|
Darrera modificació: 2019-02-11
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Biller, Peter, "Black Women in medieval scientific thought", Micrologus, 13 [=Natura, scienze e società medievali / Nature, sciences and medieval societies] (2005), 477-492.
- Resum
- Biller identifies a peculiar train of thought in discourses in Paris around the year 1300, when scholars were momentarily fixated on speculating about the physiology of Black women, particularly their sexual physiology and the quality of the breast milk that they produced. Some of these questions originated in Antiquity, when in his History of Animals, Aristotle stated that the milk of darker women is healthier for the child than that of lighter-skinned women. In the medieval Latin translation, this was rendered as ‘The milk of black women is better and more plentiful food than that of white women'. This statement was then provided with a rationalization in accordance with medieval theories of the temperaments and the role of heat in physiology: whereas as white women produced milk that remained very watery, Black women, because of their extra heat, could concoct their milk to a greater degree, producing milk of higher quality. The premise that Black women were naturally hotter than white women also underlay ideas about Black women's sexuality. Albert the Great, the Dominican theologian, was the most explicit in describing how Black women's hotness made them good sexual partners.
- Matèries
- Dones
Sexualitat
Història de la medicina
|