Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500

Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500
Author: Karen Green
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400705298

This book locates Christine de Pizan's argument that women are virtuous members of the political community within the context of earlier discussions of the relative virtues of men and women. It is the first to explore how women were represented and addressed within medieval discussions of the virtues. It introduces readers to the little studied Speculum Dominarum (Mirror of Ladies), a mirror for a princess, compiled for Jeanne of Navarre, which circulated in the courtly milieu that nurtured Christine. Throwing new light on the way in which Medieval women understood the virtues, and were represented by others as virtuous subjects, it positions the ethical ideas of Anne of France, Laura Cereta, Marguerite of Navarre and the Dames de la Roche within an evolving discourse on the virtues that is marked by the transition from Medieval to Renaissance thought. Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500 will be of interest to those studying virtue ethics, the history of women's ideas and Medieval and Renaissance thought in general.

Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500

Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500
Author: Karen Green
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2011-04-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9789400705289

This book locates Christine de Pizan's argument that women are virtuous members of the political community within the context of earlier discussions of the relative virtues of men and women. It is the first to explore how women were represented and addressed within medieval discussions of the virtues. It introduces readers to the little studied Speculum Dominarum (Mirror of Ladies), a mirror for a princess, compiled for Jeanne of Navarre, which circulated in the courtly milieu that nurtured Christine. Throwing new light on the way in which Medieval women understood the virtues, and were represented by others as virtuous subjects, it positions the ethical ideas of Anne of France, Laura Cereta, Marguerite of Navarre and the Dames de la Roche within an evolving discourse on the virtues that is marked by the transition from Medieval to Renaissance thought. Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500 will be of interest to those studying virtue ethics, the history of women's ideas and Medieval and Renaissance thought in general.

Conduct Becoming

Conduct Becoming
Author: Glenn Burger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812249607

Glenn D. Burger argues that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the "invention" of the good wife in discourses of sacramental marriage, private devotion, and personal conduct reconfigures how female embodiment is understood.

Towards an Equality of the Sexes in Early Modern France

Towards an Equality of the Sexes in Early Modern France
Author: Derval Conroy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 100034892X

This volume sets out to examine the ways in which an equality between the sexes is constructed, conceptualised, imagined or realised in early modern France, a period and a country which produced some of the earliest theorisations on equality. In so doing, it aims to contribute towards the development of the history of equality as an intellectual category within the history of political thought, and to situate "the woman question" within that history. The eleven chapters in the volume span the fields of political theory, philosophy, literature, history and history of ideas, bringing together literary scholars, historians, philosophers and scholars of political thought, and examining an extensive range of primary sources. Whilst most of the chapters focus on the conceptualisation of a moral, metaphysical or intellectual equality between the sexes, space is also given to concrete examples of a de facto gender equality in operation. The volume is aimed at scholars and graduate students of political thought, history of philosophy, women’s history and gender studies alike. It aims to throw light on the history of Western ideas of equality and difference, questions which continue to preoccupy cultural historians, philosophers, political theorists and feminist critics.

Following Chaucer

Following Chaucer
Author: Lynn Staley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472126628

Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life explores three representative figures—the royal woman, the poet, and the merchant—in relation to the concept of “office,” which Cicero linked to the health of the republic, but Chaucer to that of the common good. Not usually conjoined to the term “office,” these three figures, situated in the active life, were not firmly mapped onto the body politic, which was used to figure a relational and ordered social body ruled by the king, the head. These figures are points of entry into a set of questions rooted in Chaucer’s understanding of his cultural and historical past and in his keen appraisal of the social dynamics of his own time that also reverberate in the centuries after Chaucer’s death. Following Chaucer does not trace influence but uses Chaucer’s likely reading, circumstances, and literary and social affiliations as guides to understanding his poetry, within the context of late medieval English culture and the reshaping of the concept of these particular offices that suited the needs of a future whose dynamics he anticipated. His understanding of the importance of the Ciceronian concept of office within the active life, his profound cultural awareness, and his probing of the foundations of social change provide him with a keen sense of the persistent tensions and inconsistencies that are fundamental to his poetry.

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman
Author: Tabitha Kenlon
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785273159

The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women’s roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, “Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman” provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.

The Political Animal in Medieval Philosophy

The Political Animal in Medieval Philosophy
Author: Juhana Toivanen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2020-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004438467

In The Political Animal in Medieval Philosophy Juhana Toivanen investigates the foundations of human social life through the Aristotelian notion of ‘political animal’, as it was used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy
Author: Sara Brill
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 960
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1003809413

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is an essential reference source for cutting-edge scholarship on women, gender, and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods, new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives. Comprising 40 chapters from a diverse international group of experts, the Handbook considers questions about women and gender in sources from Greek antiquity spanning the period from 7th c. BCE to 2nd c. BCE, and in receptions of Greek antiquity from the Roman Imperial period, through the European Renaissance to the current day. Chapters are organized into five major sections: I. Early Greek antiquity – including Sappho, Presocratic philosophy, Sophists, and Greek tragedy – 700s–400s BCE II. Classical Greek antiquity – including Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon – 400s–300s BCE III. Late Classical Greek to Hellenistic antiquity – including Cyrenaics, Cynics, the Hippocratic corpus, and Aristotle – 300s–200s BCE IV. Late Greek antiquity to Roman Imperial period – including Pythagorean women, Stoics, Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and late Platonists – 200s BCE to 700s CE V. Later receptions – including Shakespeare, the European Renaissance, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Harrison, Sarah Kofman, and Toni Morrison The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy is a vital resource for students and scholars in philosophy, Classics, and gender studies who want to gain a deeper understanding of philosophy’s rich past and explore sources and questions beyond the traditional canon. The volume is a valuable resource, as well, for students and scholars from history, humanities, literature, political science, religious studies, rhetorical studies, theatre, and LGBTQ and sexuality studies.

Women and Work in Premodern Europe

Women and Work in Premodern Europe
Author: Merridee L. Bailey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2018-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315475073

This book re-evaluates and extends understandings about how work was conceived and what it could entail for women in the premodern period in Europe from c. 1100 to c. 1800. It does this by building on the impressive growth in literature on women’s working experiences, and by adopting new interpretive approaches that expand received assumptions about what constituted 'work' for women. While attention to the diversity of women’s contributions to the economy has done much to make the breadth of women’s experiences of labour visible, this volume takes a more expansive conceptual approach to the notion of work and considers the social and cultural dimensions in which activities were construed and valued as work. This interdisciplinary collection thus advances concepts of work that encompass cultural activities in addition to more traditional economic understandings of work as employment or labour for production. The chapters reconceptualise and explore work for women by asking how the working lives of historical women were enacted and represented, and analyse the relationships that shaped women’s experiences of work across the European premodern period.

Ruling Women, Volume 1

Ruling Women, Volume 1
Author: Derval Conroy
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-01-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137568496

Ruling Women is the first study of its kind devoted to an analysis of the debate concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a wide range of political, feminist and dramatic texts, Conroy sets out to demonstrate that the dominant discourse which upholds patriarchy at the time is frequently in conflict with alternative discourses which frame gynæcocracy as a feasible, and laudable reality, and which reconfigure (wittingly or unwittingly) the normative paradigm of male authority. Central to the argument is an analysis of how the discourse which constructs government as a male prerogative quite simply implodes when juxtaposed with the traditional political discourse of virtue ethics. In Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France, the first volume of the two-volume study, the author examines the dominant discourse which excludes women from political authority before turning to the configuration of women and rulership in the pro-woman and egalitarian discourses of the period. Highly readable and engaging, Conroy’s work will appeal to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism, in addition to scholars of seventeenth-century literature and history of ideas.