ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Anatomy, Ancient Literature, and the Construction of Sex Categories in 16th-Century Learned Medicine

• In Event: Decentralizing Women’s Medicine: Plural Voices Describing Female Bodies in the Long Early Modern Period

English Abstract

The definition of early modern medicine as a discipline has proven to be more complex than previously acknowledged by historians and, in light of current divisions between fields of knowledge, interdisciplinary (Blair 2010). In the Early Modern period, however, literature and historiography were embedded in medical knowledge so deeply that they can be considered its integral parts. This is particularly true for medical notions of anatomical sex. The tribade and the hermaphrodite catalysed tensions about anatomical sex and immoral behaviours (Daston, Park 1998). The role of non-anatomical components in the production of these medical categories is considerable: travel accounts from Africa, characters from Greek and Roman literature are exploited to validate the authority of physicians over the regulation of sex differences, that is of the dividing lines between what is natural and what is not.
This contribution explores the influence of early modern philological knowledge over medical notions of sex differences. Physicians like Jean Riolan mention Martial, Ovid, and Lucian within medical discussions of bodily features that produce immoral behaviours, e.g. the tribadism caused by an enlarged clitoris. These references appear as established knowledge, or information, but in earlier philological works the discussion about the tribade and other categories is still in the making. In what ways are the philological and the medical discourse connected? And can a better understanding of how philological knowledge is received and re-used by physicians shed a new light on the early modern production of sex categories and regulations? Possible answers to these questions will be discussed through the analysis of the textual tradition of selected medical treatises and dictionaries, of humanist collections of antiquities, such as the Adagia by Erasmus, and philological commentaries.

Author

• Martina Ravaioli, University of Bonn - CRC 1329 "Cultures of Vigilance"