Contraceptive Recipes in Materia Medica from the Medieval Islamic World

• In Event: Making and Shaping Humans, Animals, Plants, and Minerals in the Medieval and Early Modern World

English Abstract

Contraception and contraceptive recipes are an important theme in medical texts from the medieval Islamic world. They form part of wider discussions of birth control, which was considered key to the physician’s art, often meriting whole chapters in medical works. Recipes for contraceptives make use of animal parts, plants, and minerals, such wolf’s blood, walnut leaves or malachite. Their administration ranges from ingestible to intravaginal and they are often centred on female use.

Scholarship of contraception in the premodern Islamic world has often focused on arguments around its permissibility, with a particular emphasis on legal and theological theory. Although scholars have noted the vast number of recipes for contraceptives (and abortifacients) in texts of medical practice, their discussions have tended to be limited to whether these techniques were ‘irrational’ or ‘rational’, ‘popular’ or ‘learned’, and have placed emphasis on the development of ‘rational’ recipes that could be effective through chemical or mechanical means.

This paper examines a selection of recipes for contraceptives using animal parts, plants, and minerals that are described in materia medica from the medieval Islamic world. By bringing these recipes into conversation with theories and practices of generation discussed in philosophical and medical texts, in addition to works on zoology, botany, and mineralogy, this paper reflects on how these recipes drew upon connected understandings of generation across the animal, vegetal, and mineral realms. This paper traces parallel recipes found in sexual manuals and handbooks of wondrous techniques in order to consider how understandings of contraception and contraceptive techniques developed beyond the medical domain.

Author

• Beatrice Bottomley, The University of Bologna