This essay reflects on the ambivalent reception of The Death of Nature among English‐speaking historians of early modern science. It argues that, despite its importance, the book was mostly ignored or marginalized by these historians for a variety of reasons. These included the special role played by the “Scientific Revolution” in the grand narrative that increasingly shaped the historiography of science beginning in the 1940s and the subsequent “hyperprofessionalism” of the discipline as a whole. The essay concludes by placing Carolyn (...) Merchant’s work in the context of feminist utopian writing of the late 1970s and calls for renewed attention to the history of the utopian genre as a resource for teachers and feminist scholars of the history of science. (shrink)

In Making Sex (1990), Thomas Laqueur argued for a dramatic shift in Western medical understandings of sex difference circa 1800, falsely claiming that before then women were generally understood as imperfect men, their genitals trapped inside their bodies by their lack of complexional heat. In fact, the period before 1800 saw the coexistence of competing traditions relating to genital anatomy and function, in which Arabic medical compendia, largely ignored by Laqueur, played an important role. European interest in the inside/out model (...) of the genitals was initially specific to the late medieval Latin surgical tradition. Later elaborated by several sixteenth-century medical writers, including the surgeons Jacopo Berengario of Carpi and Ambroise Paré, it was moribund in learned European medicine by 1600, though it continued to flourish for several decades in vernacular literature, medical and nonmedical, in large part because it invited an explicit discussion of sexual practices. (shrink)

Professor Vickers extracts two or three sentences out of a long article I wrote on a completely different topic and misreads them, attributing to me statements I never made and positions I have explicitly argued against. When Francis Bacon used the metaphor of rape to refer to the Baconian natural philosopher's relationship to nature, which he did relatively infrequently, he invoked the classical, "heroic" sense of rape as the act whereby gods and heroes found dynasties and empires, as in the (...) rape of the Sabine women, the rape of Europa, and the rape of the daughters of Leucippus. (shrink)