Suchergebnisse

This book examines discourses around infertility and views of childlessness in medieval and early modern Europe. Whereas in our own time reproductive behaviour is regulated by demographic policy in the interest of upholding the intergenerational contract, premodern rulers strove to secure the succession to their thrones and preserve family heritage. Regardless of status, infertility could have drastic consequences, above all for women, and lead to social discrimination, expulsion, and divorce. Rather than outlining a history of discrimination against or the suffering of infertile couples, this book explores the mechanisms used to justify the unequal treatment of persons without children. Exploring views on childlessness across theology, medicine, law, demonology, and ethics, it undertakes a comprehensive examination of 'fertility' as an identity category from the perspective of new approaches in gender and intersectionality research. Shedding light on how premodern views have shaped understandings our own time, this book is highly relevant interest to students and scholars interested in discourses around infertility across history

Of special interest to readers of this journal is Stjern0's discussion of the growing functional convergence since World War II between a social democratic tradition of solidarity rooted in class interests and Christian democratic traditions rooted in theologies of personhood and concern for neighbor. Overall, the author's admirable effort to respect both the inherent complexity of his topic and the disparate but overlapping discourses of social theory, political ideology, and Christian ethics in which solidarity has been couched results in an account marked more by careful distinctions than by bold generalizations.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Note to Reader -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- Historiography, Sources and the Spectre of Prester John -- Structure -- Chapter 2: All the King's Treasures -- Relics, Garments and Craftsmen-Ethiopian Missions to Italy at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century -- Strangers in Ethiopia, ca. 1398/1399-1401 -- A Venetian Summer, 1402 -- King Dawit's Treasures, 1402-1403 -- Fact and Fiction in Rome, 1403-1404 -- Roads, Merchants and 'the Good Wine': Venetians in Ethiopia in the Early Fifteenth Century -- Lost in Translation at the Council of Constance, 1416-1418 -- Chapter Conclusion -- Chapter 3: The Sons of Dawit -- First Contacts with the Kingdom of Aragon -- An Interfaith Embassy to Valencia, 1427-1428 -- Spending a Fortune to Request Aid from Ethiopia, May 1428 -- Fear and Intrigue in Cairo, Early 1429 -- Five Ethiopian Pilgrims Walk Into a War, Summer 1430 -- Swapping Allegiances from France to Ethiopia, 1432/1433 -- The Abbot, the nƎguś and the Council of Florence, 1439-1444 -- Ethiopia, Rome and Aragon-And the Fall of Constantinople -- Chapter Conclusion -- Chapter 4: The Rule of the Regents -- Rome, Ethiopia, Jerusalem, and Two Very Different Men from Imola, 1478-1484 -- An Ethiopian Mission to Cairo and a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mid-1480-Spring 1481 -- An Ethiopian Mission to the Heart of Latin Christendom, 1481-1482 -- A Minuscule Franciscan Mission in Ethiopia, 1480-1484/85 -- The Lord and the Letter-Carrier -- Ethiopian Performative Diplomacy and Latin Missionary Zeal in the Early 1480s -- Ethiopia and Portugal, 1487-1527 -- Early Portuguese Emissaries to Ethiopia -- Ǝleni's Mission to Portugal, 1508-1509 -- Ethiopian Delegates to Portugal (1509-1515) -- The Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia and aṣe Ləbnä Dəngəl's Last Peacetime Mission (1520-1527) -- Chapter Conclusion.