The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages
Medicine, Science, and Culture

This book examines how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in cultural assumptions about gender.

Joan Cadden (Author)

9780521483780, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 31 March 1995

328 pages, 7 b/w illus.
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.45 kg

"...a welcome and much-needed addition to the vast scholarship on the roles of women in the Middle Ages that has been published in recent years....This book will stimulate discussion in many fields. This historian of medieval Christianity finds Cadden's ideas wonderfully suggestive for further exploration of religious topics....Students in other fields of history will find that this erudite book opens many doors of historical imagination." E. Ann Matter, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

In describing and explaining the sexes, medicine and science participated in the delineation of what was 'feminine' and what was 'masculine' in the Middle Ages. Hildegard of Bingen and Albertus Magnus, among others, writing about gynecology, the human constitution, fetal development, or the naturalistic dimensions of divine Creation, became increasingly interested in issues surrounding reproduction and sexuality. Did women as well as men produce procreative seed? How did the physiology of the sexes influence their healthy state and their susceptibility to disease? Who derived more pleasure from intercourse, men or women? This book explores how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in the broader culture's assumptions about gender. Cadden discusses how medieval natural philosophical theories and medical notions about reproduction and sexual impulses and experiences intersected with ideas about such matters as the social roles of men and women, and the purpose of marriage.

Introduction
Part I. Seeds and Pleasures: The Evolution of Learned Opinions: 1. Prelude to medieval theories and debates: Greek authorities and their Latin transformations
2. The emergence of issues and the ordering of opinions
3. Academic questions: female and male in scholastic medicine and natural philosophy
Part II. Sex Difference and the Construction of Gender: 4. Feminine and masculine types
5. Sterility: the pursuit of progeny and the failure of reproductive function
6. Is sex necessary? The problem of sexual abstinence
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX]