European History Commons^™

Jane Austen: A Study On The Influences, World, And Character Of An Eighteenth-Century Novelist, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Jane Austen is one of the most influential authors in history and her works are regarded as timeless classics. Her ability to harness the motif of the strong, independent woman in a time when society wanted women to have neither attribute is incomparable in contemporary works. This article examines Austen's life and the variety of factors (family, religious, intellectual, historical) that molded her mind and character and thus informed the characters she created and the stories she crafted.

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Testimony, Violence, And Silence: An Examination Of Agamben And His Critics, Yagmur Uygarkizi

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This paper investigates the difficulties faced by survivors of atrocities in testifying. I work on the case of female victims of domestic torture as reported by Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald. The starting point is Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz with his discussion on Primo Levi’s paradox and the testis/superstes/auctor distinction. I build on his nuances while arguing that he has not looked enough into power dynamics that render one speechless. “Unspeakable violence” refers simultaneously to incapacity and not being allowed to speak. Pain renders the victim speechless; perpetrators distort language and speak over survivors. Victims are often not allowed …

Cultivation, Conflict, And Consumption: Food Systems In Syria, 1920–1946, Sara Pekow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Syria during the French Mandate using food as a primary unit of analysis. The exploration of food pushes this project beyond the boundaries of political and diplomatic histories of Syria during the French Mandate, bringing forward the hidden voices of the nonelite. Nonelites are often not visible in archives, but their absence in most written sources permits us to ascertain their experiences in studying the materials that comprised their everyday lives. The sources consulted for this work include memoirs, print media, and state archives, to name a few.

Each chapter of this dissertation follows a different link …

Seeking Margaret Baker: Identifying The Author Of Three Manuscript Receipt Books, Kimberley G. Connor

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This paper uses recipe contributors named in three early modern manuscript receipt books (Sloane MS 2485, Sloane MS 2486 and Folger V.a 619) to identify the author as Margaret Baker, daughter of Richard Baker the Chronicler (c.1568-1645) and Margaret Mainwaring (died c.1652). A familial connection is also made to Wellcome MS 212. The Margaret Baker example is used to argue for the necessity of identifying a broader range of receipt, or recipe, book writers in order to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of recipe book production, and their social context. In the case of Margaret Baker, additional information about …

In Search Of Systemic Liberation: Black Feminist Activism Amongst French Women Of African Descent In Contemporary France, Jordan Thomas

Theses - ALL

"In Search of Systemic Liberation: Black Feminist Activism amongst French Women ofAfrican Descent in Contemporary France" examines the activisms of Isabelle Boni-Claverie, Assa Traoré, and the anti-racist and feminist collective, Lallab. In so doing, this thesis examines how the collective of each challenges France's narrative around race, belonging, and national identity. Through the analysis of the works by Boni-Claverie, Traoré, and Lallab, as well as the analysis of the responses from French media and French politicians, this thesis examines the ways in which these activists' political ideology and organizing pushes against France's national narrative of color-blind universalism in the present-day. …

Love And Romance In Early Modern British Literature, Sophia Szeneitas

Senior Honors Projects

This paper seeks to describe and analyze the way in which themes of love and romance were presented in literature in early modern Britain, and how those may differ from or be similar to romantic themes in the media of today. The works being analyzed include plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, as well as some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A few different lenses will be explored, including the interaction that love could have with the societal power structure and hierarchy present within the literature (such as the ways in which someone being the lover of a powerful person might …

By The Power Vesta-Ed In Me: The Power Of The Vestal Virgins And Those Who Took Advantage Of It, Elena M. Stanley

Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Honors Projects

Vestal Virgins were high ranking members of the Roman elite. Due to the priestesses’ elevated standing, Romans made use of their inherent privileges. Through analyses of case studies from ancient authors and archaeology, I identify three ways Romans wielded Vestal power: familial connections, financial and material resources, and political sway. I end by exploring cases of crimen incesti, the crime of unchastity, which highlight all three forms. The Vestals were influential women who shared access to power in different ways. The Vestals were active participants in the social and political world of Rome.

Invisible Yet Free: Sapphic Relationships In Late 19th Century Europe, Penelope Van Batavia

Student Academic Conference

Sapphic relationships, described as romantic relationships between two women, were able to proliferate without the watchful eye of society in late 19th-Century Europe due to many factors, including the lack of importance European society felt women had. While not entirely able to pronounce their relationships in public, these women were often able to operate somewhat publicly in three main types of common or “accepted” sapphic relationships. These include intimate friendships, “mother-daughter” models, and hetero-passing relationships. Since historical research on sapphic relationships before the 1970s was almost non-existent (beyond the chastising of such relationships) a number of women and queer academics …

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

(Witch) Crafting Identity: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of The Dutch National Identity Through Women In Haunted History, Hallie Kamosky

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This autoethnographic study analyzes the presentation of women in haunted history in order to dissect the construction of the Dutch national identity. Through a personal narrative experience, the art, museums, tourist enterprises, and physical locations that constitute the city of Amsterdam are put in conversation with one another in order to draw out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies in the Dutch narratives of progress. Firstly, the Spin Huis and the ghost story connected to it are juxtaposed to the City of Amsterdam’s narrative in order to draw out themes of sexual exceptionalism at the expense of foreign bodies. Next, the Amsterdam …

“Hush Ma Cailín”: Irish Women And Egalitarian Nationalism, Velma Tomasova Lockman

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In October 1997, the members of the Army Executive of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who favored an end to the decades-long insurgency against British rule in the occupied six counties of Ireland outmaneuvered and forced the resignations of those who supported continuing the war. Among those forced to resign was the one woman on the Army Executive. She and her comrades would coalesce around Bernadette Sands McKevitt as the dissidents prepared to fight on under the banner of the Real Irish Republican Army while the majority of the insurgents laid down their arms. The Continuity Irish Republican Army simultaneously …

Portrait Of Same-Sex Desire: Lesbian (Mis)Representations In Nineteenth-Century French Art, Jessica N. Mummert

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

In late nineteenth-century France, lesbianism became a heightened topic of interest due to scientific, social, and political discourse surrounding female sexuality. From this discourse stemmed a small but significant outpouring of lesbian artworks by male artists. Rendering the lesbian as a hypervisible, hypersexual figure for men to project their desires and fears onto, these artworks communicated concerns over sexuality, morality, feminism, class, and gender roles. Traditionally, historiography on this topic tends to focus on one mode of lesbian representation at a time or discusses lesbian art en masse. This scholarship has highlighted some different representations and the social circumstances that …

Virility And Defeat: Masculinities In Italy Between Fascism And The Sexual Revolution, Davide Giuseppe Colasanto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is the history of how masculinity evolved in a postfascist western European country. Militaristic virility was a core tenet of fascist Italy. World War Two weakened it profoundly, as men’s and women’s conceptions of their own sexual identities were fundamentally reshaped by violence and defeat. At the same time, consumer culture, exemplified by American GIs and expanding continuously through the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged the emergence of a new kind of man, only for this type, too, to be contested in turn in the wake of the New Left rebellions of 1968 and through the tumultuous 1970s. In all …

Brigid Of Kildare: The Saint Who Got A Facelift, Aimee Hunt

Student Research

On the outskirts of Papal authority, early medieval Ireland created its own Christian identity separate from other European nations closer to Rome. Saint Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of Ireland, played important yet problematic roles in that identity. After her death, the church began to alter her history. Being a female bishop, performing the first recorded abortion, and having both men and women within her monastery, Brigid had trodden on the male-dominated system in a way that few women had. Deemed unacceptable but having already been sainted, the Catholic church gave Brigid a holy facelift.

British Literature I, Justin Shaw

Syllabus Share

What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to have an identity? This course serves as an entry point to the study of early British literature and its historical contexts. We examine texts written from the 7th to the 17th Centuries that comprise a portion of what we call British literature. This survey engages poetry, prose, and drama that reimagine the complexities of intersectional identity, render the nation as part of a global stage, and challenge conventions of sexuality and gender. It traces early texts written by and about people on the margins of “Britishness” and "Englishness" such …

Colonial Markets, Consumers, And Trade: A Comparative Analysis Of Historic Ceramics From The Bluefields Bay Area, Westmoreland, Jamaica, Lacy Risner

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The ceramic assemblages from a British colonial settlement in Bluefields Bay, Jamaica, provide a unique window into the market availability, exchange routes, and consumption patterns of the eighteenth century. This study compares the historic ceramics collected from two sites in Bluefields Bay to one another and to other intra-island (Jamaica), intraregional (Lesser Antilles), and international (North America) colonial and postcolonial sites to reveal patterns of individual and global ceramic consumption and distribution in the emergent capitalist networks and markets of the colonial era. Integrating small British colonial sites into the networks of other more extensive studies focusing primarily on plantations …

Jane Anger Her Protection For Women And The Emergence Of A Radical Female Voice In Late Sixteenth Century England, Ashley M. Wessel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how women authors responded to masculine discourses of dominance in late sixteenth-century England. Directly, it concentrates on the pamphlet Jane Anger her Protection for Women, written in 1589 and published under the pseudonym Jane Anger. I argue Anger’s pamphlet was a radical voice within Elizabethan print culture which lends a view into gender politics of the time in which this piece was produced. I also argue that though Anger’s target audience was the gentlewomen of England, she crafted her pamphlet for a broad audience that included any literate man or woman across social station. The importance …

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose

The Hilltop Review

In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …

Medieval Infertility: Treatments, Cures, And Consequences, Zia Simpson

The Forum: Journal of History

Since the first civilizations emerged, reproductive ability has been one of the most prominent elements in assessing a woman’s value to society. Other characteristics such as beauty, intelligence, and wealth may have been granted comparable consequence, but those are arbitrary and improvable. Fertility is genetic, and for centuries it was beyond human control. Among the medieval European nobility, fertility held even greater power. The absence of an heir could, either directly or indirectly, bring about war, economic depression, and social disorder. Catholicism provided a refuge by allowing barren women to retain their hopes, while simultaneously enriching Rome’s coffers. Other women …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …

«Cuida Tu Alma Y Tu Cuerpo Por Dios Y La Falange»: Women’S Education And La Sección Femenina In Franco’S Spain, Madeleine Fontenay

College Honors Program

My thesis exploration is on La Sección Femenina and its diffusion of female cultural guides and shaping of female education in the early francoist period, from 1939 to 1959. The Sección Femenina and its field offices published work in many facets of women's lives to influence and reeducate women or their values and place. The contrast of rhetoric and reality gives insight into the values and upbringings of generations of Spaniards. By setting the female figure as the foundation of their francoist society, the Sección Femenina held immense cultural power. I am approaching the topic from an educational perspective, focusing …

The Political, The Personal, And The Personified: 18th Century British Political Caricature Art And The Formation Of The British Empire’S Identity, Sarah Johns

History Honors Papers

An image is often capable of communicating a number of things to a viewer, and political caricature in the eighteenth-century British metropole is one clear example of this. Political caricature became a useful tool for the wealthy—especially white men—to engage in discussions about the power of the British Empire as it continued to expand and grow in strength in comparison to other European Empires at the time. Even so, with the coming of the American conflict, things changed. No longer could these men be sure of what a British identity entailed. A family fractured, changing gender norms, evolving concepts of …

A British Health Seeker In Southern California: Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936), Molly Mcclain

History: Faculty Scholarship

In the late nineteenth-century, health tourists travelled the globe in search of relief for tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and other ailments for which the medical profession had no cure. Some sought the mountain air of the Swiss Alps while others headed to the French and Italian Riviera. A smaller, more eclectic group made their way to San Diego, an up-and-coming tourist destination that promised plenty of sunshine, fresh air, and a mild, dry climate thought to be well-suited to damaged lungs and aching joints. Among them was the best-selling British novelist Beatrice Harraden who wrote several books about Southern California, including …

Women’S Advocate Or Racist Hypocrite: Gertrud Scholtz-Klink And The Contradictions Of Women In Nazi Ideology, Mary C. S. Frasier

Student Publications

The Reichsfrauenführerin, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, led the National Socialist Women’s League from 1934 until she went into hiding in 1945. During her career in the Nazi Party, she created a female focused sector of the party that promoted pronatalist propaganda, discouraged women from engaging in politics, and urged women to only perform gender-suitable work. In contradiction to her message, Scholtz-Klink was the highest-ranking female political figure and a divorcee, who regularly chose her political career with the Nazi Party over her duties in the private sphere. Although she had little to no political power in the inner circle because of her …

Precarious Manhood: Adolescence And Group Rape In Late Medieval Europe, Michelle Armstrong-Partida

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Sexual assault, through coercion or violence, was omnipresent at every level of medieval society and perpetrated by males from all socio-economic backgrounds. This article argues that a specific type of sexual violence—group rape—committed by two or more individuals, was a phase of men’s social development. It explores the connection between adolescence and sexual aggression to show that collective rape was a feature of male youth culture used a form of recreation to gain sexual experience, forge bonds with peers, and publicly prove masculinity as adolescents transitioned from childhood to adulthood. Many young males first learned to rape in groups before …

Consumerism And Pride: The Fate Of Paris’ Marais “Gayborhood”, Christina M. Csensich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the 1980s the Marais neighborhood in Paris, France, became a haven for queer people, specifically gay, white men, filled with queer-owned and queer-centric businesses. By the year 2020, however, these businesses had been priced out by name-brand international corporations. In the 1990s, French television commercials and programs would not speak the word ‘homosexual,’ even when a character was openly queer. By the 2010s, companies regularly featured queer people and gay pride imagery and slogans in their advertising. The queer community in Paris has a unique relationship with the consumer economy, one that ties aspects of queer identity directly to …

The Effects Of Victorian Circulating Libraries On The Conventions Of Society, Kaitlyn M. Clary

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

As an era that is oftentimes categorized as one of the most prudish in British history, it is commonplace to see the Victorian Period as a time that imposed strict moral codes onto people of all classes, genders, and ages. Although the 18th century proved to be quite lenient with the manner in which social behavior was controlled, the 19th century proved to be an era of tension between the social order and individual desire, particularly for the middle and upper classes. With the aid of the Industrial Revolution, many governments found it essential to utilize the newly innovated printing …

A Civil Society: The Public Space Of Freemason Women In France, 1744–1944, James Smith Allen

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

A Civil Society explores the struggle to initiate women as full participants in the masonic brotherhood that shared in the rise of France’s civil society and its “civic morality” on behalf of women’s rights. As a vital component of the third sector during France’s modernization, freemasonry empowered women in complex social networks, contributing to a more liberal republic, a more open society, and a more engaged public culture.

James Smith Allen shows that although women initially met with stiff resistance, their induction into the brotherhood was a significant step in the development of French civil society, including the promotion of …