Experiencing Locally, Thinking Globally: Smallpox Vaccination as a Framework for Understanding the Global Early Modern
Modern PhilologyAllyson M. Poska
2021
ABSTRACT: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Spanish Crown extended the use of cowpox as a vaccine against smallpox to its subjects around the globe. As the first global public health initiative, the smallpox vaccination campaign presents a prime opportunity to reconsider the global early modern through an analysis of the relationship between the global imperial structures through which the vaccine was conveyed and the varied local responses to vaccination. In fact, the vaccination campaign prompted a complex and dynamic interchange between the global and the local over issues as diverse as the relationship between subject and king, hierarchies of medical knowledge and authority, and expectations about maternity and motherhood.
View more
The Case for Agentic Gender Norms for Women in Early Modern Europe
Gender & HistoryAllyson M. Poska
2018
ABSTRACT: We have reached a critical moment in the historiography on early modern women, as the deeply researched and considered scholarship has slowly chipped away any notion of the all-encompassing influence of early modern patriarchy. In recent years, most scholars have argued for some level of women's agency, asserting that, although patriarchy was a powerful force in early modern women's lives, in this case, this woman or these women successfully resisted patriarchal expectations and/or institutions. In addition, other scholars have worked to redefine and reassess patriarchy.
View more
Restoring Miranda: gender and the limits of European patriarchy in the early modern Atlantic world
Journal of Global HIstory2012
ABSTRACT: Atlantic history has become fashionable as a way of linking the histories of Europe and the Americas. However, much work in Atlantic history does little to challenge the national biases of traditional colonial and imperial history. This article argues that gender provides an important conceptual tool for a trans-imperial and comparative exploration, just as it provided important conceptual structures for all the peoples of the Atlantic world. An examination of the research on two gendered issues – work, and family and sexuality – demonstrates that while Europeans attempted to impose their ideas on the various societies that they encountered in Africa and the Americas, such attempts were rarely successful.
View more
Babies on Board: Women, Children and Imperial Policy in the Spanish Empire
Gender & History2010
ABSTRACT: From 1778 to 1784, in an attempt to colonise Patagonia, the Spanish Crown transported more than 1,900 peasants from northern Spain to the Río de la Plata. Based on Enlightenment ideas about economy and society, the Crown used the colonisation scheme to assert control over some of its most marginal subjects. In the hope of transforming these peasants from poverty-stricken burdens on society into filial agents of empire, the Crown invested heavily in the health and wellbeing of the colonising mothers and children, and clearly established the monarchy as a benevolently powerful paternal authority.
View more
Elusive Virtue: Rethinking the Role of Female Chastity in Early Modern Spain
Journal of Early Modern History2004
ABSTRACT: For decades, scholars have emphasized the importance of female chastity in early modern Spanish society. Early modern thinkers enthusiastically promoted the notion in their works, Mediterranean anthropologists formulated a cultural model around female chastity through their studies, and early modern historians followed suit in their examinations of the Catholic Reformation. However, this analysis of recent works on gender and the extensive demographic literature on early modern Spain reveals that there is little evidence that female chastity was a priority for most Spaniards. Instead, demography, economy, class, and the influence of regional cultures may have had more of an impact on the development of sexual mores than any overarching cultural program.
View more
Gender, Property, and Retirement Strategies in Early Modern Northwestern Spain
Journal of Family History2000
ABSTRACT: Demographic studies indicate that elderly women were a prominent part of early modern rural society. Particularly in northwestern Spain, where partible inheritance left women in control of significant property, older women played a critical role in determining not only their own elder care but intergenerational relationships and family economies as well. An examination of retirement contracts from the region of Galicia in northwestern Spain indicates that peasant women used their familial authority and wealth to ensure that they and their families would be properly cared for as they aged.
View more
When Love Goes Wrong: Getting out of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Spain
Journal of Social History1996
ABSTRACT: In order to assert greater control over its parishioners, the Catholic Reformation Church in the wake of the Council of Trent (147-1563) attempted to bring relationships, especially those involving sexual relations, under its purview. This process involved the redefinition of marriage rituals, especially in terms of premarital sexual relations and the legitimization of marriage promises by a priest. The Council also strongly reiterated Church doctrine concerning the indissolubility of the sacrament of marriage. However, parishioners often proved to have little enthusiasm for such ecclesiastical regulation.
View more
