ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Aphrodisiac Recipes and Techniques: Rethinking Practical Knowledge of Human Generation among Free and Enslaved Women in the Premodern Islamicate World

• In Event: Burying the Torch: Illuminating Diverse Actors in the Making of Premodern Knowledge

English Abstract

Recipes and techniques for enhancing sexual pleasure and desire form a key component of practical texts from the premodern Islamicate world, ranging from materia medica and medical compendia to eclectic technical handbooks and sexual manuals. Sexual pleasure was perceived to be vital to human generation, and thus drew together the concerns of myriad actors.

Existing scholarship on discussions of human generation in premodern Arabic sources has tended to focus on theories found in medical and theological texts, often centring a learned discourse that was cultivated by male authors and associated with an ancient Greek textual heritage. However, in practical texts, such as medical compendia and sexual manuals, we can locate the presence of other authorities; free and enslaved women from diverse geographical origins, who have been dismissed as ‘fictional characters’ by some scholars. I argue that these ‘characters’ in fact bear witness to alternative lines of knowledge transmission and to the flows of people that were enabled, and sometimes compelled, within an expanding Islamicate world.

This paper asks how we can read medical compendia and sexual manuals against the grain to reconstruct the practices through which free and enslaved women managed human generation. In this way, it speculates how, when working with an asymmetric textual tradition, we can account for the role of diverse actors in the production and transmission of knowledge about the human body and natural world.

Author

• Beatrice Bottomley, The University of Bologna