It is the electronic journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Every summer and winter, the journal publishes issues of peer-reviewed articles that focus on art produced in the Netherlands (north and south) during the early modern period (c. 1400-c.1750), and in other countries and later periods as they relate to Netherlandish art. Submissions are encouraged on painting, sculpture, graphic arts, tapestry, architecture, and decoration, from the perspectives of art history, art conservation, technical studies, museum studies, historiography, and collecting history.

http://www.jhna.org/

Cranach took his name from the town of his birth, Kronach, near Bamberg. He was probably trained by his father, the painter Hans Maler. By 1503 he was working among a circle of humanists at the University of Vienna. His earliest known works, created at this time, were characterized by a religious and spiritual intensity and an emphasis on man’s relationship to nature and constituted the beginning of the stylistic movement known as the Danube School.

In 1504 Cranach was called to Wittenberg by Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. There he developed the smooth, linear style that became the standard form of expression of his large and productive workshop and that determined the appearance of painting in Saxony throughout the sixteenth century. Until his death Cranach served as court artist to Frederick the Wise and successors John the Steadfast and John Frederick the Magnanimous, decorating the elector’s favorite residences, such as the Veste Coburg and Torgau castles, but no traces of his mural paintings survive. In addition to the many portraits of members of the Saxon nobility, produced as woodcuts or painted on panel, Cranach served their more private tastes with small paintings of a tantalizing, mildly erotic nature, showing nude Venuses or Lucretias. After 1508 he used a winged serpent as a signature on his own work and on the products of his workshop. In Wittenberg he was one of the two wealthiest citizens, the result of earnings not only from the workshop but also from the pharmacy, wine store, bookstore, and printer’s shop he owned.

From 1519 to 1545 he served on the Wittenberg city council and was elected burgomaster on three occasions. After Charles V took John Frederick prisoner at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547, Cranach followed him into exile at Augsburg and Innsbruck, and after the elector’s release in 1552, he accompanied him to Weimar, where the artist died in 1553.

I have  just found one great database where you can find all letters that Van Gogh have written… Hope  you will enjoy it…

http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html

Pamphlets remained the principal polemical instrument for most of the eighteenth century. Opinion could rapidly follow events, and authors could respond quickly to the arguments of their opponents. Long pamphlet wars on specific topics were frequent. Pamphlets provided the perfect instrument for personal attacks on individuals. Known as libelles in France, they targeted important persons, sparing no one, including Louis XV and his mistresses, as well as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, his wife. The ideal medium of persuasion, pamphlets were the preferred instrument of argument in every area of eighteenth-century contestation. Authors wrote on all subjects, no matter how sensitive, in an effort to persuade the public of the truth of their particular viewpoints. Thus, pamphlets played an important role in the development of public opinion.

Distinguished authors The literature of the Enlightenment, which had its fair share of contested issues, frequently appeared in pamphlet form. The great philosophes often wrote as pamphleteers even when their publications expanded beyond the limits of the typical pamphlet. For example, from 1757 to 1765, the character and political structure of Geneva (Switzerland), the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and for a time the residence of Voltaire, proved to be a subject of considerable philosophic dispute and pamphlet debate. While opposing the oligarchic structure of Geneva’s government, Rousseau argued for maintaining the city’s ban on theaters to prevent the development of aristocratic artificiality. Defending enlightened culture, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Voltaire opposed the ban on theaters, but Voltaire undercut the local aristocracy by favoring political reform of the city. Another dispute, the Querelle des Bouffons, which was initiated in Paris in 1753, concerned the relative merits of French opera versus Italian opera. Eventually involving d’Alembert, Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, this pamphlet debate ultimately centered on the quality of Rameau’s French operas. A similar querelle (“quarrel”) emerged in the 1770s in Paris between defenders of the operas of Christoph Willibald von Gluck and the advocates of his rival Niccolò Piccinni, which resulted in the appearance of scores of philosophic pamphlets. In Italy, a considerable pamphlet war began in 1749 between enlightened writers, who attacked superstitious belief in witchcraft and magic, and Christian authors, who feared that denying the supernatural would undermine the very basis of religious truth. Voltaire, perhaps the Enlightenment’s premier philosophe-pamphleteer, waged his best-known pamphlet campaign against the religious fanaticism and judicial improprieties of the Calas Affair, which involved the Parlement of Toulouse’s notorious decision in 1762 to condemn and execute, on very weak evidence, Jean Calas, a Huguenot, for the murder of his son. Although Calas was executed, Voltaire’s publications played an important role in persuading Louis XV to reverse the Parlement’s judgment. In the end, the enterprise of the Enlightenment became the subject of a polemical debate; it was initiated by authors who attacked the entire philosophic establishment and its work.

Most eighteenth-century pamphlets were not written by the great literary figures of the Enlightenment. Anyone with an opinion and the resources to pay for its publication could produce a pamphlet. In France, for example, pamphlets on such diverse subjects as economics, agricultural practices, relations with Great Britain, royal finances, and the private life of the king were written and published by clergy, nobility, and members of the urban middle classes. Mémoires judiciares, pamphletlike legal briefs of civil cases that could be legally published and circulated in huge numbers, allowed barristers to bring numerous social, moral, and even political issues before the public in the guise of discussing their cases before the courts. Important personages, lacking the talent or inclination to write their own pamphlets, could always engage writers willing to undertake the task for them. Much of the eighteenth-century political pamphlet literature in England and France was sponsored by patrons. Some of their writers were great literary figures, like Daniel Defoe, who served both Tory and Whig ministries in England in the early 1700s, but others were Grub Street hacks, hoping to acquire literary reputations while earning meager livings. Both the English and French governments employed writers to justify ministerial policies to the public. In contrast, American pamphleteers tended to be individuals—clergymen, merchants, lawyers, or planters—who wanted to express their views publicly.

Although all pamphlets were intended to influence and shape public opinion, the overtly political pamphlets had the greatest impact on society. During the 1700s, as politics moved increasingly into the public sphere in much of western Europe and in Britain’s American colonies, pamphlets provided a basic medium for political discussion. Some well-developed political newspapers and journals existed in both Britain and its American colonies, but the traditional pamphlet with its unique characteristics and potential of complete anonymity remained a vital part of all political discussion. Many of the journals were little more than periodical pamphlets.

Lively political-pamphlet debate occurred, as well, in the 1700s in Switzerland, the United Provinces (Low Countries) and the Austrian Netherlands. Perhaps most significant was the body of French pamphlet literature, which grew in both volume and intensity during that century. Such pamphlets helped transform France—where the government was committed to the maintenance of the sovereign authority of the monarch and the prevention of public discussion of matters of state—into a society in which all parties entered the public sphere and sovereign authority was ultimately transferred to the citizenry.

Eighteenth-century political pamphlets developed the language of patriotism, which, in the context of the era, implied the restoration of ancient constitutional rights that had been usurped by monarchical government. In England, this was the language of the Country Party, which expressed deep distrust of the ministry, its placemen (members of the House of Commons on the ministerial payroll), a standing army, British involvement on the European continent, modern public finance, and government bureaucracy. Country ideology, which had its origins in seventeenth-century English republicanism [see Republicanism], called for Parliament’s reform and a return to the ancient constitution of England. The Country Party argued that the independent landowners of the kingdom, rather than the ministers, should control Parliament, thereby restoring the traditional balance between the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. American colonists, some of whom fought the British attempts to tax them in the 1760s and 1770s, utilized these Country arguments in pamphlets that expressed opposition to ministerial policies. In France, patriot ideology emerged from the attempts of the Parlement of Paris to undermine royal support for Unigenitus, a papal bull (pronouncement) of 1713, which condemned as a heresy the Roman Catholic sect of Jansenism. In the 1750s, Jansenist barristers, writing in support of the activities of Jansenist magistrates in the Parlement, developed theories that were based on the ancient constitutional structure of France, which established firm limits on royal authority. These theories formed the ideological basis of much of the French patriot pamphlet literature of the 1770s, which attacked the despotism of Chancellor René-Nicholas de Maupeou in his attempt to destroy the Parlement of Paris and, necessarily, the French constitution. Patriots in the United Provinces (Low Countries) wrote pamphlets condemning the monarchical pretensions of the House of Orange and demanded a return to the pure republican system of the seventeenth century. Similar arguments appeared in the Austrian Netherlands in an attempt to counter the authority of the Austrian emperor, Joseph II. Only in republican Geneva (Switzerland) did opposition-pamphlet literature not posit arguments calling for the reestablishment of traditional constitutional forms.

The political debate in England became explosive during the John Wilkes affair. Wilkes had not only suffered from ministerial despotism (when arrested in 1763 for publishing a libelous attack on King George III in the North Briton) but had also been denied a seat in Parliament after being duly elected three times in 1769. Wilkes then became the focus of a political battle fought through pamphlets, newspapers, and popular agitation. Although this agitation did not lead to revolution, popular participation in the Wilkes affair offered a serious threat to the political practices of the kingdom.

After 1763, every act of the British Parliament that affected the Thirteen Colonies in America met a hostile response in American pamphlets and newspapers. Political writers, well acquainted with the Country Party’s ideology, believed that Parliament under the domination of corrupt ministers was despotic and that every new law undermined the British constitution, thereby threatening liberty in America. After a decade of such warnings, the implementation in 1774 of Britain’s Coercive Acts, which severely limited the authority of the colonial assembly of Massachusetts, made the despotic intentions of the ministry clear to Americans. Soon, the arguments for independence from England became increasingly compelling. In early 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the most startling pamphlet to appear during that crisis, helped Americans to recognize the necessity of independence from Britain; it advocated a republicanism that decisively rejected the arguments in favor of the balance of the ancient English constitution. Still, the traditions of Country ideology remained strong as evidenced by the publications battling the proposed constitutional changes put forward by the Philadelphia convention of 1787.

Meanwhile, the impending bankruptcy of the French monarchy, the Parlement of Paris’s continued obstruction of ministerial financial reforms, and the decision to recall the Estates General (the ancient representative body of France) to solve those problems led to the publication of thousands of pamphlets in 1788 and early 1789. Initially, the debate was between the ministry, determined to control the Estates General through a reorganization that would weaken the political influence of the nobility, and the Parlement of Paris, the official voice of the Patriot Party determined to maintain the traditional constitution in the face of ministerial despotism. The debate quickly expanded to include a third element, the National Party, which sought the maintenance of the constitution through an alliance of the nobility and the third estate against the ministry. Jansenist ideology and the theories of the eighteenth-century political philosopher Montesquieu continued to inform the language of political publications. Increasingly, however, National Party pamphleteers also relied on Rousseau’s concept of the general will in constructing their arguments. In January 1789, Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s powerful contribution to this literature, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État?, provided the most original adaptation of Rousseau to the issue of the proper representation of the French nation. Nevertheless, more traditional political arguments continued to dominate both the pamphlet literature and the thinking of the public until well after the establishment of the National Assembly in June 1789.

Pamphlets had an important function during the Enlightenment era. At a time when many polities did not permit the sanctioned free expression of thought, that form of publication provided the means for writers to air issues of public concern and to expose both the hidden secrets of governments and those of prominent individuals, opening society to wider scrutiny and public influence. Such literature also provided a route for misinformation, innuendo, and slander to pass easily into the public sphere. Nevertheless, pamphlets did help disseminate enlightened thought, expand knowledge, promote understanding of a wide variety of ideological and political arguments, and increase participation in eighteenth-century public affairs.

Jerusalem

In the late Roman period Jerusalem retained the plan and the name of Aelia Capitolina, a Roman colony founded by Hadrian between 130 and 135. On the existing street grid Hadrian had imposed two monumental colonnaded streets, one leading south from the main north gate (the present Damascus gate) along the western spur, and the other descending the Tyropoean Valley between the two spurs. The Temple Mount lay in ruins, and Aelia’s principal temple, to Capitoline Jupiter, dominated the city from the higher western spur, adjacent to the colonnaded street. To the south of the temple opened the city’s forum, part of it over the transverse valley, which Hadrian had filled in to provide the needed space. Another major street, perhaps not colonnaded, extended from the main west gate (now the Jaffa gate) east across the western spur and the Tyropoean Valley to the Temple Mount.

Roman Aelia’s small Christian community had venerated caves in Bethlehem 9 km to the south, and at Gethsemane and on the Mount of Olives just east of the city. Outside the walls stood a house church and a small suburban community on Mt. Sion. The Christians played no role in the city, of which the empire’s Christians were scarcely aware.

This changed dramatically in 326 when, according to tradition, Helena reached Jerusalem. The year before, Bp. Makarios of Jerusalem had secured permission from Constantine I at the Council of Nicaea to destroy the Capitoline temple. While removing the foundations, in Helena’s presence, workmen uncovered an empty tomb which was identified as that of Christ. A rock nearby was taken to be Golgotha. This discovery created a sensation among Christians and quickly stimulated pilgrimage from as far away as the western provinces. Constantine ordered a basilica (which became the city’s episcopal see) constructed just to the east of the tomb.

Retaining its Roman plan, Aelia now became a Christian city and, in common parlance, was once again called Jerusalem or “the Holy City.” An outpouring of public and private wealth gave the city’s topography a Christian appearance. Besides the complex surrounding the Holy Sepulchre, Constantine built the Eleona church on the Mount of Olives and a great basilica in Bethlehem. By the end of the 4th C. the Roman noblewoman Poimenia had financed the Ascension Church (Imbomon) near the Eleona, and unknown benefactors the Church of the Apostles on Mt. Sion and a church in Gethsemane. Bishops such as Cyril of Jerusalem became the most powerful men in the city.

Constantine enforced Hadrian’s edict excluding Jews from Jerusalem but permitted them entrance to mourn the destruction of the Temple—in Christian eyes salutary proof of Christianity’s triumph. With similar symbolism but opposite intentions, Julian the Apostate lifted the Hadrianic ban and resolved to rebuild the Jewish Temple. Work began in 362/3 but was soon suspended. Christian pilgrims to the Temple Mount were shown the bloodstains of Zacharias there (Protoevangelion of James 23.2–3) as well as the standing Herodian retaining walls (of considerable height) and the various underground chambers said to belong to Solomon’s palace.

By the end of the 4th C., virtually the entire pagan population had embraced the victorious faith. By 381–84, when Egeria visited Jerusalem, asceticism had struck root, and monks and consecrated virgins, many from abroad, formed an important part of the populace. Mainly Western ascetic communities existed on the Mount of Olives by 375, and a decade later St. Jerome and his protégé Paula founded rival monasteries in Bethlehem. Immigrant ascetics like Melania the Younger helped the city’s economy with generous endowments to churches, monasteries, and xenodocheia.

Like Palestine as a whole, Jerusalem profited from traffic in relics. Rich in ordinary “blessings” (see eulogia), Jerusalem also possessed the wood of the True Cross; bits of it, acquired for a price, or stolen, or given as presents, soon made their way across Christendom. Similarly, Bp. John II of Jerusalem took control of the relics of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, which came to light in 415. In 420 or 421 John’s successor dispatched Stephen’s right arm to Constantinople, in return for which Theodosios II sent money to Jerusalem and dedicated a gem-encrusted cross on Golgotha.

Melania influenced Athenais-eudokia, consort of Theodosios, who first came to Jerusalem on pilgrimage in 438/9 and then, exiled from the court, settled permanently (ca.443–60). Eudokia endowed monasteries, founded hostels for pilgrims and the poor, and built churches to the Virgin at Siloam—on the south flank of Jerusalem’s eastern spur—and perhaps at the Sheep Pool, the latter commemorating Mary’s birth. Eudokia’s Basilica of St. Stephen, north of the city, remained the largest church for a century. Above all, the exiled empress built a new fortification wall whose defensive perimeter finally incorporated Mt. Sion and the southern suburbs as far as Siloam. In the mid-5th C., Jerusalem reached a pinnacle of population and wealth unequaled since the Herodian period. Despite this, Caesarea Maritima held primacy among the sees of Palestine until 451, when Bp. Juvenal of Jerusalem secured the patriarchate (see Jerusalem, Patriarchate of).

After Constantine and Eudokia, Justinian I ranks as Jerusalem’s third imperial benefactor. He built the Nea Ekklesia of Mary Theotokos, the city’s largest church, and extended the main colonnaded street south to its west façade. This completed the urban plan of Jerusalem as depicted on the Madaba mosaic map.

In 614 the Persians besieged and captured Jerusalem with heavy destruction and loss of life, gave the city over to the Jews, and carried off the True Cross (Expugnationis Hierosolymae ad 614 recensiones arabicae, ed. G. Garitte, 2 vols. [Louvain 1974]). Herakleios forced the Persians to withdraw; the return of the city’s talisman is variously dated to 629, 630, and 631 (V. Grumel suggests 21 March 631 [ByzF 1 (1966) 139–49]); within the decade, however, Jerusalem fell to the Arabs. About March 638, after a long siege, Patr. Sophronios surrendered Jerusalem to the Caliph ʿUmar, who refrained from praying at the Lord’s Tomb and thus preserved the site for Christianity. The Muslims, who likewise called Jerusalem “the Holy City” (al-Quds), built their shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqṣa Mosque, on the Temple Mount. Christian pilgrimage continued on a smaller scale. In 1009 the mad Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim leveled the Holy Sepulchre, but Constantine IX soon restored it (R. Ousterhout, JSAH 48 [1989] 66–78).

The Crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099 and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem (see Jerusalem, Kingdom of). Europeans ruled the city from 1099 to 1187 and from 1229 to 1243, gave the Church of the Holy Sepulchre its present form and built the Gothic Church of St. Anne. They turned the Dome of the Rock temporarily into a church, the Templum Domini, and the knightly Order of Templars established itself in al-Aqṣa. Despite subsequent rebuilding, the Old City today retains the urban plan of the Roman and Byz. periods.

In art, biblical exegesis, and theology a celestial Jerusalem paralleled and sometimes reflected the terrestrial city. Conforming to biblical prophecies about Jerusalem, this conception became an archetype of the human soul, of the Christian church, and of individual church buildings. It provided an image of paradise, as in Revelations 21–22 and the 10th-C. vision of the Monk Kosmas (Synax.CP 111–14), where the heavenly city with golden streets and a palace could equally be Constantinople, sometimes called by the Byz. the New Jerusalem.

In addition to the Holy Sepulchre, six sites in Jerusalem were of special interest to pilgrims.
1.The House of Caiaphas, where part of Jesus’ trial took place and Peter denied him (Mt 26:57–75), was east of Mt. Sion. Peter’s repentance (Mt 26:75) was remembered there in the early stational liturgy of Holy Thursday. By the 6th C. at the latest, a church of St. Peter replaced “ruins” of at least the house and continued to be a focus of interest through the Latin Kingdom.
2.The Garden of Gethsemane, just east of the city, was the site where Jesus prayed (Mk 14:32–42) and was betrayed by Judas (Mk 14:43–50). Early pilgrims used Gethsemane as a place of prayer. By the late 4th C. a church was built there; probably the earthquake of 746 destroyed it. Sources refer to a rock or a cave of the betrayal. The Breviarius, Patr. Eutychios of Constantinople, and the Piacenza Pilgrim held that Jesus had a supper at Gethsemane; Eutychios distinguishes this “first supper” from the “second” meal at Bethany (Jn 12:2) and the “third,” that is, the Last Supper (see Lord’s Supper). A certain Theodosius set the Washing of the Feet at Gethsemane, which was also identified with the tomb of the Virgin’s Dormition.
3.The Praetorium, or residence of Pontius Pilate (Mk 15:16), was in fact in the area of the Tower of David, but the place pointed out to Byz. pilgrims was in the Tyropoean Valley. A church existed there from the mid-5th C., decorated perhaps with murals depicting the narrative of Mark 15:16–20. From the 6th C., pilgrims were shown the stone (with footprints) upon which Christ stood during his trial, Pilate’s seat, and a portrait of Christ.
4.The Sheep Pool (pool of Bethesda, John 5:2) was located near the east gate of the city. Excavations have shown that the site was originally a pagan healing shrine; porticoes enclosed its two pools during the Roman period. By the mid-5th C. a “Church of the Sheep Pool” was on the spot, with a courtyard overhanging the pools. It was the locus sanctus not only of the healing of the paralytic (and preserved his couch), but also of the birth of the Virgin.
5.Siloam was a pool on the south side of the city where Jesus sent the blind man to wash and be healed (John 9:7). A traditional healing shrine, it was enclosed by a square colonnade in Roman times, and, in the 5th C., marked by a church that attracted the sick ( Piacenza Pilgrim, Travels 24) seeking the eulogia of the waters. Remains of both stages have been found by excavation.
6.The Tower of David, on the site of the present Citadel, is portrayed on the Madaba mosaic map as two towers to the right of the west entrance to the city. The name was applied generally to the originally three-towered fortress built there by Herod the Great, where Byz. pilgrims believed David had composed or recited the Psalms.

McLean wrote the lyrics in 1971 after reading a book about the life of the artist.

http://19thcentury.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/female-hysteria/

In 1859, it was claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. This number makes sense if you consider that there was a 75-page catalogue with possible symptoms, and this list was seen as incomplete. Some of the symptoms of female hysteria are faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, shortness of breath, irritability and a loss of appetite for food.
The exact cause of hysteria is not clearly defined, except that is was a ‘womb disease.’ According to the Victorians, it had either to do with pent-up fluids in the female body, stress of modern-day life, or the ‘wanderings of the womb.’ It was definately an upper-class disease, an American physician expressed pleasure that the country was ‘catching up’ to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.

Luckily, there was a temporary solution for hysteria (hysteria was a chronic disease so it could never be fully cured.) The woman suffering from hysteria would go to the doctor for a ‘pelvic massage to the point of hysterical paroxysm.’ The doctors thought this to be a very tedious task indeed, and due to this, the first vibrators were invented: around 1870 the first ones were in use by physicians.

There is a Dutch book which deals with the issue, but I don’t think it has ever been translated. In Frederik van Eeden’s ‘Van de Koele Meren des Doods,’ a young wife gets ill and, after examining her, the physician encourages her husband to engage in the marrital duties more often. This book was written in 1900, and I think may be one of the earliest to show how the lack of physical affections in the Victorian marriage might affect a women’s mood.