Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine) [Hardcover]

Joan Cadden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 26, 1993 | ISBN-10: 0521343631 | ISBN-13: 978-0521343633

Explores how scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in broader cultural assumptions about gender, and discusses how medieval natural philosophical theories and medical ideas on reproduction and sex intersected with ideas about the roles of men and women.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...presents medical and scientific views on such subjects as male and female reproductive roles, the causes of sex determination, sexual pleasure, and feminine and masculine types, as well as on two concrete problems, sterility and sexual abstinence....sets itself apart from previous scholarship in a number of ways. The author is extraordinarily sensitive to nuances and pluralities of meanings, paying close attention to rhetorical strategies that reveal underlying cultural assumptions and to questions of imagery and genre." Margaret Schleissner, Isis

"Joan Cadden has written a very learned, informative and thoughtful study of the origins and development of medieval learned opinion about sex difference. For once, the elusive and complex nature of medieval ideas on the subject is portrayed without oversimplification or anachronism." Nancy G. Siraisi

"...built on impeccable scholarly bases....can now serve as a text of reference for all matters having to do with scientific or medical aspects of sexuality or sex difference." Monica Green, Society for Ancient Medicine Review

"...Joan Cadden has carefully and systematically explored a great wealth of texts from the Latin medical tradition of the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries...[she] has raised high-scholastic medicine to a level of visibility formerly enjoyed only by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas." John Baldwin, Journal of the History of Sexuality

"Joan Cadden breaks new ground in a little-explored area in medieval studies: sex differences and the reasons given for them....[T]his well-written yet heavily documented book...can easily be read and understood by those who are not medievalists or medical historians. In short, it represents scholarship at its best." Vern L. Bullough, American Historical Review

"...Cadden's book is a first-rate piece of scholarship. It is based on wide reading in source material, in printed as well as manuscript form. Medical and natural philosophical writings are covered in depth, and their treatment is enriched by examination of non-scientific sources--literature, court cases, sermons. [Cadden] moves easily from the particular to the general and back again, presenting a convincing case that 'the definitions and properties of female and male represented a principle which, at least partly, ordered the world'." Helen Rodnite Lemay, Speculum-A Journal of Medieval Studies

"Joan Cadden...manages to honor the richness and complexity of medieval ideas about sexuality while also writing with great lucidity and intelligence....Cadden's great achievement in this book has been to take a voluminous amount of material and, while respecting its complexity and diversity, draw some compelling conclusions about the nature and development of that material. This is an important book both for the conclusions it draws and the model of exemplary scholarship it offers." Wendy Chapman Peek, Journal of the History of Medicine

"Meticulously researched and documented...Cadden discusses these ideas with great clarity and sophistication, locating them not only in the intellectual tradition, but also in the context of assumptions concerning family, marriage, and spiritual achievement that structured the lives of Christian elites...Her treatment emphasizes the intellectual flexibility and cultural variety of medieval views of sex difference, while never obscuring the way in which those views all agreed in typing the female as marginal, inferior and incomplete." Katharine Park, The Journal of the History of Biology

"...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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Book Description

Based on history, feminist theory and cultural studies, this text explores the ways in which scientific ideas about sex differences in the later Middle Ages participated in the broader cultural assumptions about gender, the social roles of men and women, purpose of marriage, etc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 326 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 26, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521343631
• ISBN-13: 978-0521343633
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,770,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Book, Setting the Academic Record Straight, April 15, 2009

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Bonam Pak (Berlin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine) (Paperback)

I read the 2003 print of the 1993 book. It features 281 regular text pages including 8 monochrome picture pages and extensive footnotes (thankfully) at the bottoms of the pages. It is Joan Cadden's direct academic response to Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud of 1992. The latter claimed much too monolithic historic one-sex-concepts. Cadden paints a more complex picture which includes differing historical views. It urned her the 1994 Pfizer Award as the Outstanding Book in the History of Science. Of further interest may be Nature's Body: Gender In The Making Of Modern Science and Mismeasure of Women: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex.

Beyond it's correcting character, I like this book for its many details. Such as the described historic concepts of the uterus ("hystera") once thought to be a separate and moving entity, hence causing the term and condition known till today as hysteria. (And watching current movies, I may say, the concept of the hysteric women in various contexts as in contrast to men has survived till today.) As well as related gender thinking, such as women supposedly representing imperfect or defective males. That a woman on top (in bed) was considered an usurpation is no less funny and revealing.

After reading books on the more recent history of medical prohibitions of masturbation (Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror and - also by Thomas Laqueur - Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation) I find it fascinating that before, in stark contrast, it was actually prescribed on doctor's orders for various conditions such as headaches, weight loss and melancholia. Midwives having to provide the service for virgins till the latter ejaculated. And that in the light of the West's female ejaculatory amnesia, only very recently having been rediscovered! (See Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot: Not Your Mother's Orgasm Book! (Positively Sexual))

A very enligthening and enjoyable book with easy vocabulary.