Monday, March 9, 2020

Two Lives Reflected essays

Two Lives Reflected essays Gluckel von Hameln or Glikl and Marie de LIncarnation lived mirror like lives in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis. The two women were very devout in their religion. They were both well-educated women. They were both motivated women. They both broke the boundaries that women faced in the 17th Century. Glikl was a devout Jew. She married at the age of twelve as most of the Jews did unlike Christian women of the times that wed at 18. The two lived with each of their parents for a year after marriage. This was a typical custom of Jewish marriages in the 17th Century. They then moved out into a rented house and two servants. This was all that they were allowed to have. She married off her children in several different cities. This was a Jewish strategy of marrying children in cities that were far off and some that were close to home. The reasoning behind this was that there were insufficient Ashkenazim of the proper status to go around. They also took advantage of the Jewish law permitting first cousins to marry with one of their daughters. Marie de L'Incarnation was an Ursuline sister in Quebec. She was of the two women who founded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America. Marie spent years insisting on Christian truth to people that her countrymen intruded upon. She would take on a pastoral role to the Buisson wagoners and stablemen. She would get them to admit their faults and failings while she presided over the dinner table, lecturing them on God and his commandments, rousing them if they had gone to bed without saying their prayers. Marie went to Canada to spread the word. She taught at a school in both Algonquian and Iroquoian languages. She would also go on flying missions to spread the word farther from the Quebec center of Catholicism. She wrote catechisms, prayers, dictionaries, and a big book of sacred h ...