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Darrera modificació: 2018-05-29
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Hamza, Shireen, "Medicine without doctors: aphrodisiac recipes in tenth-century medicine and cuisine", Medieval Feminist Forum, 53/2 (2017), 91-113.
- Resum
- Two pleasures are often grouped together in Classical Arabic adab literature - that of food and that of sex. These pleasures are so often listed together as part of a good life that they are called two good things (al-aṭyabān), or, if you ask al-Ghazālī, the two pleasures (al-shahwatayn). The connection between food and sex becomes explicit in other genres as well: in recipes for aphrodisiacs. This paper will attempt to trace some of the continuities and ruptures between tenth-century medical texts and the cookbooks in their descriptions of the aphrodisiacal properties of food. These genres of texts are not always easily demarcated; the boundaries are especially blurred between erotica, as entertainment, and medicine, as “science.” For example, already by the tenth century, the physician-philosopher Abu Bakr al-Rāzi begins his treatise on coitus (Kitāb fī ‘l-bāh) with a remark on how numerous and available the treatises on this topic are - although none are up to his standards; the genre of medical treatises on the erotic had been formalized by then. I examine how the ideas of tenth-century physicians moved between medical texts, erotica, and cookbooks, and therein interrogate the presence of materials as commonplace as the chickpea or the onion in the most risque of literatures (erotica) and the presence of male and female sexual desire in the most innocuous of texts (the cookbook). Starting with an explanation of the humoral mechanisms of sex in the general medical compendia of influential tenth-century physicians, Isaac Israeli, Ibn al-Jazzār and al-Rāzī, I will briefly show why certain foods were recommended either to increase or decrease desire and virility in the dominant medical frameworks of the period. Next, I will compare these ideas with corresponding passages in kutub al-bāh (erotological texts) of twelfth-century authors, to show the innovation in, and diffusion of, medical theory on this topic. I will then investigate how foods recommended by physicians are reconceived in a cookbook by the tenth-century Baghdadi writer, Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq. My paper will show, through a close reading of some recipes, how the very formulas for aphrodisiacs challenge any separation of the ordinary, the cheap, the domestic, and the erotic. Focusing on these materials, I argue, refocuses and changes the way we understand the erotic in pre-modern Islamicate intellectual history.
- Matèries
- Alimentació
Cuina i confiteria
Medicina - Farmacologia
Àrab
Sexualitat
- URL
- https://www.academia.edu/23482921/Medicine_without_ ...
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