A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science by David F. Noble. Oxford University Press 1992. In this ground breaking work, Noble provides the first full-scale investigation of the origins and implications of the masculine culture of western science. Correcting the notion that the culture of learning has always excluded women, Noble, a professor of history at York University in Toronto, shows that the advent of ascetic culture among Christian clerics from the late medieval period has led to male dominance over institutions of higher learning and to the exclusion of women. He demonstrates with multiple historic facts and details that women had not merely been marginalized and anathematized in the science-based civilization spawned by this ascetic culture, but he also shows how these attitudes remained intact through the Reformation and continue to exert a strong influence today.
Read and weep about how women were burned at the stake for being witches. Church records, mainly court documents, of trials indicate the ladies were accused of changing into familiars, usually black cats, and flying around on brooms, as well as having had sexual intercourse with the devil himself. Signed confessions were used to prove guilt, even though such confessions were the product of duress and torture. It is expected that women would confess to anything under the influence of the rack, hoist and red-hot pincers. Changing into black cats? Flying? As resourceful as women are, they cannot change themselves into black cats. Nor can they fly. Those things are not possible. Resourceful as women are they cannot do the impossible.
During the inquisition whole German towns were emptied of women because all the women had been murdered by being burned at the stake. The alleged proof a woman was a witch is laughable by modern standards: A brown mole in the wrong place, an ectopic nipple, could spell doom. Witches were known to the Church officials to float, whereas normal women were considered heavier and will sink. This led to the witch water test with a special chair designed to dip the accused in a river or lake. The specific gravity of a normal woman is such that the body will float and all the women did float proving the conjecture and supposedly proving their guilt.
A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science by David F. Noble is an important book, a bold and provocative work. I recommend it without reservation or hesitation.
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