Women's History Commons^™

Elite Women In The Mediterranean 31 Bc – 1380 Ad: An Investigation Into Female Agency, Identity, And Patriarchy Across Classical And Christian Paradigms, Julia Maurer

Capstone Showcase

This paper explores the responses of elite women to patriarchal regimes across the Classical Pagan and Medieval Christian paradigms in the Mediterranean from 31 BC to 1380 AD. While the current historiography acknowledges the radical differences between the two worldviews fundamental to the core values of Western Civilization, an investigation of three women that can be taken to be emblematic examples of the periods in which they lived reveals a striking continuity in the nuanced social roles available to women. This continuity contradicts expectations of significant changes reflective of this revolutionary paradigm shift.

I utilize Julia Augusti, Vibia Perpetua, and …

La Princesse Adrosis Fille De L'Empereur Hadrien: Sainte Et Martyre, Laila Fares

Showcase of Faculty Scholarly & Creative Activity

Le présent ouvrage est l’ensemble de leçons hebdomadaires que j’enseignai il y a quatorze ans. Le vif intérêt que témoignèrent mes étudiants à la princesse Adrosis m’avait encouragé à poursuivre l’histoire en prose, au-delà du petit poème que j’avais composé en 2003 au jour de sa fête célébrée au synexaire copte le 18 Hathor. Les questions de compréhension et de réflexion qui suivent chaque leçon peuvent servir dans un but didactique ou ludique. Vous pouvez en faire une activité de loisir ou d’enseignement pour l’édification et le développement spirituel de vos étudiants. L’histoire de la princesse Adrosis relève de l’histoire …

P28. Canadian Jewish Women And Girls On The Homefront, 1939-1945, Jennifer Shaw

Western Research Forum

Background: The following presentation explores the roles and experiences of Canadian Jewish women on the Canadian homefront during World War Two. Despite knowing much about the lives of women in this time period in general, we do not know much about the experiences of particular groups, and how they differed from the majority of women.

Methods: Using first-hand accounts gathered from Canadian Jewish women, as well as archival materials, this presentation explores the different ways Jewish women and girls participated in the war effort and experienced the war years.

Results: While acknowledging that some of their experiences …

Research And Study Of Fashion And Costume History Spanning From Ancient Egypt To Modern Day, Kaitlyn E. Dennis Miss

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Through a generous donation to Morehead State University, research has been conducted on thousands of slides containing images of artwork and artifacts of historical significance. These images span from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the inaugural dress of every first lady of the United States. The slides are in the process of being recorded and catalogued for future use by students in hopes of furthering academic comprehension and awareness of the influence of fashion and costume history through the ages. Special thanks to the family of Gretel Geist Rutledge, faculty mentor Denise Watkins, as well as the Department of Music, Theatre, and …

Daughters Of The Sun: "The Birth" (An Excerpt), Megan Lynn

Scholarly and Creative Works Conference (2015 - 2021)

“You have never heard of me before. You have never heard of me, but my name has come out of your mouth thousands of times.”

So begins my novel, Daughters of the Sun, the story of Jesus’s twin sister, Alleluia. Using the narrative framework seen in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Alleluia tells her story over one night—Saturday into Sunday morning—in an appropriated apartment facing a church. She weaves into her story another tale of women who have lived in shadows cast by the men around them, women whom history chose to vilify—Lilith, Adam’s first wife who was written out of …

The Dichotomy Of Pudicitia, Amber L. Harvey

Young Historians Conference

The lives of women in the Roman Republic were incredibly restricted and controlled by their male counterparts, yet key counters to this restriction are often overlooked, mainly that of a woman’s pudicitia. Pudicitia was a defining moral quality that encompassed state, familial, sexual, and other duties, a woman held in society. These qualities, are shown in the mythical Rape of the Sabines, and allow female participation in the Conflict of the Orders and the defiance of the Vestal Virgins. These allowances are countered by aspects of pudicitia that restricted rights and participation, ultimately yielding a system that paradoxically encouraged …

The Catholic Church: Shaping The Roles Of Medieval Women, Ashley N. Just

Young Historians Conference

The paradoxical modern expectation for women to remain virgins while simultaneously being sexual objects for men to enjoy as they please is a result of the ideology of the Catholic Church in Medieval Europe. Christian doctrine at this time presented an image of women as inherently weak and prone to sexual sin as a result of Eve's Original Sin. This weakness then led to the expectation that women would remain chaste and subservient, which in turn inhibited the power and influence women possessed Medieval society. Many of the issues modern feminism fights to remedy result from these historical Christian ideas.

'My Happiness Overturned': Mourning, Memory And A Woman's Writing, Rachel Greenblatt

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the late seventeenth century, Beila Perlhefter mourned her seven children in the introduction she wrote to a Yiddish ethical work written (at her urging, she tells her readers) by her husband, Ber. While the autobiographical information provided in the introduction is sparse indeed, it shares certain generic characteristics with other self-writing by early modern Jews from Prague, including Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller's "Megillat eivah." At the same time, each voice is a different voice, all the more so the rare instance of a woman's voice, and this short piece defies easy categorization.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Sefer …

Two Cases Of Apostasy In Dubno In 1716 Jews, Christians, And Family Life, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This text relates a trial of two Christian women who accepted to Judaism that took place in the city of Dubno in eastern Poland in 1716. The text presented here comes from a collection of primary sources published in Kiev [now Kyiv] in 1869, as part of effort by scholars at the time to collect and publish primary source materials about Ukraine. The collection is called Arkhiv Iugo-zapadnoi Rossii, or The Archive of South-Western Russia, and contains documents from the South-Western part of Ukraine.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Two Cases of Apostasy in Dubno in 1716

“The First Duty Of Nature Is To Preserve Life” A Jewish Woman’S Plea For Divorce In Late 18th-Century Trieste, Lois Dubin

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The presentation discusses a letter from Relle [Rachele] Morschene (1770-1844) of Trieste to Chief Rabbi Raffael Natan Tedesco, written in the throes of her three-year long effort to extricate herself from her marriage to husband Lucio Luzzatto (1755-1801). From 1793 to 1796, Morschene pursued separation and civil divorce through the Habsburg courts at the same time as a Jewish religious divorce. Indeed, she was one of the first European Jewish women to seek and obtain a civil divorce. Her legal situation was novel because Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy were among the first to be subjected to civil marriage regulation …

The Woodstruck Deed The Documentation Of Accidental Defloration Among The Jews Of Early Modern Italy, David Malkiel

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The “woodstruck” (mukat ets) deed, a Hebrew document that officially records the accidental defloration of a young girl, appears in sixteenth-century Italy, in a block of deeds recorded by Jewish notaries in Rome, in a rabbinic responsum and in the record book of the Padua community. Prior to that, there is no record of such an instrument anywhere in Jewish history and literature, despite the fact that the frequency of accidental defloration must have been a constant. Moreover, the registers of the Jewish notaries of sixteenth-century Rome contain over a hundred such deeds for the sixteenth century alone. The appearance …

Jewish Women And Economic Encounters With Christians, Debra Kaplan

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

R. Yair Hayyim ben Moses Samson Bacharach (1638-1702) is well-known for his knowledge of halakha and Kabbalah. Over the course of his lifetime, he served as the rabbi in several locations in the Holy Roman Empire. In these two responsa, Bacharach deals with one of the halakhic problems surrounding women’s trade with non-Jews. Such trade inevitably caused women to enter into seclusion (yihud) with non-Jews, especially since according to Jewish law, the presence of the non-Jew’s wife did not alleviate the prohibition of seclusion with a non-Jew.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Havvot Yair, Responsum 66
• Havvot Yair, …

Unequal Opportunities The Economic Possibilities Open To Jewish Women In 18th Century Poland-Lithuania, Adam Teller

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The following texts present an image of economic opportunities, and gender roles in Jewish society in eastern Europe. The first text is an 18th-century supplication by a Jew, Bunim Szlomowicz, against his wife; the second is a 1751 decree by the Council of Lithuania regulating women's roles in trade.

An Early 17th Century Ketubah From Sefer Tikun Sofrim By Rabbi Itzhak Zabakh, Ruth Lamdan

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In Jewish Law, the halakha, there is an extensive importance to the accurate scribing of legal documents (shtarot). Any slight deviation from the standard formula of one word, or even of one character, might invalidate a formal bill or cancel a personal or commercial obligation. The importance bestowed on each word encouraged many famous rabbis to write and edit books of standard legal bills, and Hebrew scribes used to copy samples of bills for their personal use in the future. Qualified scribes made exemplary collections of documents for their students, and young trainees would copy such samples – as well …

Marriage And Networkbuilding, Claudia Ulbrich

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In eastern France Jewish marriages are well documented in the eighteenth century. Following a decree by Louis XIV in 1701 that Jewish marriage contracts had to be deposited with notaries within 15 days of marriage, these documents were registered with increasing frequency in the entire French-German region. Registration became generally obligatory in that time, so that we have large amounts of documents both for Christian as for Jews. Historians have never fully analyzed these files. Jean Fleury, who was prompted by genealogical interests, surveyed the 8500 items in the Metz archive, and compiled 2021 marriage contracts from the seventeenth and …

Pinkas Shamash Altona (1766-1767), Elisheva Carlebach

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Elisheva Carlebach's presentation discusses excerpts from the Pinkas Shamash Altona, providing a glimpse on an aspect of Jewish life that usually remained obscured--illegitimate children born to Jewish domestic servants, and the servants themselves, held very marginal status in the community. One of the pertinent issue was death. If they died the responsibility for buying them was contested between many different parties.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Pinkas Shamash Altona (1766-1767)

Click here for a video presentation.

Jewish Marriage In Christian Eyes, Yaacov Deutsch

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation deals with a Christian description of early modern Jewish marriage rituals. The text is a translation of a chapter on Jewish marriage from Johannes Buxtorf's "Synagoga Judaica" or "Jewish Synagogue" (1603).

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Synagoga Judaica (The Jewish Synagogue) by Johannes Buxtorf (1603)

Ordering Early Modern Marriage, Elisheva Baumgarten

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In this presentation, Elisheva Baumgarten discusses marriage rituals as recorded by a seventeenth-century Jewish author of a book of customs (sefer minhagim), which became popular in the early modern period. Baumgarten compares Yuspa of Worms' work with materials from the medieval period. She also places Jewish marriage rituals within the context of non-Jewish cultures of the time.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• The Custom book of R. Juspa of Worms (17th century)

Click here to view the video

Emw 2006: Gender, Family, And Social Structures, Emw 2006

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 2006 Early Modern Workshop on the topic of “Gender, Family, and Social Structures” addressed a spectrum of topics about the transformation of the concept and form of family in general, and of Jewish family in particular in the early modern period.

The workshop took up questions of: marriage rituals, as represented by early modern (Elisheva Baumgarten) and Christians (Jacob Deutsch), and marriage contracts (Ruth Lamdan), responsibilities of the Jewish community to women and out-of-wedlock children (Elisheva Carlebach), challenges to marriage and marital propriety (Debra Kaplan on rabbinic responses to Jewish women’s encounters with Christian men; David Malkiel and Kenneth …