18th Century Birthing Chair

From io9:

From the ancient times until the 1800s, many women gave birth with the aid of parturition chairs, specially designed seats that allowed women to sit upright or recline while giving birth. This particular chair had padded leather rests for the mother's legs, but the parturition chairs came in a number of flavors. Some had extendable leg rests that aren't a far cry from modern gynecological stirrups. Others were much simpler, simply giving those assisting with the birth easy access to the infant while the mother remained somewhat upright.

Iran: Four Women Stoned To Death

Varying reports are surfacing that four Iranian women have been stoned to death.

Read More Here -: MFS - The Other News:

Based on reports received by the Melli-Mazhabi  (Religious-Nationalist) website (English translation can be read here), security agents from the Iranian Judiciary transferred the bodies of four women who had been stoned to death to the Tehran forensic medicine department. The bodies are currently in freezers at this department.

The stoning executions occurred two days after the Chair of Judicial and Legal Committee of the Iranian Parliament announced that the act of stoning had been replaced by alternative forms of punishment. According to Allahyar Malekshahi, conditions of adultery, the burden of proof, and the punishment for the offence were discussed in the Committee. According to Mr. Malekshahi, “In Iran’s [Islamic Penal] Code, adultery is punishable by death, but conditions on how to prove the act of adultery has taken place are not mentioned. In order to clarify the law, a separate section was added to distinguish the conditions under which a relationship is qualified as adultery.

See also: Iran Human Rights

Warning: the above links contain images many will find distressing.

Indigenous “Grandmother” Shamans

From Republica:

Hundreds gathered at Boudhanath Stupa on Sunday to welcome 13 indigenous “grandmother” shamans from across the world to Nepal for their first visit as a group.

The spiritual elders - including Nepal´s Tamang healer, Aama Bombo - are touring Nepal for the 12th gathering of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.  The Council was formed in 2004 to promote alternative medicine, shamanism, indigenous culture, and the urgent need for social change across the globe.

Shamanism is becoming controversial in some sections of the country as more and more people embrace Western medicine.

The Inventive Translations of Mary Sidney Herbert

From Slate dot com:

It's hard to imagine a modern family as prominent in as many ways as Philip Sidney and his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke were. In addition to the social and political prominence of the Kennedys and the wealth of the Kochs, beyond their personal glamour and estates and Philip Sidney's heroism in war, the brother and sister were at the center of scholarship and art—two realms that were less separated in their time than in the present.

Mary Sidney, proficient in Latin and ancient Greek as well as modern European languages, was a brilliant translator as well as a writer in prose and verse. Active as a patron of the arts and a host to artists, she was the center of a circle that included, in addition to her brother, poets Michael Drayton, Edward Dyer, Fulke Greville, and Edmund Spenser.

Her translations of the Psalms (continuing a project of her brother's, after his death) are said to have influenced, in a following generation, her cousin once removed George Herbert and John Donne.

Kateri Tekakwitha - Native American Saint

From Huffington Post:

Some traditional Mohawks are treating the naming of the nation's first Native American saint with skepticism and fear that the Roman Catholic Church is using it to shore up its image and marginalize traditional spiritual practices.

They see the story of Kateri Tekakwitha as yet another reminder of colonial atrocities and religious oppression.

A Catholic convert at 20, she settled in Kahnawake, a Mohawk settlement south of Montreal where Jesuits had a mission and where she and other women performed mortification rituals such as self-flogging as part of their faith. At her death at the age of 24, Kateri's smallpox scars reportedly vanished and later she was reported to appear before several people. She is buried at a shrine on Kahnawake.

Obits For Notable Women

From Philly dot com:

Maria Rosa Menocal, 59, formerly of Philadelphia, a Yale University professor and scholar who studied the interactions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain, died Monday, Oct. 15, at the home of a friend in Killingworth, Conn., after a three-year battle with melanoma.

Dr. Menocal was born in Havana. When she was 7, a year after the Cuban revolution, she came to Philadelphia to join relatives.

Her family eventually settled in Wayne, and she graduated from Radnor High School. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973; a master's degree in French from Penn in 1975; and a doctorate from Penn in 1979 in philology, the study of language as used in literature.

Early in her career, Dr. Menocal lived in Cairo and studied Arabic. She also lived in Spain and France, her husband, R. Crosby Kemper III, said.

A fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, she was a visiting lecturer or professor at Bryn Mawr College, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and the American University in Cairo, among others.

From the Irish Times:

At a time when it was very unusual for people in their 50s to enter university for the first time, Sheelagh Harbison undertook an undergraduate degree in general studies at Trinity College Dublin, which included history.

Her talent was spotted by the great professor of medieval history Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, who arranged for her to have special tuition in Latin so she could enter the honour school, and study for a moderatorship BA degree in history and political science.

She took her degree in 1972 and went on to complete an M Litt on William of Windsor, an English justiciar of Ireland in the later Middle Ages, subsequently published in a festschrift for Prof Otway-Ruthven.

She continued to work in TCD as a tutor until the 1990s, working also under Prof Jim Lydon. When he retired, she contributed also to his festschrift an essay on Colony and Frontier in medieval Ireland.

Another important work was her study of Rinndoon Castle on Lough Ree for the Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society.

Janet Johnson & Demotic Egyptian

From the Chicago Tribune:

Long before Facebook posts and tweets, long before letters with postage stamps, ancient middle and upper-middle-class Egyptians scrawled notes on pieces of clay pots and handed them to children who ran across the village to deliver the messages.

The language these Egyptians used from about 700 B.C. to A.D. 300 is called demotic Egyptian — from the Greek demos, meaning tongue of the common man — and was written in a cursive script during the same period when hieroglyphs were being used to memorialize pharaohs on monuments.

University of Chicago scholar Janet Johnson recently completed a 37-year project compiling the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, which has tens of thousands of words, some of which became "ebony," "adobe" and the name "Susan," surviving the trek across several centuries and cultures.

Ancient Female Oracles Seen As Divine

From Deseret News:

All ancient societies looked to prophecy and divination to ensure that their beliefs and activities were consistent with the will of the gods. Cosmic order could only be maintained by living a life in harmony with God.

Among the Romans, no prophetic oracle was more important or famous than the Sibyl, the prophetess of Cumae. The Sibyl was an office — like a high priestess — rather than a specific individual.

Throughout the ancient world at different times there were many women who were said to have been Sibyls, including a legendary Jewish Sibyl, the daughter-in-law of Noah, who is said to have lived at the time of the Tower of Babel.

For the Romans, however, the most venerated Sibyl prophesied from a sacred cave-temple at Cumae, near modern Naples in Italy.

The appearance of Sibylline oracles in Roman society dates back to the beginning of Roman history. 

The remarkable history of the Sibyls is recounted in H. W. Parke, "Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy" (Routledge, 1988). The surviving 14 books of Christianized Sibylline oracles have been translated in James Charlesworth, "The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha" (1983), 1:317-472.

Girl Challenges Taliban

From the Post Gazette:

The Taliban's attempted murder of a 14-year-old girl simply because she campaigned for the right of Pakistani girls to go to school is extreme even by that group's barbaric, medieval standards.

Malala Yousufzai, a young activist who defied the Taliban by pursuing an education and encouraging other girls to do so, was shot Tuesday in the head and neck by an assailant as she sat in a school bus in Mingora, a town in the Swat Valley.