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From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism—popular with women—emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture, women, who had surrendered their souls to divine love, were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. This book asks how practitioners of exorcism were able to distinguish demonic from divine possessions. Drawing on unexplored accounts of mystical schools and spiritual techniques, testimonies of the possessed, and exorcism manuals, it examines how early modern Europeans dealt with this dilemma. It shows that the personal experiences of practitioners trumped theological knowledge. Worried that this could lead to a rejection of Catholic rituals, the church reshaped the meaning and practices of exorcism, transforming this healing rite into a means of spiritual interrogation. In its efforts to distinguish between good and evil, the church developed important new explanatory frameworks for the relations between body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and the natural and supernatural.

Renowned in her day for her scholarship and eloquence, Isotta Nogarola (1418–66) remained one of the most famous women of the Italian Renaissance for centuries after her death. And because she was one of the first women to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated republic of letters, Nogarola served as a crucial role model for generations of aspiring female artists and writers. This volume presents English translations of all of Nogarola's extant works and highlights just how daring and original her convictions were. In her letters and orations, Nogarola elegantly synthesized Greco-Roman thought with biblical teachings. And striding across the stage in public, she lectured the Veronese citizenry on everything from history and religion to politics and morality. But the most influential of Nogarola's works was a performance piece, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, in which she discussed the relative sinfulness of Adam and Eve—thereby opening up a centuries-long debate in Europe on gender and the nature of woman and establishing herself as an important figure in Western intellectual history. This book will be a must read for teachers and students of Women's Studies as well as of Renaissance literature and history.

At a time when women were generally excluded from scholarly discourse in the intellectual centers of Europe, four extraordinary female letterate proved their parity as they lectured in prominent scientific and literary academies and published in respected journals. During the Italian Enlightenment, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, Diamante Medaglia Faini, and Aretafila Savini de' Rossi were afforded unprecedented deference in academic debates and epitomized the increasing ability of women to influence public discourse. This book reveals how these four women used the methods and themes of their male counterparts to add their voices to the vigorous and prolific debate over the education of women during the eighteenth century. In the texts gathered here, the women discuss the issues they themselves thought most urgent for the equality of women in Italian society specifically and in European culture more broadly.

First published in 1690, this book made its author the spokesperson for the art of midwifery at a time when most obstetrical texts were written by men. More than a technical manual, it contains descriptions of obstetric techniques of midwifery and its attendant social pressures. The author's visibility as a writer, midwife, and proponent of an incipient professionalism accorded her a status virtually unknown to German women in the seventeenth century. Translated here into English, the book contains birthing scenes, sworn testimonials by former patients, and a brief autobiography.

Born Françoise d'Aubigné, a criminal's daughter reduced to street begging as a child, Madame de Maintenon (1653–1719) made an improbable rise from impoverished beginnings to the summit of power as the second, secret wife of Louis XIV. An educational reformer, Maintenon founded and directed the celebrated academy for aristocratic women at Saint-Cyr. This volume presents the dialogues and addresses in which Maintenon explains her controversial philosophy of education for women. Denounced by her contemporaries as a political schemer and religious fanatic, Maintenon has long been criticized as an opponent of gender equality. The writings in this volume faithfully reflect Maintenon's respect for social hierarchy and her stoic call for women to accept the duties of their state in life. But the writings also echo Maintenon's more feminist concerns: the need to redefine the virtues in the light of women's experience, the importance of naming the constraints on women's freedom, and the urgent need to remedy the scandalous neglect of the education of women. In her writings as well as in her own model school at Saint-Cyr, Maintenon embodies the demand for educational reform as the key to the empowerment of women at the dawn of modernity.

This book offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—it demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, the book devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the “Turkish envoy” Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d’Agoty. The book contributes to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

Born to a noble family in Tournai, Marie Dentière (1495–1561) left her convent in the 1520s to work for religious reform. She married a former priest and with her husband went to Switzerland, where she was active in the Reformation's takeover of Geneva. Dentière's Very Useful Epistle (1539) is the first explicit statement of reformed theology by a woman to appear in French. Addressed to Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister of the French king Francis I, the Epistle asks the queen to help those persecuted for their religious beliefs. Dentière offers a stirring defense of women and asserts their right to teach the word of God in public. She defends John Calvin against his enemies and attacks the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Her Preface (1561) to one of Calvin's sermons criticizes immodesty and extravagance in clothing and warns the faithful to be vigilant. Undaunted in the face of suppression and ridicule, this outspoken woman persisted as an active voice in the Reformation.

We tend to think of terror as a bad thing, but this was not always the case. In eighteenth-century France the word “terror” had largely positive connotations. God was said to instill terror in the wicked, and rightly so, and theologians even saw terror as the proper stance for all human beings in the face of the Almighty. Monarchs who took the role of God’s deputies on earth likewise sought to impart terror, and to call a king “the terror of his enemies” was a way of praising him. Judicial theorists justified the public punishment of criminals by claiming that it brought terror to would-be criminals. Plays that prompted feelings of terror in their audiences received the praise of critics, and writers on aesthetics lauded terror as a prerequisite of “the sublime” in art. Doctors believed that terror could cure such illnesses as malaria, rabies, epilepsy and gout. In other words, terror was considered a good thing. All that changed with the French Revolution. The revolutionaries called for terror as “the order of the day,” but following the fall of the Committee of Public Safety in July 1794, detractors of that regime used the word “terror” to summarize the discredited regime. At that point the word itself lost its positive connotations, but in the larger history of the western world, that was not so long ago.

Scarcely anyone was as involved in both the natural and the political concerns of the eighteenth century as Georg Forster (1754–94), one of the most dynamic figures of the Enlightenment. In Forster, the two most significant coordinates of his time converged: He gained an inestimably rich experience of nature on his voyage around the world with James Cook. And he was at the center of political events when, inspired by the French Revolution, he declared the “Mainz Republic” in 1793. Indeed, “nature” and “revolution” intersect spectacularly in the thoughts and deeds of this brilliant writer, naturalist, explorer, translator, illustrator, and key revolutionary.

We live in a material world—our homes are filled with things, from electronics to curios and hand-me-downs, that disclose as much about us and our aspirations as they do about current trends. But we are not the first: the early modern period was a time of expanding consumption, when objects began to play an important role in defining gender as well as social status. This book reconstructs the material lives of seventeenth-century Romans, exploring new ways of thinking about the meaning of things as a historical phenomenon. Through creative use of account books, inventories, wills, and other records, it examines early modern attitudes toward possessions, asking what people did with their things, why they wrote about them, and how they passed objects on to their heirs. While some inhabitants of Rome were connoisseurs of the paintings, books, and curiosities that made the city famous, the book shows that men and women of lesser means also filled their homes with a more modest array of goods. It also discovers the genealogies of certain categories of things—for instance, books went from being classed as luxury goods to a category all their own—and considers what that reveals about the early modern era.

This book reconstructs the case of two reformed prostitute nuns (“convertite”) who fled their convent in Bologna, Italy, in 1644 and whose garroted corpses were discovered in a cellar fifteen months later. The investigation of the crime in Bologna and Rome, at Pope Innocent X’s behest, was intended to implicate his enemy, sometime Bolognese papal legate, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, who eventually fled to France. This detailed micro-history of crime and punishment in seventeenth-century Italy examines life strategies among marginal figures (prostitutes, nuns, maidservants, mercenary soldiers, bandits) and “new men” attempting to succeed at the papal court without benefit of exalted birth. It illuminates investigative strategies and papal justice, from extrajudicial evidence gathering, to apprehending perpetrators, to witness interrogations and confrontations, to uses of torture. It recreates the lives of the fugitive nuns against the realities of female poverty and prostitution in seventeenth-century Bologna and puts faces on the least reputable of convent women, who rarely appear in scholarship on female monasticism, though most Catholic cities had convents of convertite.

Who are the familiar spirits of classical culture and what is their relationship to Christian demons? In its interpretation of Latin and Greek culture, Christianity contends that Satan is behind all classical deities, semi-gods, and spiritual creatures, including the gods of the household, the lares, and penates. But this book argues that the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance had a more nuanced and perhaps less sinister interpretation of these creatures or spiritual bodies. The form of the body relies on the spirits' knowledge of their human interlocutors' pasts. But their core trait is compassion, and sometimes their odd, eerie arrivals are seen as harbingers or warnings to protect the people. It comes as no surprise then that when spiritual beings distort the natural world to communicate, it is vital that one begins to listen.

Inspired by a series of visions, Francisca de los Apóstoles (1539–after 1578) and her sister Isabella attempted in 1573 to organize a beaterio, a lay community of pious women devoted to the religious life, to offer prayers and penance for the reparation of human sin, especially those of corrupt clerics. But their efforts to minister to the poor of Toledo and to call for general ecclesiastical reform were met with resistance, first from local religious officials and, later, from the Spanish Inquisition. By early 1575, the Inquisitional tribunal in Toledo had received several statements denouncing Francisca from some of the very women she had tried to help, as well as from some of her financial and religious sponsors. Francisca was eventually arrested, imprisoned by the Inquisition, and investigated for religious fraud. This book contains what little is known about Francisca—the several letters she wrote as well as the transcript of her trial—and offers modern readers a perspective on the unique role and status of religious women in sixteenth-century Spain. Transcribed from more than three hundred folios, it chronicles the drama of Francisca's interrogation and her spirited but ultimately unsuccessful defense.

Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–74), a woman artist and scientist, surmounted meager origins and limited formal education to become one of the most acclaimed anatomical sculptors of the Enlightenment. This book tells the story of her arresting life and times, in light of the intertwined histories of science, gender, and art that complicated her rise to fame in the eighteenth century. Examining the details of Morandi's remarkable life, it traces her intellectual trajectory from provincial artist to internationally renowned anatomical wax modeler for the University of Bologna's famous medical school. Placing Morandi's work within its cultural and historical context, as well as in line with the Italian tradition of anatomical studies and design, the book uncovers the messages contained within her wax inscriptions, part complex theories of the body and part poetry.

In a time when the Pauline dictum decreed that women be silent in matters of the Church, Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724) was a pioneering author of religious books, insisting on her right to speak out as a believer above her male counterparts. Publishing her readings of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation, as well as her thoughts on theology in general, Petersen and her writings created controversy, especially in orthodox circles, and she became a voice for the radical Pietists—those most at odds with Lutheran ministers and their teachings. But she defended her lay religious calling and ultimately printed fourteen original works, including her autobiography, the first of its kind written by a woman in Germany—all in an age in which most women were unable to read or write. Collected in this volume are Petersen's autobiography and two shorter tracts that would become models of Pietistic devotional writing.

This book describes the emergence of London as a global city between 1549 and 1689, as an important population, economic and cultural center that was particularly transformed by its contact with Asia in this period. This process is usually described as one that occurred in a national or Atlantic World context and extended outward in a proto-imperial fashion. But in this period, maritime Asia and the empires and trading cities associated with it played a driving role in defining globally-oriented institutions and historical changes in London. These partial shifts influenced by and partially translated from the world of Asian trade included the emergence of the joint-stock corporation, developing understandings of national autonomy, the increasing importance of history and law, the image of absolutist authority by the monarch, and the revolutions in science and politics in the late seventeenth century, which are often seen to mark the birth of modernity. The methodology employed in the book uses translation of both Asian and European sources from this encounter as well as the history of cartography, the history of science, and the history of the book and manuscripts in order to better understand historical processes of linguistic exchange. New archival sources discovered in the course of research by the author include the Selden Map of China.

Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. This book retells six episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories the book recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this work is based on research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome. The book contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp.

Starting in the late twelfth century, the governments of Italy’s newly-formed city-republics rejected imperial measurement standards and created new local ones, displaying them in their main squares. This book argues that this deceptively simple gesture—almost entirely overlooked by historians—triggered a series of revolutionary practices that not only redefined the cultural landscape of medieval and early modern Italy, but also laid the foundations of today’s ideas about precision, reproducibility, and truth. This book is thus both a sociopolitical history of a crucial component of medieval material culture, and a quest for the foundations of objectivity. By looking at the emergence of measurement standards—the ways they were conceived, made, guarded, enforced through the population, and unquestioningly followed—this book exposes power’s labors in shaping and merging with the real.

Read by Protestants and Catholics alike, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–94) was the foremost German woman poet and writer in the seventeenth-century German-speaking world. Privileged by her social station and education, she published a large body of religious writings under her own name to a reception unequaled by any other German woman during her lifetime. But once the popularity of devotional writings as a genre waned, Catharina's works went largely unread until scholars devoted renewed attention to them in the twentieth century. This book provides translations for the first time into English three of the thirty-six meditations, restoring Catharina to her rightful place in print. These meditations foreground women in the life of Jesus Christ—including accounts of women at the Incarnation and the Tomb—and in Scripture in general. The selections give the modern reader a sense of the structure and nature of Catharina's devotional writings, highlighting the alternative they offer to the male-centered view of early modern literary and cultural production during her day, and redefining the role of women in Christian history.

Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century—including the forced conversion of its native Muslim population. Written by one of many coerced Christian converts, this letter lodges a clear-sighted, impassioned protest against the unreasonable and strongly assimilationist laws that required all converted Muslims in Granada to dress, speak, eat, marry, celebrate festivals, and be buried exactly as the Castilian settler population did. Now available in an English translation, the account is an example of how Spain's former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown.