ABSTRACT
What are the differences between the parts of generation in men and women? Helkiah Crooke, a London physician, asks this question in the midst of his 1615 book on anatomy, Microcosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man. This is a huge book, running to more than a thousand folio pages and filled with illustrations. It was in many ways a typical anatomical book. Following Andreas Vesalius’ groundbreaking work of 1543, On the Fabric of the Human Body, anatomies were often printed in a large format and amply illustrated. Anatomy had become the ultimate investigation of nature, laying bare the secrets of God’s most wondrous creation. To understand the body of man was complex. The body of woman, and its hidden capacity to generate new life, was an even greater challenge. This is an era when ‘generation’ – a term that I will use throughout this chapter – encompassed the processes of development and growth as well as the act of reproduction. Sex, gender and sexuality were not defined simply in terms of ‘biology’. What it meant for a body to be ‘natural’ was itself at stake. Emerging discourses of objectivity were tied to constructions of subjectivity.2 The differences between men and women and between masculinity and femininity were inscribed and enacted within understandings of the natural world as God’s creation. Social relations were regulated by the Church and mediated through notions of patrilineage and patriarchy which informed governance from the state to the family. Questions about sex, generation and sexuality were debated within universities, in legal courts, and by laypeople. By publishing books that exposed knowledge about generation, physicians demonstrated their mastery of the natural world and displayed their prowess as men of learning.3
