How do you become an alchemist? This is what a 16th-century book suggests: This advice is said to come from a woman; it’s from The Secrets of the Lady Isabella Cortese, published in Venice in 1561. But what does this book, and the mysterious writer to whom it is attributed, tell us about women, science, alchemy, authorship, authority and expertise …
Imagine you are the ruler of an Italian city in the Renaissance; your husband has been murdered and your children were taken hostage by your political enemies, who hope to take control of your fortress. Yet the people inside are still loyal to you and are not surrendering. So, leaving your children with your enemies, you go inside the castle, …
Imagine that it’s 1554, and you’re the father of a young girl who is unwell. You write to a friend of yours, who is a physician, describing her symptoms, which include her being ‘pale, as if bloodless’. And this is the reply you get: The doctor continues, writing that the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates suggests that So… the solution for …
Is there anything more enlightening than listening in while women discuss their role in society? As the recent adaptation of Miriam Toews novel Women Talking shows, this is a pretty fascinating premise. In Toews’ story, which was inspired by real events, eight women from a Mennonite community gather to decide what to do in the aftermath of horrific sexual attacks …
From the mid-16th century to the early 20th century, young girls described as suffering from bodily weakness, dietary disorders, heart palpitations, fainting spells, paleness, and an absence of menstruation (amenorrhoea), were often given the diagnosis of ‘green sickness’, the ‘disease of virgins’.
In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf famously described how the history of women was unknown: ‘It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald, but save in these respects […] we know little of them and have little evidence upon which to base our conclusions.’ Woolf was writing shortly after women were granted the vote in the UK (1918), after an arduous campaign by the suffragettes. This first feminist wave, associated with the political women’s suffrage movement, did not prompt historians to investigate women’s history with a few exceptions.
It is estimated that between 1 and 2% of people have some kind of intersex variation and fall under the umbrella term of ‘sex variant’. (That’s around the same number of people who have red hair!) Yet, it is only in recent decades that intersex people have gained space in mainstream debates about equality and human rights. However, they have figured prominently in medical, religious, and legal arguments for centuries, serving as examples of competing ways of understanding gender and sex.
As she finds out the witches’ prophecy about Macbeth being crowned king and the current king’s imminent visit to their home, Lady Macbeth invokes evil spirits to help her be rid of her feminine qualities so that, together with Macbeth, she can murder the king: