Speculum

A radically subversive critique brings to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

In Speculum, Hannah Copley considers the difficult history of the female body. Mirroring the title object used for centuries by gynaecologists, the poems uncover the hidden lives behind scientific progress. From the enslaved women exploited in the name of invention to the anonymous residents of mother and baby homes, Copley navigates personal, historical and forgotten legacies with equal exactitude and tenderness. Speculum is not only important as a feminist text, but its poetry is immaculate; a virtuosic first collection.

The quintessential examination of women, gynecology is not simply the study of women's bodies, but also serves to define and constitute them. From J. Marion Sims's surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-19th century to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. 34 photos.

"The King's Mirror (Speculum regale-Konungs skuggsjá)" by Anonymous (translated by Laurence Marcellus Larson). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Highlights local history to tell a national story about the evolution of the women’s health movement, illuminating the struggles and successes of bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces. The women’s health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women’s bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women’s liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women’s relationships with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women’s access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women’s bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood. This book examines historically the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. By bringing medical history and the history of women’s bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, the author sheds light on the understudied efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office—in the home, the women’s center, the church basement, the bookshop, and the clinic. Lesbians, straight women, and women of color all play crucial roles in this history. At its center are the politics, institutions, and relationships created by and within the women’s health movement, depicted primarily from the perspective of the activists who shaped its priorities, fought its battles, and grappled with its shortcomings.

The Speculum compiled by Archbishop Thomas Secker (1758-68) is a major source for our understanding of the position of the Church of England in the mid-eighteenth century. A parish by parish digest of the returns submitted to the archbishop between 1758 and 1761, in the main for the diocese of Canterbury but including several others. It contains very full information on such matters as the size and social structure of the parishes; the names and qualifications of the clergy; their wealth; and their relations with Roman Catholics and protestant dissenters. Part of the significance of the Speculum is its witness of the pastoral pressure applied by Secker, allowing the historian to assess how far an energetic archbishop was ableto improve the standards of pastoral provision in the parishes under his care. This edition has attempted to preserve the spelling and capitalisation of the original, and editorial notes give biographical information on the large number of persons mentioned in the text, as well as identifying other textual allusions. JEREMY GREGORY is Lecturer in History at the University of Northumbria.

The attribution of the Speculum Astronomiae to Albertus Magnus became a controversial issue only recently, when the great neo-Thomist historian Pierre Mandonnet suggested -- without any antecedents -- that the author was Roger Bacon rather than Albert. Mandonnet's theses were refuted by Lynn Thorndike and have since then been the subject of widespread discussion. The present historiographical case-study considers this debate in the light of an analysis of texts by Albert himself, as well as other important authors, such as Bacon, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Witelo, Campanus of Novara, and others, which shows how widespread the general concept of the influence of the stars and other astrological ideas to be found in the Speculum were. Most of the scientific ideas of the Middle Ages were based on principles derived from the notion of celestial influence and its consequences. The Speculum drew the fundamental outlines of this discipline into a theoretical and bibliographical introduction -- no small achievement -- and was consequently greeted with great interest and used as a standard reference book for many centuries. Set against the background of discussions taking place in the 1260s, within the Dominican Order as well as in the Faculties of Arts, Zambelli removes all doubt that the Speculum was written by Albert, possibly with some collaboration.