443 research outputs found
The Female Experience of Epidemics in the Early Modern Low Countries
Recent literature has argued that women in parts of the early
modern Low Countries experienced high levels of ‘agency’ and
‘independence’ – measured through ages and rates of marriage,
participation in economic activities beyond the household, and the
physical occupation of collective or public spaces. Epidemic disease
outbreaks, however, also help bring into focus a number of female
burdens and hardships in the early modern Low Countries, possibly
born out of structural inequalities and vulnerabilities obscured from
view in ‘normal times’, and which is supported by recent demographic
research showing heightened adult female mortality compared
to male during epidemics. For women, these included
expectations of care both inside and outside the familial household,
different forms of persecution, and social controls via authorities
from above and internal regulation within communities from
below – though these were also restrictions that women of course
did not always passively accept, and sometimes violently rejected
Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema
Films illustrate 2 ways that epidemics can affect societies: fear leading to a breakdown in sociability and fear stimulating preservation of tightly held social norms.
The first response is often informed by concern over perceived moral failings within society, the second response by the application of arbitrary or excessive controls from outside the community
Review of Ronsijn, W. (2014) Commerce and the Countryside: The Rural Population’s Involvement in the Commodity Market in Flanders, 1750-1910
Collective identities and transnational networks in medieval and early modern Europe, 1000-180
Better Understanding Disasters by Better Using History
This paper argues that the understanding of causes and effects of hazards and shocks could be furthered by making more explicit and systematic use of the historical record, that is, by using ‘the past’ as a laboratory to test hypotheses in a careful way. History lends itself towards this end because of the opportunity it offers to identify distinct and divergent social structures existing very close to one another on a regional level and the possibility this creates of making comparisons between societal responses to shocks spatially and chronologically. Furthermore, the basic richness of the historical record itself enables us to make a long-term reconstruction of the social, economic and cultural impact of hazards and shocks simply not possible in contemporary disaster studies material
Cosmic censorship of smooth structures
It is observed that on many 4-manifolds there is a unique smooth structure
underlying a globally hyperbolic Lorentz metric. For instance, every
contractible smooth 4-manifold admitting a globally hyperbolic Lorentz metric
is diffeomorphic to the standard . Similarly, a smooth 4-manifold
homeomorphic to the product of a closed oriented 3-manifold and and
admitting a globally hyperbolic Lorentz metric is in fact diffeomorphic to
. Thus one may speak of a censorship imposed by the global
hyperbolicty assumption on the possible smooth structures on
-dimensional spacetimes.Comment: 5 pages; V.2 - title changed, minor edits, references adde
The Sex-Selective Impact of the Black Death and Recurring Plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349-1450
Although recent work has begun to establish that early modern plagues had selective mortality effects, it was generally accepted that the initial outbreak of Black Death in 1347-52 was a ‘universal killer’. Recent bioarchaeological work, however, has argued that the Black Death was also selective with regard to age and pre-plague health status. The issue of the Black Death’s potential sex selectivity is less clear. Bioarchaeological research hypothesizes that sex-selection in mortality was possible during the initial Black Death outbreak, and we present evidence from historical sources to test this notion.Collective identities and transnational networks in medieval and early modern Europe, 1000-180
History and the Social Sciences
Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one “laboratory” in which hypotheses developed by sociologists, economists, and even natural scientists can be explicitly tested, especially using dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. As one example to demonstrate this, a case is made for the stimulating effect of “disaster studies.” Historians have failed to interact with ideas from disaster studies, not only because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because of a twin conception that medieval disaster study bears no relation to the modern
The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries
Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled database of adult burial information for 293 rural localities and small towns in the seventeenth‐century Low Countries, explicitly comparing mortality crises against ‘normal’ years. In contrast to expected results, we find no clear female mortality advantage during mortality spikes and, more to the point, women tended to die more frequently than men when only taking into account those years with very severe raised mortality. Gender‐related differences in levels of protection, but also exposure to vectors and points of contagion, meant that some of these female advantages were ‘lost’ during food crises or epidemic disease outbreaks. Responses to mortality crises such as epidemics may shine new light on gender‐based inequalities perhaps hidden from view in ‘normal times’ – with relevance for recent work asserting ‘female agency’ in the early modern Low Countries context
Epidemics, public health workers, and ‘heroism’ in cinematic perspective
During COVID-19, acts of ‘heroism’ – particularly by ordinary people ‘from below’ – have been foregrounded, prompting complicated ethical issues in the public health context. By analysing examples from a large corpus of films about epidemics across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, this article investigates how cinema has represented public health workers. We find that the public health worker in epidemic-related films tends to be elite or an authority figure with expertise, often male – whose personal burden and sacrifice goes unrecognised by others, or even directly challenged ‘from below’. However, although the public health worker as ‘ordinary hero’ rarely features, the ‘human’ side of epidemiologists, physicians and bacteriologists – through either personal redemption and a return to more humble roots, or recognition of personal error, questioning of official regulations and authorities, and eccentric and unorthodox behaviour – makes these ‘elite’ figures appear more ordinary, bridging the gap between the two
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