Abstract
The material culture of nonprocreative sex also has its history, and this essay will attempt to trace what survives from women’s attempts to avoid or terminate pregnancy in the late antique and early Byzantine period. Both texts and objects testify to the grim reality of the choices that women then faced.
This paper was presented in an earlier version at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, in July, 2000, where several conference participants offered useful feedback. Professors Lawrence J. Bliquez and John M. Riddle, Lydia Collins, M.D., Jean Brodahl, and Karen Encarnacibn have likewise given perceptive advice, but the responsibility for the remaining flaws remains, of course, with myself.
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Notes
James V. Ricci, The Development of Gynaecological Surgery and Instruments ( Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1949 ), 30.
Holt N. Parker, “Women Doctors in Greece, Rome and the Byzantine Empire,” in Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, ed. Lilian R. Furst (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 131–50, here 138–40.
P. Gautier, “Le typikon du Christ Sauveur Pantocrator,” Revue des études byzantines 32 (1974): 12–145.
Michael Psellos, Carmen de re medica, Physica et medici graeci minores, ed. I. L. Ideler (Berlin: Reimeri, 1841), line 1189.
E. Künzl, “Spätantike und byzantinische medizinische Instrumente,” in Epidauros to Salerno, ed. Antje Krug, PACT 34 (1992): 209;
and Lawrence J. Bliquez, “The Surgical Instrumentarium of Leon Iatrosophistes,” Medicina nei secoli arte e scienza 11 /2 (1999): 316.
Lawrence J. Bliquez, “The Hercules Motif on Greco–Roman Surgical Tools,” From Epidauros to Salerno, ed. Antje Krug, PACT 34 (1992): 47.
Jan Blayney, “Theories of Conception in the Ancient World,” in The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives, ed. Beryl Rawson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986 ), 231.
This appendage seems most common on the fictile uteri found in Italic sanctuaries. Lawrence J. Bliquez, Roman Surgical Instruments and Minor Objects in the University of Mississippi ( Göteborg: Paul Astroms, 1988 ), 71.
Elizabeth A. Clark, commentary, The Life of Melania the Younger (N.Y. and Toronto: Mellen Press, 1984 ).
Ralph Jackson, Doctors and Diseases in the Roman World ( Norman, O.K.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 ), 104.
H. Schoene, “Zwei Listen chirurgischer Instrumente,” Hermes 38 (1903): 282.
G. E. Pentogalos and John G. Lascaratos, “A Surgical Operation Performed on Siamese Twins During the Tenth Century in Byzantium,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 58 (1984): 99–102, here 99–100.
Lawrence J. Bliquez and Alexander Kazhdan, “Four Testimonia to Human Dissection in Byzantine Times,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 58 (1984): 554–57 overviews examples, here 556.
Vivian Nutton, “From Galen to Alexander, Aspects of Medicine and Medical Practice in late Antiquity,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 8.
John Scarborough, “Early Byzantine Pharmacology,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 221.
John M. Riddle, “Byzantine Commentaries on Dioskurides,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 96.
Monica Green, Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease Through the Early Middle Ages (Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation 1985), 204–5.
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© 2002 Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación
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McClanan, A.L. (2002). “Weapons to Probe the Womb”. In: McClanan, A.L., Encarnación, K.R. (eds) The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08503-0_3
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