Satan in America tells the story of America's complicated relationship with the devil. "New light" evangelists of the eighteenth century, enslaved African Americans, demagogic politicians, and modern American film-makers have used the devil to damn their enemies, explain the nature of evil and injustice, mount social crusades, construct a national identity, and express anxiety about matters as diverse as the threat of war to the dangers of deviant sexuality. The idea of the monstrous and the bizarre providing cultural metaphors that interact with historical change is not new. Poole takes a new tack by examining this idea in conjunction with the concerns of American religious history. The book shows that both the range and the scope of American religiousness made theological evil an especially potent symbol. Satan appears repeatedly on the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the United States, a shadow self to the sunny image of American progress and idealism.

In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager probes the struggles of aggrieved spouses shedding light on the nature of marriage and violence in the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. Analyzing over 1,500 divorce records that reveal intimate details of marriages in conflict in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840--1860, Sager offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of ordinary Americans shaken by accusations of cruelty. At a time when the standard for an ideal marriage held that both partners adequately perform their respective duties, hostility often arose from ongoing domestic struggles for power. Despite a rise in the then novel expectation of marriage as a companionate relationship, and even in the face of liberalized divorce grounds, marital conflicts often focused on violations of duty, not lack of love. Sager describes how, in this environment, cruelty was understood as a failure to fulfill expectations and as a weapon to brutally enforce more traditional interpretations of marital duty. Sager's findings also challenge historical literature's assumptions about the regional influences on violence, showing that married southerners were no more or less violent than their midwestern counterparts. Her work reveals how definitions and perceptions of cruelty varied according to the gender of victim and perpetrator. Correcting historical mischaracterizations of women's violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, Sager finds antebellum wives both capable and willing to commit a wide variety of cruelties within their marriages. Her research provides details about the reality of nineteenth-century conjugal unions, including the deep unhappiness buried within them.

According to the popular press in the mid twentieth century, American women, in a misguided attempt to act like men in work and leisure, were drinking more. “Lady Lushes” were becoming a widespread social phenomenon. From the glamorous hard-drinking flapper of the 1920s to the disgraced and alcoholic wife and mother played by Lee Remick in the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses,” alcohol consumption by American women has been seen as both a prerogative and as a threat to health, happiness, and the social order. In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role, particularly one that glorifies motherhood. Lady Lushes offers a fresh perspective on the importance of gender role ideology in the formation of medical knowledge and authority.

Drink, in the minds of antebellum temperance reformers, represented the threat of an increasingly urban, industrial world. Contrasting the drunkards' lack of restraint with their own thrift and sobriety, these members of the emerging middle class lay claim to respectability, virtue, and moral leadership. As they sought to legitimate their own authority, reformers also employed temperance literature to propagate middle-class ideas about the nature of women and their role as guardians of the home. Stories of women as innocent victims and loving saviors filled temperance literature. Ministers, novelists, and journalists portrayed wives beaten by drunken husbands; poets and songwriters extolled mothers and sisters who rescued men from demon drink. Yet a strand of misogyny also ran through temperance ideology. Denunciation of women as causes of intemperance and snares for men, and celebration of women's victimization often coexisted with a more positive assessment of women's role in the emerging middle class. Unless a woman remained vigilant, she too might succumb to drink, and reformers had very little sympathy for such a fallen angel. By examining the contradictory images of women employed by the antebellum temperance movement, Scott Martin reveals the reformers' commitment not only to social betterment but also to middle-class interests and a particular gender ideology. Martin explores the reasons why more men than women drank, the ways in which society dealt with women who neglected familial and social obligations to become drunkards, and the consequences of women's failure to eradicate male drunkenness.

Mining the rich Venetian archives, especially the unusually detailed records of Venice's own branch of the Roman Inquisition, Guido Ruggiero provides a strikingly new and provocative interpretation of the end of the Renaissance in Italy. In this boldly structured work, he develops five narrative accounts of individual encounters with the Inquisition that illustrate the double-edged metaphor of how passions were both bound by late Renaissance society and were seen in turn as binding people. In this way new perspectives are opened on magic, witchcraft, love, marriage, gender, and discipline at the level of the community and beyond. Witches, courtesans, prostitutes, women healers, nobles, Cardinals, and renegade priests and monks speak from these pages describing their lives, beliefs, hopes, fears, and lies. With an imaginative flair for storytelling and impeccable scholarship, Ruggiero exposes the rich complexity of the culture and poetics of the everyday at the end of the Renaissance and illuminates a previously unexplored chapter in Italian history.

"This important study explores the medicalization of alcohol abuse in the 19th century US” and its influence on American literature and popular culture (Choice). In Rum Maniacs, Matthew Warner Osborn examines the rise of pathological drinking as a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in 19th century America. At the heart of that story is the disease that afflicted Edgar Allen Poe: delirium tremens. Poe’s alcohol addiction was so severe that it gave him hallucinations, such as his vivid recollection of standing in a prison cell, fearing for his life, as he watched men mutilate his mother’s body—an event that never happened. First described in 1813, delirium tremens and its characteristic hallucinations inspired sweeping changes in how the medical profession saw and treated the problems of alcohol abuse. Based on new theories of pathological anatomy, human physiology, and mental illness, the new diagnosis established the popular belief that habitual drinking could become a psychological and physiological disease. By midcentury, delirium tremens had inspired a wide range of popular theater, poetry, fiction, and illustration. This romantic fascination endured into the twentieth century, most notably in the classic Disney cartoon Dumbo, in which a pink pachyderm marching band haunts a drunken young elephant. Rum Maniacs reveals just how delirium tremens shaped the modern experience of alcohol addiction as a psychic struggle with inner demons.

This book addresses the multifaceted history of the domestic sphere in Europe from the Age of Reformation to the emergence of modern society. By focusing on daily practice, interaction and social relations, it shows continuities and social change in European history from an interior perspective. The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe contains a variety of approaches from different regions that each pose a challenge to commonplace views such as the emergence of confessional cultures, of private life, and of separate spheres of men and women. By analyzing a plethora of manifold sources including diaries, court records, paintings and domestic advice literature, this volume provides an overview of the domestic sphere as a location of work and consumption, conflict and cooperation, emotions and intimacy, and devotion and education. The book sheds light on changing relations between spouses, parents and children, masters and servants or apprentices, and humans and animals or plants, thereby exceeding the notion of the modern nuclear family. This volume will be of great use to upper-level graduates, postgraduates and experienced scholars interested in the history of family, household, social space, gender, emotions, material culture, work and private life in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe.

Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction. Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre's engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.

Drink, in the minds of antebellum temperance reformers, represented the threat of an increasingly urban, industrial world. Contrasting the drunkards' lack of restraint with their own thrift and sobriety, these members of the emerging middle class lay claim to respectability, virtue, and moral leadership. As they sought to legitimate their own authority, reformers also employed temperance literature to propagate middle-class ideas about the nature of women and their role as guardians of the home. Stories of women as innocent victims and loving saviors filled temperance literature. Ministers, novelists, and journalists portrayed wives beaten by drunken husbands; poets and songwriters extolled mothers and sisters who rescued men from demon drink. Yet a strand of misogyny also ran through temperance ideology. Denunciation of women as causes of intemperance and snares for men, and celebration of women's victimization often coexisted with a more positive assessment of women's role in the emerging middle class. Unless a woman remained vigilant, she too might succumb to drink, and reformers had very little sympathy for such a fallen angel. By examining the contradictory images of women employed by the antebellum temperance movement, Scott Martin reveals the reformers' commitment not only to social betterment but also to middle-class interests and a particular gender ideology. Martin explores the reasons why more men than women drank, the ways in which society dealt with women who neglected familial and social obligations to become drunkards, and the consequences of women's failure to eradicate male drunkenness.

Satan is not God’s enemy in the Bible, and he’s not always bad—much less evil. Through the lens of the Old and New Testaments, Erik Butler explores the Devil in literature, theology, visual art, and music from antiquity up to the present, discussing canonical authors (Dante, Milton, and Goethe among them) and a wealth of lesser-known sources. Since his first appearance in the Book of Job, Satan has pursued a single objective: to test human beings, whose moral worth and piety leave plenty of room for doubt. Satan can be manipulative, but at worst he facilitates what mortals are inclined to do anyway. “The Devil made me do it” does not hold up in the court of cosmic law. With wit and surprising examples, this book explains why.