Noble Women Research Articles

Ladies' Aid: Gentile Noblewomen as Saviors and Benefactors in theAntiquities

Three women in Josephus'sAntiquitiesare well known for their purported devotion to Jewish religious practices: Poppaea Sabina, the consort/wife of the emperor Nero, whom Josephus describes as “God-fearing” (θɛοσɛβής); Fulvia, a Roman convert of consular rank whom he pegs as the source of the expulsion of Jews from Rome under Tiberius; and Helena, Queen of Adiabene, also a convert to Judaism. In this article, I show that the stories of these three Gentile noble women, who share an interest in Jewish religious practices, are part of a larger narrative pattern in theAntiquitiesthat repeatedly characterizes Gentile women of high standing as saviors and benefactors of the Jewish people. According to Josephus, imperial women intercede on behalf of Jewish aristocrats before every Julio-Claudian emperor, often with ramifications for the entire Jewish people. He also claims that Domitia, the wife of the emperor Domitian, was one of his own patrons. Patronage on behalf of the Jewish community is integral to the stories of both Fulvia and Queen Helena of Adiabene. Furthermore, the salvific acts of foreign noblewomen feature prominently in Josephus's retelling of the story of Moses early in theAntiquities.

Marriage Strategy among the German Nobility, 1400–1699

Marriage Strategy among the German Nobility, I400-1699 Studies of family strategy among the early modern Western European elites generally assert that upward social mobility took place primarily through the marriage of daughters of new to husbands of higher rank, and that women attracted much stronger social disapproval for marrying beneath their rank than men did. According to Dewald, A long succession of alliances joined aristocratic young men with wealthy women from lower ranks, the daughters of officials, bankers, and merchants; marriage of impoverished but noble women with wealthier men happened much less often but was certainly not unheard of. Stone, too, states that in the view of the English gentry, it was permissible to marry your son to the heiress of a tradesman, but not to marry your daughter to a tradesman or even to his son.1 In Germany, however, studies analyzing the connubium, or marriage connections, of individual noble families or regional groups of nobles from the Middle Ages through the early modern period have not found this pattern of marrying daughters up and sons down. Rather, they suggest that within the German nobility, sons tended to marry spouses of higher status than their own, and daughters to marry spouses of lower status. Two historians of the medieval German noble family recently argued that the unique characteristics of the German nobility are responsible for the development of this marriage strategy. Freed traces its origins to the legal disabilities attached to unequal marriages between members of the freeborn high nobility (counts and barons) and those of the unfree lower nobility. Spiess points out that the strategy would have been encouraged by the dowry system of the

CNN Interview: Iranian President Opens a “Crack in the Wall of Mistrust” Between Iran and the U.S.

In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. At the outset, I would like to congratulate all free and noble women and men especially the followers of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him), on the occasion of the New Year. I take as a good omen the concurrence of the Christian New Year with the Islamic month of Ramadan, the month of edification and self-restraint that has been the goal of all divine prophets.

Feminine Genealogy, Matriarchy, and Utopia in the Fairy Tale of Marie-Catherine D'aulnoy

With the development of a proto-capitalist economy and court society, nobles, and particularly noble women who had just one generation earlier prospered in the salons, were losing their "place" in seventeenth-century France. Through an analysis of Madame d'Aulnoy's L'ile de la Felicite, Belle-Belle, ou le Chevalier Fortune, and L'oranger et l'abeille, I look at how d'Aulnoy creates utopic spaces based on notions of civility in order to provide a "place," or no-place (ou-topos) for those disenfranchised nobles. In brief, I show that within d'Aulnoy's tales are inscribed so many salon-like spaces which are structured in a matriarchal and utopic manner. The fairy tale as a genre furthermore creates "feminine genealogies" between Amazons and fairies of times past with the salon women of the first half of the seventeenth-century. At the same time that d'Aulnoy concerns herself with gender issues, she also proposes through her tales a rehabilitated model of the feudal state in which noble men and women are equal, implicitly criticizing a patriarchal monarchy. The very genre of the fairy tale, which historically legitimated the lineage of a noble family by posting a fairy at its origin, coincides with d'Aulnoy's gender and class interests.

The Secularization of the Search for Salvation: The Self-Fashioning of Orthodox Clergymen's Sons in Late Imperial Russia

In recent decades, historians of prerevolutionary Russia have emphasized the diverse and complex nature of the group of educated Russians that has traditionally been referred to as the “intelligentsia.” In the existing historiography, there have been numerous investigations into various subgroups of the intelligentsia, including studies of noble intellectuals, students, women radicals, religious thinkers, ethnic elites, and members of political parties and of specific professions. The subgroup that contributed more to Russian professions and political movements than any other non-noble subgroup in both quantitative and qualitative terms is also the only prominent subgroup that has been neglected. The members of this neglected subgroup are Russian Orthodox clergymen's sons, referred to throughout this article by the Russian term popovichi?

Les Arts libéraux de la "librairie" capitulaire de Chartres

Inserted into a window of the chapel of Saint-Piat in the cathedral of Chartres are five panels of early fifteenth-century stained glass portraying four of the liberal arts (Dialectic, Arithmetic, Rhetoric, and Geometry) and an unidentified seated figure. These panels were painted in 1415 by Jehan Perier for the well-documented glazing of the Chartres chapter library, a separate wooden structure located east of the choir, which was destroyed in 1906. Representations of the liberal arts were common in library glazings elsewhere at this time. At Chartres they are personified as elegantly posed and lavishly clothed noble women, identified by inscriptions and painted in a style and technique which find more parallels in early fifteenth-century manuscripts than in contemporary stained glass.

Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance Court Society*

Fifteenth Century Italy has been called both the “golden age of bastards” and the “age of golden bastards.” But while scholars from Jacob Burckhardt to Lauro Martines have decried princely infidelity and the political problems resulting from the promotion of the inevitable bastards, they have not discussed a central character in the creation of such situations: the mother of those bastards or, more properly, the mistress of the prince. “Golden bastards,” male and female, could not have existed without the tacit cooperation of noble women and the men who protected them – husbands, fathers, and brothers. And herein lies a conundrum. Paternal, spousal, and/or fraternal consent to an illicit relationship which was, at best, a tenuous claim on the generosity of a prince might appear to violate the model constructed by family historians of a society concerned with preserving the honor of their women in order to enhance the family's position through advantageous marital alliances of the virgin daughters.

A Confraternity of Florentine Noble Women

A Confraternity of Florentine Noble Women

Noble Women in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa

Noble Women in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa

Noble Women in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa

Noble Women in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa

Ombres féminines dans l'histoire de Languedoc, aux Xe et XIe s.

This short essay had been asked me by professor Ph. Wolff two years ago and must be published without notes. Its grounds into sources are thin, because sources itselves are very scanty. They concern only aristocratic women, only some testamentary gifts, dowries and widow's transactions. All bring supposing the noble women had been absorbed by her lignage, used by him. But the documents also participate to the "great story", that of land and power.

The Jewish woman: Myself and others

The Jewish woman is, like the Jewish man, a paradox. The woman is the mainstay of the family, the members of which, including the woman and at her unconscious instigation, reg? ularly break out and away, in order that the woman may be confirmed in her centrality to the family and to the society that perpetuates this paradox. Women have always been rebels. At every turn women overthrow the masks of order, dominance and rationality which, un? altered, would warp female knowledge of the flow of life, its feel, its current. The Jewish home-based Friday-night ritual revolves around the lady of the house. Lighting the candles, she is the Queen of the Sabbath, ushering in the sacred peace of the Sabbath. Throughout her life and cyclically through the year she symbolically enacts the roles of Eve (and Lillith); matriarch Sarah; cunning Rebec? ca; prolific Leah; difficult, beloved Rachel; Miriam, who sang when her brother Moses passed through the opened seas and who al? most went too far politically; Sheba or the Many-Named; the nameless beloved of the nameless lover of Solomon's psalms; Ruth and Naomi, natural-born Jew and sister-woman; Queen Esther, who saved her people; Judith, who took the head of Holofernes, the enemy; and all those others in Jewish lore who are not men. As in a repertory company, the members of a family take on, directly or indirectly, each other's conflicts and destinies, resolving them variously. The Jewish woman has had a full task to fulfill the demands of her own charac? ter, as well as those aspects denied within the men. The Jewish man has, of course, the same situation; but, because of his previously more public role, has been less free to mimic the hidden self of the other. For example, Jessica, daughter of the Mer? chant of Venice, dreamed out Shylock's de? sire to be accepted by the prevailing society, the desire to assimilate that haunts and taunts all Jews (perhaps the better to maintain inner Jewish identity by contrast). For Shylock, the loss of his honor, beyond that of his ducats, was brought home to him by the loss of his daughter. Like other prodigal daughters, Jessica rebelled against having to be like those great and noble Jewish women. Like them, she just wanted to be herself. (So did Emma Goldman.) The strictures of Judaic thought are there for a reason. Instead of commanding general virtuous goodness, thereby incurring anxiety concerning whether an act is or is not the Good, the early Jews set forth Ten Thou Shalts and Shalt Nots. Anything else was all right. Jews live by Law so deeply ingrained in their consciousness that variable constructs are con? tinually mandated in response. Further, be? cause the Law is inviolable, it is regularly Carol Rubenstein is a poet, translator and anthologist.

“Our Women and What They Think,” Amy Jacques Garvey andthe Negro World

Negro women are the acknowledged burden bearers of their race. Whether this is due to the innate laziness of Negro men, or to their lack of appreciation for their noble women, we are not quite sure. Perhaps both these reasons are contributing f actors. Yet the results are the same—an overburdened womanhood and a backward race….With Negro woman in this important, yet unenviable position, she should be careful in keeping pace with daily events and training her mind to cope with situations and problems. Her tasks become greater as the cycle of civilization shifts nearer to Africa and nationalism and self-determination, the rallying cry of the East.Amy Jacques Garuey

The Status of Nursing among the French Canadians of the Province of Quebec

with eagerness, they knew the pressing needs of the Colony still in its infancy. Madame la duchesse d'Aiguillon, niece of the Cardinal de Richelieu, whose zeal equalled her piety, resolved to furnish the necessary funds to build in the city of Quebec a hospital destined for the colonists and the Indians, as the savages of the country are called. Three nuns, nursing sisters of Dieppe, of the order of the Chanoinesses of St. Augustin, were chosen for this heroic enterprise. In company with the first group of Ursuline nuns, among whom was Mother Marie of the Incarnation (who was called the T6r'se of New France), they arrived at Quebec on the first of August after a frightful voyage of three months. At this moment an epidemic of smallpox broke out among the Hurons; the nursing sisters, lodged temporarily by the Jesuits, put themselves to work immediately and in less than three months they had given care to more than two hundred of these unfortunates whose filth was equalled only by their misery. A life of unheard-of sufferings and privations began for the group of noble women, which was to be theirs for more than a century. Their unconquerable courage, their great charity, were above everything. Extreme poverty, the cruelty of the Iroquois, fire, war-nothing could conquer their devotion. In 1642 occurred the founding of Ville-Marie, today Montreal, 180 miles from Quebec. The distance of the borough of Hochelaga (the Indian name for Montreal) from that of Stadaconna (the Indian name for Quebec) necessitated the establishment of a new hospital, that of the HAtel-Dieu of Montreal. The same sublime devotion, the same heroic sacrifices that were so admired at Quebec surrounded the cradle of Ville-Marie. To the great Jeanne Mance (the collaborator of Maisonneuve), whose ability and qualities we know, was entrusted the direction of the new hospital. She is the first woman who appears in the origin of Ville-Marie (Montreal). With her noble heart, her sound judgment, her enterprising spirit, her firm will, and her heroic virtues, she is the fine pure type after which her followers are modeled. She associated with her the nursing sisters of la Fleche to help her and to continue her work. The history of these noble and ancient institutions is the history of Montreal, of its heroic origin, of its stirring struggles, of its astonishing

Red Cross Enrollment

practically forced their way in as volunteers without remuneration, subsistence, or recognition by the Government, and these same noble women often used their own private means to furnish comforts for the sick soldier, for which Army regulations did not provide. There was no Red Cross at that time, and the graduate nurse had not yet appeared on the horizon. It was my privilege, as a little girl, to know that great leader, Clara Barton, who was instrumental in bringing the Red Cross to America. She was my mother's friend, and I often listened to her as she outlined her plans for the formation of that great humanitarian organization in her native country. She had seen its far-reaching benefits abroad but at that time our Government had