Gender and the City before Modernity E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Gender and History Special Issues
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 697

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Gender and the City before Modernity presents a series of multi-disciplinary readings that explore issues relating to the role of gender in a variety of cities of the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds.

• Presents an inter-disciplinary collection of readings that reveal new insights into the intersection of gender, temporality, and urban space
• Features a wide geographical and methodological range
• Includes numerous illustrations to enhance clarity

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Series

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

The volume

Gender, space and time

Boundaries: physical, conceptual, symbolic

Citizenship, belonging and participation

Conclusion

Notes

1: The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities

Laodike’s interventions

Laodike’s queenship

Consort and sister

Motherhood

Female civic life and queenly intervention

Notes

2: ‘A Remarkably Patterned Life’: Domestic and Public in the Aztec Household City

The problem of sources

Male and female roles and the complex calli household

Household structures at city level

Gender ideals and Aztec education

Male and female responsibilities in family and temple households

‘Complex equalities’ and domestic practicalities

Notes

3: Women, Property and Urban Space in Tenth-Century Milan

11 January 903: Archbishop Andreas makes a will

A very male monastery: Sant’Ambrogio in the late ninth century

Santa Maria Gisonis and the creation of a hinterland

Gisla: the difference a day makes

Conclusion

Notes

4: Towards a Female Topography of the Ancient Greek City: Case Studies from Late Archaic and Early Classical Athens (c.520–400 BCE)

Four Athenian case-studies

Discussion

Implications: Late Archaic and Early Classical Athens in a broader geographical and chronological context

Notes

5: Bodymaps: Sexing Space and Zoning Gender in Ancient Athens

Space and gender in classical Athens

Gendered space and spaced gender

Space and sexuality

Discourse and dispositif

Conclusion

Beyond space and gender

Notes

6: Ladies who Lounge: Class, Religion and Social Interaction in Seventeenth-Century Isfahan

Town and country

Harem life in Safavid Isfahan

Outside the harem: the Christian women of Isfahan

Art and architecture as signifiers of religious and class distinctions

Conclusion: material culture as a signifier of gender relationships in Safavid Isfahan

Notes

7: The Nanjing Courtesan Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604): Gender, Space and Painting in the Late Ming Pleasure Quarter

The city of Nanjing and its pleasure quarter

Ma Shouzhen as a ‘symbolic place’ in the journey through the city

Ma Shouzhen, painting, gender and space

Conclusion

Notes

8: Squabbling Siblings: Gender and Monastic Life in Late Anglo-Saxon Winchester

Monastic life, the outside world and urban space

Books and scriptoria: shared resources?

Saintly rivalry and the cults of relics

Burials and patronage

Serving the Nunnaminster: sacramental pastoral care in female space

Conclusion

Notes

9: A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage

Prisoners of conscience in Roman Carthage: religion, class and the social meaning of resistance to authority

The biological family and the family of faith

Awaiting trial

The interrogation

Resisting Rome or resisting thy neighbour?

Perpetua and the Egyptian

The long future

Notes

10: Women’s Social Networks and Female Friendship in the Ancient Greek City

Bridging and bonding: women’s social networks in action

Women’s social capital and civic engagement

Female friendship in the Greek city

Conclusions: women and the Greek city

Notes

11: Seeing is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice

Balconies as architecture, in paintings and on the stage

Women on balconies

Balconies as points of interaction

Balconies and the illicit

Balconies and windows: alternative openings?

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Gender and History Special Issue Book Series

Gender and History, an international, interdisciplinary journal on the history of femininity, masculinity, and gender relations, publishes annual special issues which are now available in book form.

Bringing together path-breaking feminist scholarship with assessments of the field, each volume focuses on a specific subject, question or theme. These books are suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in history, sociology, politics, cultural studies, and gender and women’s studies.

Titles in the series include:

Gender and the City before Modernity

Edited by Lin Foxhall and Gabriele Neher

Historicising Gender and Sexuality

Edited by Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. Spear

Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return

Edited by K. H. Adler and Carrie Hamilton

Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation

Edited by Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker

Translating Feminisms in China

Edited by Dorothy Ko and Wang Zheng

Visual Genders, Visual Histories: A special Issue of Gender & History

Edited by Patricia Hayes

Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment: Gender and History

Edited by Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao

Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas

Edited by Sandra Gunning, Tera Hunter and Michele Mitchell

Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historial Perspective

Edited by Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin

Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities

Edited by Kathleen Canning and Sonya Rose

Gendering the Middle Ages: A Gender and History Special Issue

Edited by Pauline Stafford and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker

Gender and History: Retrospect and Prospect

Edited by Leonore Davidoff, Keith McClelland and Eleni Varikas

Feminisms and Internationalism

Edited by Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott

Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean

Edited by Maria Wyke

Gendered Colonialisms in African History

Edited by Nancy Rose Hunt, Tessie P. Liu and Jean Quataert

This edition first published 2013 Originally published as Volume 23, Issue 3 of Gender & History © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gender and the city before modernity / edited by Lin Foxhall and Gabriele Neher. p. cm. “Originally published as Volume 23, Issue 3 of Gender & History.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-23443-3 (pbk.) 1. Women–History–To 1500. 2. Women–Social life and customs. 3. City and town life–History–To 1500. 4. Urban sociology–History–To 1500. I. Foxhall, Lin. II. Neher, Gabriele. III. Gender & history. HQ1127.G46 2012 305.4–dc23 2012001069

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Plate 90, Thriving Southern Capital (National Museum of Chinese History). Cover design by Nicki Averill Design

1 2013

To Dr Alex Cowan (1949–2011), Reader and Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University, a valued collaborator in this project who will be much missed.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Lin Foxhall is professor of Greek archaeology and history at the University of Leicester. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Liverpool, and has held posts at St Hilda’s College Oxford and University College London. Her current field project is based in Bova Marina, southern Calabria, Italy. She has written extensively on gender, agriculture and land use in classical antiquity, and is about to publish Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity with Cambridge University Press.

Gabriele Neher is a lecturer in Renaissance art history at the University of Nottingham. She has studied at Aberdeen and Warwick and has been at Nottingham since 1997. Her publications are concerned with the impact of change of political rule on the cultural identity of the subject town; she has worked extensively on Brescia and other urban centres of the Veneto. She is also Reviews Editor for Gender & History.

Gillian Ramsey is currently a teaching fellow in ancient history at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester. She completed her doctorate in classics at the University of Exeter in 2009; her thesis was entitled ‘Ruling the Seleukid Empire: Seleukid Officials and the Official Experience’. She researches power structures and modes of power-holding in the Seleukid world, using diverse evidence from Greek epigraphy to Akkadian cuneiform tablets.

Caroline Dodds Pennock lectures in international history at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on Aztec history and the Atlantic world, with particular interests in gender, violence and cultural exchange. Her first book, Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for 2008.

Ross Balzaretti has taught at the University of Nottingham since 1990. He was UK co-editor of Gender & History from 2004 to 2009. He is currently completing two books: Liguria in the Early Middle Ages (Duckworth) and The Lands of St Ambrose (Brepols). He has published in Past & Present, History Workshop Journal and Early Medieval Europe, mainly in the field of early medieval history, particularly gender and sexuality.

Lisa C. Nevett is professor of classical archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Her major publications include Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), House and Society in the Ancient Greek World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Ancient Greek Houses and Households (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, co-edited with Bradley A. Ault).

James Davidson is professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. His most recent book, The Greeks and Greek Love (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007), won the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay non-fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender non-fiction.

Emma Loosley is senior lecturer in the history of art at the University of Manchester and specialises in the art and architecture of the Middle East, in particular the material culture of Middle Eastern Christianity. Her last book, Messiah and Mahdi (London: East and West, 2009), looked at Caucasian Christian influences on Safavid Iranian culture.

Monica Merlin is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of Oxford. Her thesis focuses on the late Ming courtesan Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604), painter and poetess living in the Nanjing pleasure district. Her research interests are gender and visual culture, social history and Chinese women painters of the Late Imperial time.

Helen Foxhall Forbes studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge and Theology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Her doctoral research explored ideas of purgatory and penance in Anglo-Saxon England, and her research interests include social history and the history of the Church, early medieval theology and liturgical texts. She is currently writing a book entitled Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith.

Kate Cooper is professor of ancient history at the University of Manchester. Her work on gender and family in late antiquity includes the monographs The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). A book for the general reader, Early Christian Women, will be forthcoming from Atlantic Press in 2012.

Claire Taylor is a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC, USA. She has written on various aspects of fifth- and fourth-century Athenian politics and society, as well as on the epigraphic culture of non-elite groups. Her current research explores wealth and poverty in fourth-century Attica.

Alexander Cowan was visiting fellow in history at Northumbria University. He published three studies on cities in early modern Europe, primarily Venice, and edited two books on European urban culture. He was working on a study of urban oral communication and gossip in early modern Italy, to appear in Gossip, Gospel and Governance: Orality in Europe 1400–1700.

Introduction

Lin Foxhall and Gabriele Neher

This special issue of Gender & History focuses on the operation of gender in cities before modernity; that is, cities unaffected or only lightly touched by the processes of large-scale industrialisation, capitalism, large-scale globalisation and world-wide networks. The city itself has a long history, going back to at least 3500 BCE in the ancient Near East and China. Yet, cities are not simply population centres. Cities in the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds are qualitatively different kinds of spatial, political, social (including religious) and economic entities from their more recent counterparts, sometimes existing and emerging for quite different reasons than in the modern world. Gender plays a significant role in shaping cities, both physically and conceptually, as a fundamental element of human identities, social relationships, and the larger political, economic and cultural networks in which they are embedded. Certainly, we have found that the spatial, social, economic and cultural density of cities facilitates the observation of patterns of gender relations for the chronological periods with which we are primarily concerned in this volume.

We have tried not to be too prescriptive about what we mean by ‘city’. Clearly, scholarly understandings of a ‘city’ vary, as do indigenous cultural definitions, which may include temporary spaces and structures largely devoid of permanent inhabitants. We consider cities to be both spatial constructs and social conurbations that permit interactions. Thus, issues to do with the physical and cultural frameworks that define and shape gender are fundamental to the studies collected here. A second strand that runs throughout the papers in this volume is the manifestations of gender relations within cities in accordance with specific and local contexts, whether of Roman Africa or Renaissance Venice.

Gender, as a key element of social and political organisation, may well also operate in distinctive ways characteristic of cities and their relatively self-contained civic communities in an era before modernity, though our intention in these papers generally is to explore these earlier cities in their own terms, not to set up explicit comparisons. For example, the ways in which gender was entangled in social and political stratification, relationships and processes that regulate residence, presence, movement and the expression of power and authority within these spaces could arguably be distinct from analogous phenomena in more modern cities, differently embedded in larger political and geographical super-structures. Regularly in the societies represented in the present papers, cities were conceptualised as a macrocosm of another social entity, such as the household, and/or as spatially and ideologically manifesting and embodying cosmological principles. In this introduction, as well as in the discussions among the workshop participants which led up to it, we have tried to explore common, or at least analogous, themes and trajectories across a range of different city cultures. Is there something about the socio-spatial entity of the city itself, as it operated in a world without the overarching political and economic frameworks of modern times, that generated similar kinds of engagements with gender?

One of the key problems of studying gender in this era is that, on the one hand it is obvious and omnipresent as a formulating principle (linked to others, of course) of just about all societies. But, on the other hand, gender is often so fundamental, and so intertwined with other aspects of life, that in many cases it lurks below the radar of our most obvious source material. It has been so inherent to structures and modes of organisation that sources rarely address gender as an organising principle directly, because there was no need in their contemporary contexts. In addition, gender is itself one of the filters that play a part in selecting which voices we hear from the past. The result is that we need to use different kinds of source materials – as well as a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches – sometimes in rather unconventional ways and combinations, to listen for a fuller range of voices and to tease out how gender was interwoven into the rhythms of urban life and institutions. Therefore, many of the papers assembled here are cross-disciplinary, exploiting and interrogating visual, architectural, archaeological, landscape and other kinds of evidence beyond the written sources fundamental to all historical studies.

Communities, and especially their elite rulers, were of course acutely aware of the significance of spaces, and one of the prime means of signalling civic identity for communities was thus through art, architecture and monuments; visibility conferred authority.1 This is most immediately and tangibly apparent in the arrangement and reorganisation of urban spaces, and their entanglement with social practice, an issue addressed by almost all papers in this volume.2 The significance of urban geography in the perception of identity has long been recognised by scholars from a variety of disciplines, ranging from Habermas’s concern with the ‘structural transformation of the public sphere itself’ to Foucault’s engagement with the Panopticon. One model put forward to get to the bottom of just how art, architecture and monuments might interact with social and political space is the concept of the ‘sociology of space’, first proposed by Edward Muir and Ronald Weissman in a groundbreaking essay in 1989. Through a comparison between the Renaissance Republics of Florence and Venice, both fundamentally city-states that also ruled over adjacent territories, Muir and Weissman proposed that the internal organisation of a city offered a key insight into the social order and political workings of, in their case, a Renaissance city. They suggested that ‘“place” [should be] understood as the geographies of sociability and ritual, central to understanding Renaissance cities and Renaissance society’. The notion of ‘place’ is at the heart of this volume, both from the point of view of what Muir and Weissman termed ‘social geography’, that is the actual importance of who lives where and what buildings are located and moved to which site, and from the perspective of ‘symbolic geography’, that is the particular uses to which spaces are put, drawing partially on Muir’s earlier work on ‘civic ritual’. Muir and Weissman concluded that amongst the characteristics of the urban landscape of Renaissance Venice there was a clear tendency towards centralising of power. These central nodes of power were always cities; so, for example, regime changes and the need to manifest such changes in spatial and physical forms, encouraged the establishment of particular loci of power and established new modes and networks of relations. This could be done through writing, singing, performing, staging events or these relationships could be literally carved in stone. As many of the essays below demonstrate, such phenomena would suggest corroboration of Muir and Weisman’s theory and also add to the significance of the timing and extent of spatial additions and reorganisation of a city’s internal spaces from the point of view of establishing a visual identity for the cities concerned.