Good overviews of the devel opments within and contributions to the field of women's history and gender studies are provided by S. Mantini, 'Women's history in Italy: Cultural itineraries and new proposals in current historiographical trends,'
This article examines the violence committed by men and women that appeared before the eighteenth century criminal courts in two cities in Europe: one in the North (Rotterdam, Holland) and one in the South (Bologna, Italy). The results provide further evidence for the existence of a broader pattern of nonlethal violence in early modern Europe that shared many of its characteristics among men and women. The comparison between Rotterdam and Bologna also revealed significant differences with regard to the pattern of violence. First, domestic violence was regularly prosecuted by the criminal court of Rotterdam, though seldom by the criminal court of Bologna. Second, the Rotterdam women represent a much larger share as offenders in the category of fighting than the women of Bologna (41 percent compared to 17 percent). Finally, the urban geography of violence was much more gendered in Bologna. The article argues that this divergent pattern can be explained by the significant differences between Bologna and Rotterdam with regard to women's social and legal positions. Whereas in Bologna, women's free movement was limited because of various factors, women in Holland had more free, independent, and public lives.
The complex relationship between the history of infectious diseases and social inequalities has recently attracted renewed attention. Smallpox has so far largely escaped this revived scholarly scrutiny, despite its century-long status as one of the deadliest and widespread of all infectious diseases. Literature has demonstrated important differences between rural and urban communities, and between cities, but has so far failed to address intra-urban disparities due to varying living conditions and disease environments. This article examines the last nationwide upsurge of smallpox in the Netherlands through the lens of Amsterdam’s 50 neighborhoods in the period 1870–72. We use a mixed methods approach combining qualitative spatial analysis and OLS regression to investigate which part of the population was affected most by this epidemic in terms of age and sex, geographic distribution across the city, and underlying sociodemographic neighborhood characteristics such as relative wealth, housing density, crude death rate, and birth rate. Our analyses reveal a significant spatial patterning of smallpox mortality that can largely be explained by the existing social environment. Lacking universal vaccination, the smallpox epidemic was not socially neutral, but laid bare some of the deep-seated social and health inequalities across the city.
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