Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe (review)

222 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) benefited from an introductory chapter discussing the sources examined and explaining their applicability to canon law, Roman law and theology respectively, as well as their normative or ‘binding’ nature. For example, the Summa Elegantius features prominently as evidence for each of these three disciplines, but, as its name suggests, it was merely a summa and without normative force. In its structure the book comprises twenty-four short chapters, most no longer than four or five pages. The text itself amounts to little more than 170 pages. This conciseness has a cost, as little space is devoted to introducing the subject matter, and the chapters end without a summing-up or re-articulation of the often complex main themes. The lack of an overall guiding argument increases the level of difficulty in following the material presented. The use of endnotes, rather than footnotes, is frustrating, as the need to constantly flip midsentence to the notes makes it difficult to follow the author’s intellectual itinerary. Evans ends, rather than concludes, her study by drawing an intriguing contrast between the medieval notion of salvation by works, that is the diligent study of the law, and the notion of salvation by grace that was to emerge in the approaching Reformation. The conclusion provides no synthesis of her subtle argumentation and amassing of disparate sources. As a result, I was left with a sense of having reviewed a catalogue of snapshots rather than being at the destination of a fascinating journey. Jason Taliadoros Department of History University of Melbourne Finucci, Valeria and Kevin Brownlee, eds, Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe, Durham, Duke University Press, 2001; paper; pp. 327; RRP US$21.95; ISBN 0822326442. Histories of the body have come a long way since Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex. His relatively linear narrative of the shift from the one-sex to the two-sex body, accompanied by his thesis that it was only in the modern period that bodily sex came to surpass cultural gender as the pre-eminent marker of differences between men and women, has been succeeded by numerous studies which prefer layered to sequential interpretations. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee’s new Reviews 223 Parergon 20.1 (2003) collection of multi- and inter-disciplinary essays contains some valuable new additions to this field of scholarship, exploring aspects of body and gender through pre-modern discourses on literal and metaphorical generation. In a pair of essays with close thematic links, Dale B. Martin and Gianna Pomata explore the implications of a fascinating range of evidence concerning male menstruation. Martin’s primary interest is with the contradictions inherent in Greco-Roman masculinity. How could ancient cultures have asserted the centrality of sexual activity, potency and the role of the father within masculinity, while simultaneously (and increasingly) praising the self-discipline required to remain celibate? If menstruation were definitive of femininity, how could male menstruation (such as haemorrhoids and nosebleeds) be possible? Martin argues that such contradictions should not be explained away but rather accommodated into a more complex understanding of Greco-Roman masculinity. Moreover, because careful regulation of manliness required the services of a physician, higher forms of masculinity had to be reserved for the social elite. Pomata challenges both Laqueur’s theory of the male body as paradigmatic of the premodern body and the scholarly orthodoxy linking male menses to effeminacy and the demonisation of the Jews. Sampling medical writings from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries, she turns up an extraordinary body of evidence showing that male menstruation was praised for its health benefits and had minimal impact on gender identity. In 1771 English actor David Garrick wrote to a male friend, ‘Thank ye Stars for ye Piles – if you had not them, you would have gout, or Stone, or both and ye Devil and all – While I had ye Piles I had Nothing Else, now I am quit of them, I have Every other disorder’ (pp. 126– 27). Both authors link their evidence to wider medical theories such as plethora, and the importance of crisis, and it would have been interesting had the...