The Mother’s Blood: Classical Embryology’s Impact on Christian and Jewish Theology

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Gender and Sexuality

Abstract

Women’s bodies have been bound up with theology for as long as people have asked the question “Where do babies come from?” The answers to this query provided by Classical Greek thinkers have had major implications for Jewish and Christian conceptions of God, motherhood and female piety. Many scholars ask how the Classical embryological debates reflect, and affected, the status of women, and assume that theories that downplay the mother’s contributions to offspring are implicitly sexist and disempowering. Comparing medieval Jewish and Christian theological adaptations of these embryological debates destabilizes these assumptions. Medieval interpretations of Classical embryology reveal that both vital theological doctrines and the religious status of women depended on understandings of human conception. In reality, theories that lessened women’s contributions to the embryo opened rich avenues for mystical activity by Christian women, while more equitable theories favored by Jewish thinkers did little to provide opportunities for Jewish women.

Author

• Ranana Dine