International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2008 Abstracts

This paper examines the processes by which French medical encyclopaedias from the mid-thirteenth century onward incorporated different traditions, Greco-Arabic medicine, Roman natural philosophy, and Judeo-Christian moral thought, in discussions of embryology and particularly the importance of menstrual blood in fetal development. I argue for the centrality of scholars in and around Paris in transmitting and transforming Arabic and Aristotelian theories of embryonic growth in the mid-thirteenth century universities. Parisian Aristotelians of the early thirteenth century and compilers such as Vincent de Beauvais and Thomas of Cantimpré in the 1240s exerted a heavy influence on the scholastic scientific writings of such later thirteenth century figures as Albertus Magnus, Giles of Rome, and Mondino de’ Luzzi. The Parisian writings reveal an intertwining of medicine, natural philosophy, and theology in their views on embryology, particularly concerning the nourishment of the fetus. We encounter multiple purposes of blood in this material: the retention of menses during pregnancy allows for 1) the formation of the fetus from the mother’s blood, combined with the male seed (based on the Aristotelian model, which only became the predominant theory in precisely this period), 2) sustenance for the fetus via the umbilicus, and 3) a component part of what we would call the amniotic fluid. We also find differing interpretations of fetal development and sustenance, from the theological perspective, influenced by Levitical prohibitions on menstrual blood, to the Arabic medical, relatively free of moral views, to the new scientific views, based on an integration of Arabic with Roman natural historical encyclopaedias denigrating menstrual blood but with no explicit Judaeo-Christian proscriptions. The multivalent meanings and purposes of menstrual blood in thirteenth century medical and natural philosophical discourses led to considerable debate over scientific epistemologies and the connections between religion and medicine.