Making up for losses: The workings of gender in William Harvey's de<i>generatione animalium</i>

Keller, Eve

doi:10.1080/00497878.1998.9979201

Women's Studies

1998

DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1998.9979201

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Making up for losses: The workings of gender in William Harvey's degeneratione animalium

Eve Keller

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Cited by 4 publications

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“…In her study of the politics of Harvey's analogies, Eve Keller rightly argues that Harvey's writings are 'filled with sex stories'. 8 She has also found Harvey to settle primarily on masculine dominance and female passivity quite in the face of the logic of his own findings on the ovum; she describes him 'taking back his assertions of her [i.e. woman's] procreative agency'.…”

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Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey’s De conceptione

Davis

2019

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This essay offers a new reading of William Harvey’s De conceptione, considering for the first time its interest in non-generative conception. Further, it considers the way that Harvey entangles observations about erotic and maternal love in his discussions of the conceiving body. Love provides a context which Harvey reads for information about conception. But, for Harvey, conception and generation are not synonymous. Conceptions can be without as well as with a foetus, and Harvey is at least as interested in non-generation as he is in generation, and false pregnancy as pregnancy. Harvey’s notion of an immaterial or ‘mere’ conception, on which he builds an intricate analogy about the relation of uterus and brain, is designed to accommodate un-reproductive as well as reproductive experience. Reading signs of love – desires, devotions, intimacies – gives Harvey a way of distinguishing between different kinds of reproductive non-events, health and pathology. He offers an extended consideration of wind eggs and uses fictions of the wind to credit the loves of those that produce no offspring as nonetheless creatively conceiving and biologically demonstrative.

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Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey’s De conceptione

Davis

2019

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Epigenesis and the rationality of nature in William Harvey and Margaret Cavendish

Goldberg

2017

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The generation of animals was a difficult phenomenon to explain in the seventeenth century, having long been a problem in natural philosophy, theology, and medicine. In this paper, I explore how generation, understood as epigenesis, was directly related to an idea of rational nature. I examine epigenesis-the idea that the embryo was constructed part-by-part, over time-in the work of two seemingly dissimilar English philosophers: William Harvey, an eclectic Aristotelian, and Margaret Cavendish, a radical materialist. I chart the ways that they understood and explained epigenesis, given their differences in philosophy and ontology. I argue for the importance of ideas of harmony and order in structuring their accounts of generation as a rational process. I link their experiences during the English Civil war to how they see nature as a possible source for the rationality and concord sorely missing in human affairs.

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Cavendish's Body of Knowledge

Clairhout¹,

Jung²

2011

English Studies

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Making up for losses: The workings of gender in William Harvey's degeneratione animalium

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey’s De conceptione

Love, wind eggs, and mere conceptions: non-generation in William Harvey’s De conceptione

Epigenesis and the rationality of nature in William Harvey and Margaret Cavendish

Cavendish's Body of Knowledge

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