Legitimate Offspring Research Articles

Supposititious Children and Athenian Civic Identity

ABSTRACT: Supposititious children may be defined as children smuggled into households and then presented as legitimate off-spring. This article considers the sources that refer to such children in the Classical and Hellenistic periods at Athens. It explores the underlying concern of the male citizen that these children might be enrolled in the citizen population. It explains that this anxiety was tied to the possible contamination of their imagined pure bloodlines, a contamination they believed threatened the legitimate operation of the social, cultural, and political mechanisms of the city.

The Sudanese Medical Education in the Light of Flexner Report

Medical education as a profession is a legitimate offspring of Flexner’s report in 1910. It strived to excel in preparing future doctors and increasing the competency of medical practitioners. We provide a scientific critique of Flexner’s report, displaying its merits and shortcomings and shedding a spotlight on Sudan’s medical education milestones and its current strive for excellence and innovation in curricula designing, accreditation, graduate competencies, staff professional development, and quality improvement. Since the publication of this inspiring study, a global effort has been launched to improve the quality of health system policies and health professions’ competency through education. All stakeholders now seek fundamental reform in medical education in Sudan to improve its quality and trustworthiness. Based on this study, our impost does not necessarily propose following its footsteps but instead evaluates its stimulating role in planning and intervention.

Viešas reikalas? Bylos dėl impotencijos XVII–XVIII a. Vilniaus ir Žemaitijos katalikų konsistorijose

Matter of Public Concern? Impotence-Related Cases in the Catholic Consistories of Vilnius and Samogitia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Since the time of Paul the Apostle, Christians regarded marriage as a medium in which a couple’s legitimate offspring are born and which prevents the risk of fornication (Lat. fornicatio). With the development of canon law, the concept of conjugal debt (Lat. debitum conjugale) was defined in the middle of the twelfth century, which stated that upon marrying, a man and a woman undertook to have sexual relations with each other. At the same time, theologians and canonists debated about the essential condition for marriage: whether it was consent (Lat. consensus) or consummation of marriage via sexual intercourse (Lat. consummatio). In this context, various sexual pathologies that interfered with a couple’s sexual life were treated not only as a medical but also as a legal problem affecting the continuity and validity of marriage. In Catholic canon law, the terms used to refer to the sexual disorders causing difficulties in marriage were “impotence” (Lat. impotentia) or “frigidity” (Lat. frigiditas). These terms, although not gendered, were nevertheless most often used to describe men’s physiological problems. In the ninth century, impotence was divided into natural, permanent, and temporary, the latter thought to be caused by magic (Lat. maleficium). The decisions of the popes collected in Decretales (Liber Extra) of Pope Gregory IX, the most important collection of medieval canon law, defined modus operandi of the Church in dealing with impotence-related cases. Only permanent impotence could become legal grounds for declaring a marriage null and void; if the disorder was temporary, the couple had to live together for three years and attempt to consummate marriage. The very nature of the condition had to be proven by a specialist examination or a witness testimony, and in this respect, the impotence-related cases were rather a definitive example of institutional intervention in a seemingly very private sphere. In the Catholic consistories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, impotencerelated cases were perhaps the rarest category of all marital litigation. In the surviving sources of the seventeenth-eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts, it was possible to find data on ten such cases, of which seven were examined. Due to the scarcity and chronological inconsistency of the data drawing generalising conclusions is problematic, nonetheless, it is possible to observe certain trends and to reveal aspects that are relevant from the point of view of micro-history. All bar one of the cases involved male impotence, and five out of seven resulted in the decisions declaring the marriages null and void. The analysis of case materials clearly reveals an aspect of publicity characteristic of this type of cases that had evolved in canon law since the Middle Ages, namely, third-party inspections. It was the expert insights of women or doctors that had a decisive influence on the decisions on whether to annul the marriage or to order the spouses to stay in it. This rather unwanted limelight may have precluded many of the cases from ever reaching the courts. Keywords: Impotence, ecclesiastical courts, Catholic Church, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, canon law.

Morálne zásady manželov v Augustínovom spise De bono coniugali

The treatise of Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo, intituled De bono coniugali presents the unique dogmatist and at the same time moralistic view on the topic of marriage, which did not have, at the time, the analogy in the patristic literature. In this paper we focus on the Saint Augustine’s apology of the marriage. In centre of our interest will be the moral principles of the married couples issued from the main characteristic rudiments of the marriage defined by our bishop of Hippo that are used in the catholic Church almost without any changes also in nowadays. The marriage as the union of man and woman was from the beginning viewed as the base of the human society of any religion. Also the pagan Rome esteemed a lot the family and the spouses procreating and raising the children for the fatherland. The Christianity brings to the marriage the new aspect by giving to it the character of the sanctity and inviolability. The marriages were united with the goal of the procreation of the legitimate offspring but its absence, according Saint Augustine, did not make the obstacle of the sanctity and the purpose of the marriage. The Church in the confrontation with the pagan customs and traditions, or the sinful concupiscence of the man, well maintained the observation of the sacrament of the marriage, which provides with the new content. That is why the marriage became the sacred union based on the norm of the inviolability, the equality of both spouses, the procreation of the offspring and mutual fidelity. By theses rules the Church helped the women to gain the more dignify position in the society than it given by the roman legislative.

Imagining Domesticity in Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares and Don Quijote

This article discusses the role of the home in both Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote and his Novelas ejemplares. The first half of the article addresses the relationship between the idea of wandering and the idea of home, showing that multiple characters understand Don Quijote's vagrancy as the key manifestation of his madness. Moreover, the knight's homelessness connects him to another wandering character: the Morisco Ricote. A historical and textual understanding of home and homelessness thus opens an interpretive space, one that registers Don Quijote's and Ricote's inability to wander as emblematic of the frustrated promise that modernity presented to Spain. Moving on to the Novelas ejemplares, we delineate in El celoso extremeño the identification of the private sphere with patriarchal values of honour, wealth, sexual control and legitimate offspring, and how these are undermined by the representatives of the public sphere. The same is shown to hold in four other stories as well.

A Study on Marital Quality of Couples from Urban Area

The last two decades has witnessed noticeable changes in the concept of marriage. For many years academic psychologists had not been interested in research on marital relationship. The changes in various aspects of society influence the basic determinants of marriage incessantly. Thus, the outcome is the interest in researchers escalating in the aspects of love and marriage day by day.Though, it is widely believed that love is the fundamental base of marriage but it is also true that marriage is socially, ritually recognized union and legal contract between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between them. In The History of Human Marriage (1922), Edvard Westermarck defined marriage as a more or less durable connection between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring. Later he rejected his earlier definition and defined marriage from different viewpoint in 'The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization' ( 1936). The anthropological handbook (1951) defined marriage as a union between man and woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners.In other words marriage is the foundation of the family, which in turn is the fundamental building block of the society. Previous research has found the associations between marital status and social support (Pugliesi & Shook, 1998). The definition of marriage varies culture to culture. According to Cherlin (2004), the cultural meaning of marriage also changed through deinstitutionalization, where marriage is based on personal choice and self-fulfillment through mutual social responsibility and roles. On the other hand, Hindu doctrine prohibits youth participation in spouse selection and considers the virginity of bride-to-be the most essential qualification for marriage (Pothen, 1989).Marital quality is defined as global evaluation of the marriage (Fincham & Bradbury, 1987), including positive and negative aspects of marriage like support and strain; (Burman & Margolin, 1992; Fincham, Beach, & Kemp-Fincham, 1997; Slatcher, 2010), attitudes, behaviors and interaction patterns (Bradbury, Fincham, & Beach, 2000) etc. According to Filsinger ( 1998), quality or marital quality is often used as synonym for adjustment but refers more to detached evaluation of the characteristics of the relationship. Briefly, it refers to the overall level to which individuals have lit together in smooth functioning dyad. Some longitudinal studies done by Beach & O'Leary ( 1993a, 1993b) and Fincham, Beach, Harold, & Osborne ( 1997) indicate that marital dissatisfaction predicts increases in depressive symptoms over time. Marital satisfaction predicts global happiness, above and beyond other types of satisfaction (Glenn & Weaver, 1981); predicts psychological well-being and physical health (Drigotas, Rusbult, Wieselquist, & Whitton, 1999); and may serve as buffer to stressful life events (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006; Treboux, Crowell, & Waters, 2004). Correspondingly, low quality marital bonds are predictive of depression (Beach & O'Leary, 1993) and marital dissolution (Huston et al., 2001).There are many predictors of stability and satisfaction in marriage. Among the various possibilities explored by researchers, one's spouse's personality and living conditions, the effect of autonomy and relatedness on marriage, the Empty Nest Syndrome, as well as types of premarital relations effects the marital satisfaction. Other factors which may influence the marital quality, relationship satisfaction as well as well-being of couples are love attitude and intimacy, relationship threatening attitude, emotional security and insecurity, family influence etc.Romantic love is deemed an important part of marriage. Many individuals view romantic love as basis to marry (Dion & Dion, 1991) and its disappearance as grounds to terminate marriage (Simpson, Campbell, & Berscheid, 1986). …

Romanticism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism

Examples from Charles Darwin, especially his tacking between different forms of temporality that enabled an integration of human experience and geological immensity, and John Tyndall, with his all-encompassing vision of a mechanical and energetic universe, show the sense in which Victorian scientific naturalism replicated in important respects the Romantic sensibilities of a Humboldt or a Goethe, for whom the natural world represented a self-sufficient unity. There was no ontological gap between Mind and Nature for scientific naturalism any more than there had been for Romantic sensibilities. Reason was what resulted from human nature, and human nature was reason. Nature red in tooth and claw, the terrible sublimity of scientific naturalism, was Romanticism's legitimate offspring.

Indian marriage laws and mental disorders: Is it necessary to amend the legal provisions?

Byline: Choudhary. Narayan, Mridula. Narayan, Deep. Shikha, Shivendra. Shekhar Marriage has been, since ancient times, one of the most important social institutions in all societies and it forms the basis of civilization and social structure. Marriage is said to be a contractual agreement that formalizes and stabilizes the social relationship which comprise the family.[sup][1] The anthropological handbook “Notes and Queries (1951)” defined marriage as “a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners.”[sup][2] Leach offered a list of 10 rights associated with marriage, with specific rights differing across cultures, which are: *To establish a legal father of a woman's children *To establish a legal mother of a man's children *To give the husband a monopoly in the wife's sexuality *To give the wife a monopoly in the husband's sexuality *To give the husband partial or monopolistic rights to the wife's domestic and other labor services *To give the wife partial or monopolistic rights to the husband's domestic and other labor services *To give the husband partial or total control over property belonging or potentially accruing to the wife *To give the wife partial or total control over property belonging or potentially accruing to the husband *To establish a joint fund of property–a partnership–for the benefit of the children of the marriage *To establish a socially significant “relationship of affinity” between the husband and the wife's brother.[sup][3] In our country, marriage is regarded as an important and sacrosanct event in an individual's life, and everyone is supposed to get married and have a family so that he can continue his progeny. Marriage is essential not only for begetting a son to discharge his debt to the ancestors but also for performance of other religious and spiritual duties. For every persons, who has a daughter, marrying off the daughters when they achieve the marriageable age is regarded as one of the most sacrosanct religious duty. For Indian women, marriage is one of the most important aspects of her life, and the social status of the women enhances after getting married, whereas remaining unmarried after a certain age is stigmatizing for her.[sup][4] Parents often cough up their life savings, take loans or dispose of their immovable properties to arrange substantial dowry to marry off their daughters.[sup][5] Divorce is not generally acceptable in our society. After marriage, there is even a stronger social and moral compulsion to continue the relationship despite facing difficulties/problems in the marriage.[sup][4] Marriage, Mental Disorders, and Indian Legislation Major mental disorders are listed both as preconditions of marriage and as grounds for divorce. Under Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, conditions in respect to mental disorders (Section 5(ii)), which must be met before the marriage is solemnized, are as follows: *Neither party is incapable of giving a valid consent as a consequence of unsoundness of mind *Even if capable of giving consent must not suffer from mental disorders of such a kind or to such an extent as to be unfit for marriage and the procreation of children *Must not suffer from recurrent attacks of insanity. It is pertinent to point out that the original provision was “neither party is an idiot or a lunatic,” which was changed to the present provision by Marriage Laws (Amendment) Act, 1976. “Recurrent attacks of epilepsy” was also a disqualification for marriage, which was removed by the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Act, 1999. Supreme Court observed that to brand the wife as unfit for marriage and procreation of children on account of the mental disorder, it needs to be established that the ailment suffered by her is of such a kind or such an extent that it is impossible for her to lead a normal married life (R. …

Courtesans Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

This essay provides a reassessment of the view that the young wives of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are modeled on hetaeras. It begins by examining a parallel debate in contemporary Attic red-figure vase paintings of women at home to show that displays of female sexuality are not incompatible with marriageable maidens and free citizen wives. Aristophanes similarly situates his female characters within a domestic context as the site of sexual and social legitimacy. A detailed analysis of clothing, footwear and grooming practices deployed in the sex strike demonstrates that they represent the standard accoutrements of housewives rather than of hetaeras. Their domesticated eroticism, while enabling the male spectators a voyeuristic glimpse of other men’s wives, reinforces their procreative function as mothers and producers of future Athenian citizens. The importance of sexual desire within marriage for the production of legitimate offspring is dramatically reinforced by the onstage presence of the boy child in the thwarted sexual encounter of Myrrhine and Cinesias. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata fits with a pattern of heightened interest in women and domestic ideology at the end of the fifth century BCE. The centrality of marriage in the play may represent a response to the erosion of Pericles' citizenship law in response to the depletion of Athenian men in the waning years of the Peloponnesian war.

The arms revisited

The arms revisited

“The King His Play”: Charles II, Christina of Sweden, and Dryden’s Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen

“The King His Play”: Charles II, Christina of Sweden, and Dryden’s Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen Candy Schille Today only a few specialists may know of John Dryden’s Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (1667), but during the Restoration it pleased readers and playgoers mightily.1 Samuel Pepys sat through it four times during its first season, twice during its second, and twice again during its third; he thought it “one of the best plays I ever saw.” Between March 1667 and January 1668 King Charles II watched it five times, twice at court (Loftis, “Commentary” 331), and, Dryden proudly tells us in his Preface, “grac’d it with the Title of His Play” (115). It was first printed in 1688, with two editions the following year and three more before 1700 (Loftis, “Textual Notes” 420). For modern scholars, the interest of the play has been primarily in the comic plot—in its importance to the genesis of the “gay couple” and tragicomic patterns.2 Nell Gwynn, playing Florimell, caught Charles II’s eye, and by 1669, she had supplanted his long-time favorite, Barbara Castlemaigne, the “uncrowned queen of England”(Novak 381–82; Fraser 102). My focus here, however, is not on the comic but rather the serious plot of the tragicomedy and how a play about a “Maiden Queen” might have drawn the recently restored king to claim the play as his own. I will argue that this play, concerned with a monarch lacking an (legitimate, in Charles’s case) heir, provides for a peaceful resolution to a looming succession crisis, yet still keeps issues of fitness to rule—issues, that is, of “title” and/or “merit”—very much alive. In this, more broadly, Secret Love is an early example of Dryden’s habit of qualification even in plays that purport to underwrite an orthodoxy or promote a profitable party line. In effect, his dramatic [End Page 41] works usually (and I believe intentionally) evidence a sort of internal deconstructive impulse. Secret Love offers a particularly cogent handling of the issues of monarchical responsibility and prerogative. In brief, the unnamed virgin queen of the title loves a commoner, Philocles, whom she has promoted as her court favorite, but she has jealously guarded her right to rule independently of a husband. Philocles loves another woman of royal blood, but loves as much, or more, the idea of becoming king. Ultimately the queen’s struggle between her desire to marry beneath her and her desire to maintain her primacy as ruler results in a baroque settlement in which she will live unmarried and the crown will in time devolve upon the commoner’s head. In part, the play is an early expression of anxieties about succession, anxieties that would later deepen as Charles II remained without legitimate offspring to inherit the throne. Two of the most recent and most substantive handlings of the contemporary issues at stake have emphasized another aspect of the cultural work that Secret Love may have been intended to do: that is, not merely to express, but also to allay anxieties caused by the recent restoration—and the potential abuses--of monarchical power. Though he mentions Secret Love only briefly, Duane Coltharp has argued that in general Dryden “attempt[s] to appropriate revolutionary energies for royal uses” (417).3 Among these “revolutionary energies” is sexual desire, which becomes an “imperative of generational succession” (423).Stephen P. Flores, dealing specifically with Secret Love, makes explicit what Coltharp’s argument only permits: a broad analogy between the play’s passionate, absolutist queen and Charles II. In Flores’ reading, what audiences may have perceived as contemporary threats to political stability are contained by their embodiment in a woman; assumptions and traditions concerning gender allow these threats to be diffused or dismissed (180–88). Although Flores’ and Coltharp’s readings strongly suggest that Dryden’s ending produces in audiences some sort of affective repose friendly to royal interests, the resolution, such as it is, to Secret Love is manifestly unsettled and unsettling. None of the characters’ private desires are satisfied, and the immediate public solution to the succession crisis ensures neither the successive legitimacy nor the personal...

De l'onocentaure. Étude de mythologie comparée

The Onocentaur: A comparative study in mythology The following analysis is meant to study and compare two myths belonging to different cultural backgrounds, namely Pelops and Hippodomeia in Ancient Greece and Sichem and Dina in Genesis, book 34. Initially, the narrative patterns of these myths seem to have very little in common. The hypotheses, based on research in anthropology and zootechnics, will be supported by paradigms associating both narrative pattern and knowledge of ethology and lexicology. The subtle anthropomorphization of the Equidae in those two versions allows an interpretation liable to reveal, in the imaginative world of myths, the fertile links between the animal world and that of Man. Thus, we will tackle zoological problems in connection with the regeneration of domestic species (crossbreeding ) and hybridization, in order to apply them to human beings, whose marriages ( exogamy) and legitimate offspring in an agonistic and commercial environment, were considered as necessary evils to what we commonly refer to as “cultural development”.

Autoctonia, filiação legítima e cidadania no Íon de Eurípides

Taking as reference a preliminary discussion on the characteristics of the myth of autochthony in Athens, as well as on other themes connected to the same topic (like the notion of legitimate offspring and citizenship), an analysis is carried out on the way those concepts play a central role in the structure of Euripides’

Limitations for measuring religion in a different cultural context—The case of Japan

The article points out the limitations in surveys measuring religiosity and spirituality using the measures developed in Christian or Western contexts. Japanese people think of religion ( shūkyō) as revealed religion such as Christianity that has specific doctrinal belief and faith. Through their history of religious regulation, Japanese people came to consider themselves “non-religious” as a way of survival, not to be punished by political authorities and not to be stigmatized in their community. Thus they tend to answer that they consider themselves “non-religious” in surveys, while performing ritual performances for their ancestors in Buddhist temples and Buddhist altars not only to thank ancestors but also to ease the psychological fear people have toward muenbotoke, restless ancestors who have no legitimate offspring to take care of them. To extend the study of spirituality or religiousness in the Japanese context, qualitative studies are necessary not to misinterpret religiousness and spirituality in Japanese context.

Ecological barriers to early colony establishment in three coexisting acacia-ant species in Kenya

In black cotton uplands in East Africa, four sym- biotic acacia-ant species compete for possession of a single swollen thorn tree species, Acacia drepanolobium, and yet coexist at fi ne spatial scales. Three of the four ant species produce independent foundress queens that establish colo- nies claustrally within swollen thorns, most often on small saplings. We conducted surveys of such saplings at two sites in 2001 and 2004, and examined foundresses and incipient colonies within their swollen thorns to determine what fac- tors infl uence their success. Competition among foundresses for nest initiation sites was intense, with an average of over one founding attempt per swollen thorn in all samples, and with living and dead queens signifi cantly hyper-dispersed among available thorns. Combat with other foundresses was the most common cause of death among claustral queens, especially for Tetraponera penzigi. In interspecifi c battles for nest initiation sites, T. penzigi was dominant over Cremato- gaster nigriceps and C. mimosae, and C. nigriceps won over 80 % of its contests with C. mimosae foundresses. For single- ton foundresses, brood parasitism by the braconid wasp Tri- gastrotheca laikipiensis typically results in the death of the entire ant brood. Host queens defend parasite larvae, pupae and eclosed adults, apparently unable to distinguish the wasps from legitimate offspring. Rates of brood parasitism were as high as 15-20 % for incipient colonies of both Cre- matogaster species, but were extremely low for T. nigriceps in all samples. Although T. penzigi and C. nigriceps foun- dresses are always solitary, approximately 18 % of claustral C. mimosae colonies contain cooperating pleometrotic queens. For unparasitized, claustral C. mimosae colonies, brood production per queen did not differ between solitary and cooperating foundresses. However, the per-capita risks associated with parastitism were reduced for pleometrotic queens.

The Prophetic Strain: Shelley on Erotic Failure and World Legislation

Till old experience do attain To something like Prophetic strain. --Milton (1) 1 MICHAEL FERBER STATES THE ORTHODOX VIEW WHEN HE SAYS THAT IT IS with completion of becomes Shelley, arrives at modes, themes, and style distinctive of his 'mature' poetry. (2) In Greek, Alastor names an avenging demon, and there is a certain irony, if not nihilism, in notion of coming into one's own under aegis of vengeance. Indeed, in his preface to poem appears to portray world as an intrinsically vengeful place, suggesting it rewards those who recognize its true nature by killing them off quickly rather than subjecting them, like those who fail to do so, to and poisonous decay: that Power which strikes luminaries of world with sudden darkness and extinction, by awakening them to too exquisite a perception of its influence, dooms to a slow and poisonous those meaner spirits dare to abjure its dominion. (3) Harold Bloom writes in his gloss of this passage: That Power is Imagination, in its Wordsworthian formulation, and it brings with it a choice between kinds of destruction: ... The first becomes a quest for a finite and measured object of desire which shall yet encompass in itself beauty and truth of infinite and unmeasured conceptions of Poet. This quest is necessarily in vain, and leads to untimely death of quester. Such a theme would not have been acceptable to Wordsworth or Coleridge, and yet is legitimate offspring of their own art and imaginative theory.... [T]o put it as a contrary of Wordsworth's language, Nature always will and must betray human heart loves her, for Nature ... is not adequate to meet demands made upon her by human imagination. (4) This conception of a kind of Manichean antagonism between Imagination and Nature, between man and world in which he's fated to pass his life, certainly is in keeping with idea Shelley's poem, and through it what we have come to recognize as the mature Shelley, are born under sign of a vengeful demon. Bloom suggests becomes Shelley by asserting his incommensurability not only with Nature, but also with his own poetic progenitors, Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, by denying their incompatibility with Nature, are figured as representing not nurturing soil of Shelleyan poetics but and poisonous decay which poetics springs to life by repudiating. But this is in a sense to read Alastor's title with insufficient attention to what Bloom instructively identifies as Shelley's distinctively urbane irony (283). The preface does not only, as Bloom claims, contrast two kinds of destruction: Poet's solitude and unimaginative man's lonely gregariousness (285), but also, crucially, contrasts intercourse with an intelligence similar to himself which Poet actually thirsts for, and single prototype of his conception, with which he vainly tries to quench thirst. The Defense argues [t]he great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own, and [t]he great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to effect by acting upon (517). In this light, Alastor's Poet can be seen to confuse cause and effect, devoting his love wholly to a certain image, forgetting point of imagination itself is it makes sympathy of corresponding powers in other human In Alastor's preface, hardly holds quest for sympathy to be vain; rather, it is precisely in contrast to worthy end Poet's vacancy of spirit makes itself felt: The intellectual faculties, imagination, functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. …

Adah Isaacs Menken: Race and Transgendered Performance in the Nineteenth Century

Stowe, she supposedly gushed, have dreamed of this moment, for I am a great admirer of your work. do admire yours, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe is said to have replied. (1) (Gersom 108) My darling, a woman with such beautiful legs should bother about poetry! (Swinburne 2) Adah Isaacs Menken (183?-1868) was an author and an actress whose constructions of identity result in a figure who has been customarily explained as both a transgressive force in a domestic economy, as well as a deviant sexual aberration (Brooks 43). Her elusively gendered public presence and performances confounded the critical descriptions of her contemporaries and have proven a difficult subject for subsequent biographers. I introduce Menken's history and stage performance for two reasons. First, since comparatively little is known about Menken, her history will serve as an indication of how problematic any construction of Menken is, and how there are a multiplicity of discourses surrounding her life which are, at best, conflicting. Second, I suggest that these conflicting discourses are a generative discursive space wherein Menken (and others) derive a multiplicity of resultant constructions of her identity. Moreover, through an investigation of these two points, I suggest that Menken articulates her inconsistent racial and gendered identities as performative and permeable constructions that do accommodate a reading of Menken through any one racial or gendered category. Menken's identity constructions enable multiple, conflicting readings of her body and utterances which Menken deftly manipulates and, to an extent, controls. (2) The narrative offered by Menken's history and performance exists as an amalgamation of several quasi-mythical narrative lines proliferated by Menken, her contemporaries, and subsequent biographers. Aside from purported affairs with Algernon Swinburne and Alexander Dumas, (arguably) six marriages, tantalizing correspondence with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Walt Whitman, and a variety of largely unsubstantiated conjectures on what may have been her Jewish, Spanish, Irish, Creole and/or black ancestry, Adah Isaacs Menken (as she is most frequently known) (3) was one of the highest paid actors in the world during the early to mid-1860s, largely for her scandalously revealing male-impersonation in H.M. Milner's Byronically derived Mazeppa. Menken's accounts of her origins are varied and seldom consistent. Menken identified herself variously as Black, as Jewish, as Spanish, and as Caucasian, among others. Ed James, a journalist and Menken's colorful acquaintance, wrote that Menken was (despite her frequent public and printed attestations to the contrary) (4) not born a Jewess, and there was nothing about her features except, perhaps, her lustrous eyes to lead anyone to suppose so. Her real name was Adelaide McCord, and she was born at Milneburg, near New Orleans, on June 15, (James 3), an assessment with which her other early biographer, George Barclay, concurred (Barclay 19). Typical of most aspects of Menken's contentious biography, no one agrees with what James and Barclay wrote. The more recent narrative lines of Menken bio-criticism, here citing John Cofran's use of 1850 census data, suggest that Menken is actually Ada C. McCord, born in Memphis in 1835 (52). While this does account for several aspects of Menken's autobiographical outbursts, Menken's use of the surname on what were probably her first two marriage certificates, indicates some complication of the McCord theory. Wolf Mankowitz and others, taking Menken's oft repeated designation of New Orleans as her birthplace and using Board of Health records, cite Menken as the legitimate offspring of an Auguste Theodore (a free man of color) and a Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux (Mankowitz 34). While Menken's early history remains largely unverifiable, Menken undoubtedly took her name from what was arguably her second husband, Alexander Isaac Menken. …

Courtesan, Concubine, Whore: Apollodorus' Deliberate Use of Terms for Prostitutes

This article examines Apollodorus' use of the terms hetaira, pallake, and porne in the speech Against Neaira. It argues that he employs these terms with consistency and with attention to differences among them rather than haphazardly or interchangeably as was previously believed. Apollodorus' distinctions among types of prostitutes are further clarified through comparisons with his use of the terms in other speeches. Finally, there is a reexamination of the famous statement on the existence of three types of women in society. By resituating this claim in its oratorical context, I show that it is not an all-inclusive remark on women's roles but rather a statement quite specific to Apollodorus' attack on Neaira.

Identity in the globalising world

The paper suggests that instead of talking about identities, inherited or acquired, it would be more in keeping with the realities of the globalising world to speak of identification, a never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged. The frantic search of identity is not a residue of the pre-globalization times not yet fully extirpated but bound to become extinct as the globalization progresses; it is, on the contrary, the side-effect and by-product of the combination of globalising and individualising pressures and the tensions they spawn. The identification wars are neither contrary nor stand in the way of the globalising tendency: they are a legitimate offspring and natural companion of globalisation and far from arresting it, lubricate its wheels.

"Objects of Charity": Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, 1768-72

England was peculiar among the leading European countries of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in not having a major hospital devoted to the care of abandoned babies and young children. By 1700, many other countries had such a facility, usually established in their principal cities: institutions of this sort were to be found in Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, and Venice. Although London had Christ's Hospital, founded in the reign of Edward VI, an institution that in the first half-century of its existence admitted some foundling children, it soon transformed itself into a refuge and school for the legitimate offspring of freemen of the city of London. By the late seventeenth century, the Hospital had a notice posted near its gates, stating These are to certify that no child or children who are dropped in Christ's Hospital can receive any benefit from thence.' The establishment of a true foundling hospital was impeded by hostility to bastard-bearers, and by Tudor poor laws that vested responsibility for the nurture of abandoned babies and children in the parishes in which they were found.2