII

[Extract] Can objects touch us in the classroom without being touched? How can we learn from the way that they touched others in the past as they were handled, visualized, and displayed? How do the haptic and the affective come together in teaching about emotions in history through material culture? In recent years, a new approach, ‘history of emotions,’ has shaped historical analysis. Although there are many differences among the humanities and social science scholars who explore this field, broadly speaking they share an understanding that emotions, as they are conceptualised, expressed and performed, are culturally, socially and historically-specific.26 That means that what we think an emotion is, what name we give the physical and intellectual experience we have, and how we give voice or action to it is shaped by the cultures we live in and has changed over time, sometimes in very obvious ways and others more subtle. Extending from this, some scholars consider how emotions are conveyed or expressed through objects, and as objects move across time and space.27 We can explore this last point in more detail through a pair of gloves that once were worn by the King of Sweden. Charles XII (1682-1718) was an eccentric and divisive monarch who ruled through much of the Great Northern War (1700-21) (Figure 1). On 11 December 1718 (new style), he was inspecting siege fortifications at a fortress, Fredriksten, on the border with Denmark when he was shot through the head and killed instantly. Who was responsible for this dramatic regicide remains a dynamic, popular talking point today.2

Encountering Karl : Willem de Vlamingh and the VOC on Noongar Boodjar

[Extract] This essay examines key feelings that Dutch East India Company (VOC) crews attached to fires they saw in the southwest of the Australian continent, and understood to be the work of Indigenous peoples. It considers both their own feelings and those they projected onto Indigenous populations. To do this, I use a case study of Willem de Vlamingh’s expedition of 1696–97, analyzing documents that conveyed perceptions of the fires and fire culture that the crews encountered on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar (Land or Country), the lands in and around what is now occupied by the city of Perth, Western Australia.[2] On this expedition to explore the region, VOC crews saw Indigenous peoples but reported they had not been able to meet with them. However, this essay argues that, through fire, Indigenous and VOC peoples were interacting, and the VOC records contain interpretations of these interactions

Devoted politics: Jesuits and elite Catholic women at the later sixteenth-century Valois Court

This essay analyses how elite women at the sixteenth-century French court interacted with the Jesuits, in the context of the spiritual and political ambitions of all participants. Focusing particularly on the dynamic relationship between Catherine de Medici and the Jesuits, contextualized by the experiences of other elite women and men, it explores the period from the 1560s to the end of the 1580s during which Catherine occupied a powerful role and when individual members of the Society of Jesus rose to prominence at the court. To date, the scholarship of elite Catholic politics in which the Jesuits were involved has prioritized the activities of France’s monarchs, Charles ix and Henri iii, and its leading men in dynasties such as the Gonzaga-Nevers and Guise. Re-reading many of the same sources with an eye to the contribution and activities of women offers the potential for a broader narrative

Evangelizing Korean women and gender in the early modern world : The power of body and text

This monograph examines how Korean women and men came to engage with Catholic missions during Europe’s late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a profoundly volatile period in East Asian history during which political, cultural, and social disruption created opportunities for new interactions in the region. It analyzes the nature of that engagement, as women and men became both subjects for, and agents of, catechizing practices. As their evangelization, experience of faith, proselytizing, and suffering were recorded in mission archives, the monograph explores contact between Catholic Christianity and Korean women in particular. Broomhall demonstrates how gender ideologies shaped interactions between missionary men and Korean women, and how women’s experiences would come to be narrated, circulated, and memorialized

Temporality, emotion, and gender in Leonardo da Vinci's conceptualisation of natural violence

This chapter explores how the Italian engineer and artist Leonardo da Vinci conceptualised forms of violence in nature, to nature, or by nature. In using the term ‘natural violence’, this chapter aims to capture Da Vinci’s broad-ranging consideration of such violence related to the natural world upon which he reflected across his work and to which he gave varied and ongoing responses over the course of his life. It argues that his perception of temporality, emotion, and gender were important aspects that helped Da Vinci make sense of natural violence. In doing so, the chapter suggests that while Da Vinci may have been radical in some aspects of thinking, in others he was representative of his era, and that investigating his conceptualisation of natural violence brings these distinctions into sharper focus

Australian universities, generic skills and lifelong learning

The concept of lifelong learning implies a cycle where the learner contributes prior learning into a new learning environment and sees that learning upgraded. In recent years, a range of internal and external pressures have encouraged Australian universities to identify the meta or generic skills embedded in tertiary study. Using a content analysis of relevant university policy documents, this study assesses how the Australian higher education sector has presented this discussion through the notion of ‘graduate attributes’ and then analyses the implications of this conceptual transition. This article argues that the shift from a notion of generic skills to graduate attributes both reinforces and encourages universities to concentrate their participation in lifelong learning at one particular end of the cycle. This study suggests that, whilst informal experience is increasingly incorporated into university admission processes and even into credit for courses, progression towards a more equitable and accessible higher education sector remains patchy at best

La représentation de soi dans les mémoires féminins du début de l’époque moderne

Cet article examine la manière dont l’identité féminine s’est construite au début de l’ère moderne, la place que tient l’identité collective dans la définition de soi ainsi que les techniques utilisées dans la représentation de soi. On s’y intéresse notamment à des textes appartenant à différents genres à vocation autobiographique (mémoires, testaments) et que nous ont laissés deux femmes, Charlotte Arbaleste et Renée Burlamacchi, qui sont nées toutes deux dans des familles protestantes.This essay explores how two early modern Huguenot women, Charlotte Arbaleste and Renée Burlamacchi, developed representations of themselves in two different autobiographical moments. Both Arbaleste and Burlamacchi left documentation of their lives in family memoirs and testaments. By exploring how these women pursued self-representation in these texts, this essay examines the ways in which early modern women’s identity was constructed, the role of collective identities in defining the self, as well as the development and techniques of self-representation in different documentary forms

Frogs and Feeling Communities:A Study in History of Emotions and Environmental History

This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human–frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relation with the living planet. In tracing human–frog relations over time we tease apart the complex historic relationships between cultural frameworks, scientific expectations and conventions, and the texts and images emerging from these contexts, which operate explicitly or implicitly to train and discipline the emotional selves of human adults and children