ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

As in the Earth, So in the Womb: Astral Powers, Virginal Conceptions, and the Spontaneous Generation of Humans

• In Event: Reconsidering Spontaneous Generetation

English Abstract

The unsettling possibility that human beings might themselves arise through spontaneous generation loomed large over medieval and early modern natural philosophy. Well before the rediscovery of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, medieval readers encountered accounts of rocks turning into humans in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Building upon Avicenna, Albertus Magnus transformed this topic into a formal Aristotelian problem, arguing that astral influences could fashion even the most complex creatures from the fertile mud of a post-diluvial world. In the centuries that followed, spontaneous generation continued to challenge the Genesis narrative and the doctrine of a monogenetic human origin.
While scholarship has largely concentrated on the philosophical debate, this paper explores the underexamined implications of these theories for the social and cultural status of the female body. Albertus Magnus proposed that under the right environmental conditions, the power of the stars could act not only on the soil but also on the womb enabling virginal conceptions and births. Around 1300, Peter of Abano further deprived women or their own generative powers claiming that the womb was not strictly required for the generation but served merely as a suitable environment for complex embryos under unfavorable times or climates. The trope that the earth was the true mother of the living beings extended far beyond metaphor. It also operated reciprocally: the female body came to be equated with fertile soil that only provides matter, nourishment, and shelter.
The discovery of the equatorial regions’ constant warmth and humidity reinforced this framework, encouraging speculations that the conditions required for the spontaneous generations or large animals – including humans – could exist even in the present world. As Andrea Cesalpino noted in the late 16th century, the maturation of human or elephant embryos demands more months of steady warmth and moisture that temperate latitudes can provide. The female womb supplies these conditions so that the whole of the earth can be inhabited. In Cesalpino’s formulation, “The Sun is everyone’s father”. The earth – and the earth alone – remains the common mother.

Author

• Ivano Dal Prete, Yale University