front cover of The Court Midwife
The Court Midwife
Justine Siegemund
University of Chicago Press, 2005
First published in 1690, The Court Midwife made Justine Siegemund (1636-1705) the spokesperson for the art of midwifery at a time when most obstetrical texts were written by men. More than a technical manual, The Court Midwife contains descriptions of obstetric techniques of midwifery and its attendant social pressures. Siegemund's visibility as a writer, midwife, and proponent of an incipient professionalism accorded her a status virtually unknown to German women in the seventeenth century. Translated here into English for the first time, The Court Midwife contains riveting birthing scenes, sworn testimonials by former patients, and a brief autobiography.
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front cover of German Writing, American Reading
German Writing, American Reading
Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866–1917
Lynne Tatlock
The Ohio State University Press, 2012
In postbellum America, publishers vigorously reprinted books that were foreign in origin, and Americans thus read internationally even at a moment of national consolidation. A subset of Americans’ international reading—nearly 100 original texts, approximately 180 American translations, more than 1,000 editions and reprint editions, and hundreds of thousands of books strong—comprised popular fiction written by German women and translated by American women. German Writing, American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866–1917 by Lynne Tatlock examines the genesis and circulation in America of this hybrid product over four decades and beyond. These entertaining novels came to the consumer altered by processes of creative adaptation and acculturation that occurred in the United States as a result of translation, marketing, publication, and widespread reading over forty years. These processes in turn de-centered and disrupted the national while still transferring certain elements of German national culture. Most of all, this mass translation of German fiction by American women trafficked in happy endings that promised American readers that their fondest wishes for adventure, drama, and bliss within domesticity and their hope for the real power of love, virtue, and sentiment could be pleasurably realized in an imagined and quaintly old-fashioned Germany—even if only in the time it took to read a novel.
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front cover of Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ
Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ
Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Read by Protestants and Catholics alike, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–94) was the foremost German woman poet and writer in the seventeenth-century German-speaking world. Privileged by her social station and education, she published a large body of religious writings under her own name to a reception unequaled by any other German woman during her lifetime. But once the popularity of devotional writings as a genre waned, Catharina’s works went largely unread until scholars devoted renewed attention to them in the twentieth century.

For this volume, Lynne Tatlock translates for the first time into English three of the thirty-six meditations, restoring Catharina to her rightful place in print. These meditations foreground women in the life of Jesus Christ—including accounts of women at the Incarnation and the Tomb—and in Scripture in general. Tatlock’s selections give the modern reader a sense of the structure and nature of Catharina’s devotional writings, highlighting the alternative they offer to the male-centered view of early modern literary and cultural production during her day, and redefining the role of women in Christian history.

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