"A kind of agonie in my thoughts": writing puritan and non-conformist women's pain in 17th-century England.

The relationship between pain as a physical and emotional experience and the concept of suffering as an essential aspect of sanctification for faithful believers was a paradoxical and pressing theological and phenomenological issue for puritan and non-conformist communities in 17th-century England. Pain allows the paradox of non-conformists' valorisation and suppression of corporeality to be explored due to its simultaneous impact on the mind and body and its tendency to leak across boundaries separating an individual believer from other members of their family or faith community. The material world and the human body were celebrated as theatres for the display of God's glory through the doctrines of creation and providence despite the fall. Pain as a concept and experience captures this tension as it was represented and communicated in a range of literary genres written by and about puritan and non-conformist women including manuscript letters, spiritual journals, biographies and commonplace books. For such women, targeted by state authorities for transgressing gender norms and the religion established by law, making sense of the pain they experienced was both a personal devotional duty and a political act. Three case studies comprise a microhistory of 17th-century English puritan and non-conformist women's lived experience, interpretation and representation of pain, inscribed in a series of manuscripts designed to nurture the spiritual and political activism of their communities. This microhistory contributes to a better understanding of pain in early modern England through its excavation of the connections that such writers drew between the imperative to be visibly godly, their marginalised subject position as a proscribed religious minority and their interpretation of the pain they experienced as a result.

Blurring reality with fiction: Exploring the stories of women, madness, and infanticide.

PROBLEM: Often, there is a sense of shock and disbelief when a mother murders her child. BACKGROUND: Yet, literary texts (plays, poems and novels) contain depictions of women experiencing mental illness or feelings of desperation after childbirth who murder their children. AIM: To further understand why a woman may harm her child we examine seven literary texts ranging in time and place from fifth century BCE Greece to twenty-first century Australia. METHODS: A textual analysis approach examined how the author positioned the woman in the text, how other characters in the text reacted to the woman before, during, and after the mental illness or infanticide, and how the literary or historical critical literature sees the woman. FINDINGS: Three important points about the woman's experience were revealed: she is represented as morally ambiguous and becomes marginalised and isolated; she is depicted as murdering or abandoning her child because she is experiencing mental illness and/or she is living in desperate circumstances; and she believes there is no other option. CONCLUSION: Literary texts can shed light on socio-psychological struggles women experience and can be used to stimulate discussion by healthcare professionals about the development of preventative or early intervention strategies to identify women at risk.

Investigating the tool marks on oracle bones inscriptions from the Yinxu site (ca., 1319-1046 BC), Henan province, China.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC) are the earliest well-developed writing forms of the Chinese character system, and their carving techniques have not been studied by tool marks analysis with microscopy. In this study, a digital microscope with three-dimensional surface reconstruction based on extended depth of focus technology was used to investigate tool marks on the surface of four pieces of oracle bones excavated at the eastern area of Huayuanzhuang, Yinxu site(ca., 1319-1046 BC), the last capital of the Shang dynasty, Henan province, China. The results show that there were two procedures to carve the characters on the analyzed tortoise shells. The first procedure was direct carving. The second was "outlining design," which means to engrave a formal character after engraving a draft with a pointed tool. Most of the strokes developed by an engraver do not overlap the smaller draft, which implies that the outlining design would be a sound way to avoid errors such as wrong and missing characters. The strokes of these characters have different shape at two ends and variations on width and depth of the grooves. Moreover, the bottom of the grooves is always rugged. Thus, the use of rotary wheel-cutting tools could be ruled out. In most cases, the starting points of the strokes are round or flat while the finishing points are always pointed. Moreover, the strokes should be engraved from top to bottom. When vertical or horizontal strokes had been engraved, the shell would be turned about 90 degrees to engrave the crossed strokes from top to bottom. There was no preferred order to engrave vertical or horizontal strokes. Since both sides of the grooves of the characters are neat and there exists no unorganized tool marks, then it is suggested that some sharp tools had been used for engraving characters on the shells. Microsc. Res. Tech. 79:827-832, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Women, writing, and healing: rhetoric, religion, and illness in An Collins, "Eliza," and Anna Trapnel.

Focusing on An Collins, "Eliza," and Anna Trapnel, this essay considers the interconnections of mind, body, and spirit in the mid-seventeenth century. Given their gender and their era, that the writing of all three serves as a means of expressing religious devotion is not surprising--what may be, however, is the role of illness as both catalyst for and topic of work that is also deeply and consciously rhetorical. Articulating what may be as much illness enabled as it is divinely inspired, their work further suggests a more than merely intuitive sense of language's capacity to heal body as well as soul.

Ancient administrative handwritten documents: X-ray analysis and imaging.

Handwritten characters in administrative antique documents from three centuries have been detected using different synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques. Heavy elements in ancient inks, present even for everyday administrative manuscripts as shown by X-ray fluorescence spectra, produce attenuation contrast. In most cases the image quality is good enough for tomography reconstruction in view of future applications to virtual page-by-page `reading'. When attenuation is too low, differential phase contrast imaging can reveal the characters from refractive index effects. The results are potentially important for new information harvesting strategies, for example from the huge Archivio di Stato collection, objective of the Venice Time Machine project.

[Female anthropology, physiology and disease in ancient Christian writers]. / Antropologia, fisiologia femminile e malattie di donne negli antichi scrittori Cristiani.

Ancient Christian sources are rich in reference to the anthropology and physiology of the female. Christianity in the first centuries had multiple positions as concerns the doctrinal thoughts as well as the social practices. Christian anthropological doctrine has been developed along two exegetical lines, hinging on Genesis 1-3: the first views the human being as a whole psycophysical entity and thereby highlights the protological inferiority of the woman; the second, spiritual and Platonic, emphasizes the inner self and thus, in theory, is more equalitarian. Ancient philosophical theories regarding human generation, in particular those ofAristotle and the Stoics, are used, along with medical notions, by Christian theologians to elaborate the dogma of incarnation. However, in certain cases, as with the post partum virginity of Maria, medical theories are totally put aside. The stories recounting the miracles offer the possibility of understanding medical practices offemale conditions and the emotive reactions of the women.

Ali ibn Hosein Ansari (1330-1404): a Persian pharmacist and his pharmacopoeia, Ekhtiyarat i Badi i.

Ekhtiyarat i Badi i (Badi i Selections) is a drug manual of traditional Persian medicine, well known in Farsi-speaking countries, the Middle East and India. The author was the greatest pharmacist-physician of the 13th-century Mongolian period in Persia. The unique style of writing, with authoritative and critical drug overviews, made his book an invaluable Farsi reference of traditional pharmacy for four centuries. In spite of adverse social and political circumstances in the Mongolian era, the book contributed to the reconstitution of Persian pharmacy and medicine, serving as a basic reference for the compilation of other drug manuals and scientific works for centuries after its introduction.

"[N]ot subject to our sense" : Margaret Cavendish's fusion of Renaissance science, magic and fairy lore.

This article explores Margaret Cavendish's depictions of alchemy, witchcraft and fairy lore in her scientific treatise Philosophical Letters and in fictional texts from Natures Pictures and Poems and Fancies. Though Cavendish was a dedicated materialist, she appropriates theories of magic from early modern science and folklore into her materialist epistemology. As Cavendish draws upon a fusion of early modern conceptions of magic, she creates a radical theory of matter which not only challenges patriarchy and binary oppositions, but also explores the plurality and mystery that can exist within an infinitely complex material world.

WPW syndrome: the 'Rosetta stone' of rhythmology. The history of the Rosetta stone.

Prior to the 'discovery' of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, interpreting the respective phenomena was akin to reading hieroglyphic characters; thus a clear pathophysiological understanding and practical clinical diagnosis were impossible. The epochal work by Wolff, Parkinson, and White, which resulted in the electrophysiologically correct interpretation of circus movements as the cause of tachycardic rhythm disorders, can therefore indeed be compared to the deciphering of hieroglyphic writing by Champollion in 1822 with the aid of the Rosetta stone. After intensive archaeological and graphological examinations by the Society of Antiquaries, the Rosetta stone finally made its way to the British Museum, where it can still be viewed and admired today.

Early Maya writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala.

The ruins of San Bartolo, Guatemala, contain a sample of Maya hieroglyphic writing dating to the Late Preclassic period (400 B.C. to 200 A.D.). The writing appears on preserved painted walls and plaster fragments buried within the pyramidal structure known as "Las Pinturas," which was constructed in discrete phases over several centuries. Samples of carbonized wood that are closely associated with the writing have calibrated radiocarbon dates of 200 to 300 B.C. This early Maya writing implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica.

Khipu accounting in ancient Peru.

Khipu are knotted-string devices that were used for bureaucratic recording and communication in the Inka Empire. We recently undertook a computer analysis of 21 khipu from the Inka administrative center of Puruchuco, on the central coast of Peru. Results indicate that this khipu archive exemplifies the way in which census and tribute data were synthesized, manipulated, and transferred between different accounting levels in the Inka administrative system.