Hairy women and naked truths: Gender and the politics of knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 43-74

  Fissell, Mary E ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845794930     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491495     Document Type: Review

References (94)

1. Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston, Printed and sold by S. Kneeland, opposite to the Probate-office in Queen-street., M,DCC,LXV [1765]), 53
2. I am very grateful to Ava Chamberlain, "Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts," New England Quarterly, 75 (2002), 179-203, for sharing much information about the so-called bad book controversy with me
3. Some of the evidence has been published in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven, 1995), 172-78
4. and in Thomas H. Johnson, "Jonathan Edwards and the 'Young Folks' Bible,'" NEQ, 5 (1932), 37_54
5. On Edwards's understanding of the processes of reproduction, see Chamberlain, "The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 57 (2000), 289-322
6. See Mary E. Fissell, "Making a Masterpiece: The Aristotle Texts in Vernacular Medical Culture," in Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine (Baltimore, in press), for further discussion of this episode
7. Previous studies of this work include Sir D'Arcy Power, "Aristotle's Masterpiece," The Foundations of Medical History (Baltimore, 1931), 147-78
8. Otho T. Beall, Jr., "Aristotle's Master Piece in America: A Landmark in the Folklore of Medicine," WMQ, 3d Ser., 20 (1963), 207-22
9. Vern L. Bullough, "An Early American Sex Manual, Or, Aristotle Who?" Early American Literature, 7 (1973), 236-46
10. Janet Blackman, "Popular Theories of Generation: The Evolution of Aristotle's Works: The Study of an Anachronism," in John Woodward and David Richards, eds., Health Care and Popular Medicine in Nineteenth-Century England: Essays in the Social History of Medicine (New York, 1977), 56-88
11. Angus McLaren, "The Pleasures of Procreation: Traditional and Biomedical Theories of Procreation," in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World (Cambridge, 1985), 323-420
12. Porter, "'The Secrets of Generation Display'd': Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England," in Robert Purks Maccubbin, ed., 'Tis Nature's Fault. Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1987), 1-21
13. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), esp. 19-24
14. The literatute on monstrosity is large and growing. In addition to Huet, among the most useful for my interpretation of this image are William B. Ashworth, Jr., "Natural History and the Emblematic World View," in David C. Lindberg and Richard S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), 303-32
15. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (Boston, 1998)
16. Park and Daston,"Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in France and England," Past and Present, No. 92 (1981), 20-54
17. and Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1995)
18. On monstrosity in the mid-17th century in particular, see David Cressy, Travesties and Transgression in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford, 2000), 29-50
19. Jerome Friedman, The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution (New York, 1993), esp. 48-54
20. William E. Burns, "The King's Two Monstrous Bodies: John Bulwer and the English Revolution," in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, ed. Peter G. Platt (Newark, Del., 1999), 187-202
21. The Problemes of Aristotle, with other Philosophers and Phisitions. Wherein are contayned diuers questions, with their answers, touching the estate of mans bodie (At Edenborough, Printed by Robert Waldgraue, 1595), STC (2d ed.), 763
22. Ann Blair has shown that European books published under this title actually consist of two different works. The first (published in Latin in 1475) is still included in modern editions of Aristotle's works, although it is not considered to be Aristotle's own work. This text was never to my knowledge published in English. The other - Problems - was first published in Latin in 1483 or 1488, rapidly translated into various European vernaculars, and frequently republished in the 16th and 17th centuries. I am very grateful to Professor Blair for sharing her work on these texts with me; see her "Authorship in the Popular 'Problemata Aristotelis,'" Early Science and Medicine, 4 (1999), 189-227
23. On Aristotle as a sex expert, see Fissell, "Making a Masterpiece."
24. T.C., I.D., M.S., T.B., "practitioners," The Compleat Midwifes Practice . . . (Printed for Nathaniel Brooke at the Angell in Cornhill, 1656), Thomason Tracts E.1588[3]
25. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives . . . (London, Printed by Peter Cole, at the sign of the Printing-Press in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange, 1651), Thomason Tracts E.1340 (1). On these and similar texts, see my forthcoming Vernacular Bodies: Women and Popular Medicine in Early Modern England
26. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton, 1994), 275-76
27. Lemnius, A Discourse Touching Generation. Collected out of LÆvinus Lemnius, a most learned physitian. Fit for the use of physitians, midwifes, and all young married people (London, printed by John Streater, 1664). Identified as L1043A on the UMI microfilm
28. Boaistuau, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature . . . (Imprinted at London, by Henry Bynneman dwelling in Knightrider streat, at the signe of the Mermaid Anno 1569), STC 10787, fol. i3r, v. In this translation of Boaistuau by Fenton, there is considerable tension in the image of the king and the hairy woman, because the previous chapter tells (and illustrates) the story of a wicked king who was forced to live in the wild and became hairy. One of the major themes of this part of the work is that rulers are subject to the same misfortunes as their subjects, and that good government is a difficult task
29. Boaistuau, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature, fol. 12r
30. Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French, by Th: Johnson (London, printed by Th: Cotes and R. Young, anno 1634), STC 19189
31. Aristotle's Master piece Compleated'. . . (London, printed by B. H., 1697), Wing (CD-ROM, 1996) A3697KA (hereafter cited as Masterpiece II). Harris fled to Boston in the 1680s to escape prosecution for publishing unlicenced political satires. Perhaps the Masterpiece's early and enduring American popularity dates to Harris's Boston sojourn or connections
32. Every Woman Her Own Midwife, Or, a Compleat Cabinet Opened for Child-bearing Women (London, Printed for Simon Neale, 1675), Wing E3553
33. Pechey, The Compleat Midwife's Practice Enlarged (London: H. Rhodes, J. Philips, J. Taylor and K. Bentley, 1698), Wing (CD-Rom 1996) P1022. I write "appear to be" because I have not found another source for these sections. Although they are new to the Masterpiece, I suspect that they derive from another source
34. Aristotle's Book of Problems, 58
35. Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 21
36. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sexual Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), 203-04
37. See Timothy Husband and Gloria Gilmore-House, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York, 1980), 100-01, for a discussion of a 16th-century image of St. Mary of Egypt
38. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)
39. Jacob Bontius, Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis libri sex (Amstelodami, 1658), book 5, 84. An English translation was published in London in 1776
40. Aristotle's Complete Master-piece, in three parts . . . (London [ie., Boston], Printed and sold for Zechariah Feeling, MDCCLXVI)
41. Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson . . . (Boston, printed and sold by Nathaniel Coverly, in Black-Horse Lane, North End MDCCLXX), Reilly 1092
42. For example, see Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds, Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London, 1994)
43. Karen Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiop White': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello," in Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), 71-93
44. and Francesca T. Royster, "White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 432-55
45. See, esp., Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1995)
46. Morris Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950), B435
47. Hall, Things of Darkness
48. Peter Erickson, "Representations of Race in Renaissance Art," The Upstart Crow, 18 (1998), 2-9
49. Erickson, "Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance," Criticism, 35 (1995), 499-527. Many thanks to Virginia Vaughan for these two references
50. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all ages . . . (London, printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, and are to be sold at his shoppe in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Rose, 1613), STC (2d ed.) 20505, 545-56
51. See Margaret Pelling, "Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body, and Disease," in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., London 1500-1800: The Making of the Metropolis (London, 1985), 82-112
52. Masterpiece I, 20
53. This suggestion has to be understood as particularly outrageous in view of early modern concerns about sexual honor. See, in particular, Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996)
54. and Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London, 1999)
55. Culpeper, Directory for Midwives, 5, 34, 10
56. On Culpeper, see F.N.L. Poynter, "Nicholas Culpeper and His Books," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 17 (1962), 152-67
57. and "Nicholas Culpeper and the Paracelsians," in Allen G. Debus, ed., Science, Medicine, and Society in the Renaissance. Essays to Honor Walter Paget, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 1:201-20
58. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration. Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660 (London, 1975), 268-73. Unfortunately, the recent biography by Olav Thulesius cannot be relied on since it includes fictitious episodes
59. Masterpiece I, 93
60. All the Culpeper quotations in the paragraph are Culpeper, Directory for Mid wives, 1651, 29
61. Aristotle's Last Legacy: or his Golden Cabinet of Secrets (London, Tho. Norris, MDCCXI [1711]), 91
62. This is the first version of Legacy, which appeared in an undated edition around 1690. It is replaced by the second version in the 1730s, which is a redaction of the Masterpiece
63. On the longer history of concerns about virginity, see Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, eds., Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Newark, Del., 1999)
64. and Marie H. Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisberg, Pa., 1997)
65. Masterpiece I, 44-45
66. Jane Sharp, Midwives Book (London, printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the west end of St. Pauls, 1671), Wing (2d ed.) S2969B, see 120
67. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1970)
68. Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984)
69. Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987)
70. Robin Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of 1685 (London, 1984)
71. Melinda S. Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (University Park, Pa., 1999)
72. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714 (Manchester, Eng., 1999), 86-104
73. Cannon, "Memoirs," Somerset Record Office DD/SAS C/1193/4 48
74. The Works of Aristotle in Four Parts (London, Printed for, and Sold by all the Booksellers, 1777)
75. Aristotle's Master-piece Compleated (Glasgow, printed in the year 1781)
76. See Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 61-78, and Philip K. Wilson, "'Out of Sight, Out of Mind'?: The Daniel Turner-James Blondel Dispute over the Power of the Maternal Imagination," Annals of Science, 49 (1992), 63-85
77. See also Paul-Gabriel Bouce, "Imagination, Pregnant Women, and Monsters in Eighteenth-Century England and France," in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. Rousseau and Porter (Chapel Hill, 1988), 86-100
78. Todd, Imagining Monsters
79. Lisa Cody, "A New Whim-Wham from Guilford," Gender and History, 4 (1992), 175-96
80. On the complex meanings associated with figures such as these, see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, 1989), esp. 87-110
81. See, in particular, Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago, 1998)
82. Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England," Genders, No. 6 (1989), 125-30
83. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (New York, 1997)
84. Ruth Perry, "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991), 1-27
85. Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, 1995)
86. Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 1996)
87. Aristotle's Masterpiece Completed in Two Parts ([New York?], printed and sold by the book-sellers, 1796)
88. Cannon, "Memoirs," 41
89. on Cannon, see Hitchcock, "Sociability and Misogyny in the Life of John Cannon, 1684-1743," in Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, eds., English Masculinities, 1660-1800 (London, 1999), 25-43
90. Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854), ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge, 1972), 45
91. A. L. Rowse, A Cornishman at Oxford (London, 1965), 196
92. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford, 1993), 226, 722
93. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980)
94. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1985)