The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner (review)

An eighteenth-century satire of parthenogenesis, where women inhale airborne seeds to reproduce without the need for sexual congress with men, is just one of the vignettes in this sprawling, wonderful collection. Although The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century begins with an engaging discussion of ultra-modern commercial and technological reproductive practices, and makes reference to early modern “precursors of some modern structures and concepts” (xvii), this book’s strength lies with its taking early modern reproduction seriously on its own terms — as a history of “generation” as it was then called.

To characterize this edited collection as impressive barely conveys the intellectual quality and breadth of its scholarship, its interdisciplinarity, its European range, the transnational collaboration represented by its twenty-four authors, the sophistication of its analysis, the scope of its source material and archival work, and the historical imagination demonstrated in its more than five hundred pages. It is a history of medicine, the body, science, biology, gender, print, and much else. Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner, the volume’s editors, wish aloud that they would have liked to have included more on male generation (there are some arresting images of semen and the penis), “reproductive deviants” (20), and contraception, yet the variety of the book’s subject matter is dizzying.

It is impossible to cover every contribution, but it is feasible to convey a sense of the array of topics discussed: biology, embryology, theories of generation, breeding, in-breeding, fetal imagery, infanticide, disability, hysteria, breastfeeding, literary representations of reproduction, body size, the pelvis, ovaries, tapeworms, anatomical displays of the penis and testicles, and advice books and medical manuals. In their intelligent introduction, the editors impose some order on their expansive subject matter with the structural themes of breeding, the bodies of mother and child, bodily perceptions, and the role of literature and print, “sex-lit,” in the history of reproduction (8). However, it is a tentative uniformity at best; the whole significance of the eighteenth-century discussion and debate uncovered by these twenty-first-century commentators is its surprising richness and diversity.

There is some repetition. The airborne seeds that so capture the imagination are dealt with in two chapters (chs. 20 and 22). The contributions vary in levels of assumed knowledge and specialist interest: Staffan Mu¨ ller- Wille’s biological history (ch. 1) is a demanding start to the book, whereas Julie Peakman and Sarah Watkins’s “Making Babies” (ch. 20) is a far more general survey that might well have been better placed early in the collection. But these are minor quibbles.

It was as long ago as 1987 that Thomas Laqueur first proposed a basic division between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European bodily configurations and theories of reproduction, and sparked considerable debate about the timing, extent, and nature of the representations that he had identified, simultaneously imparting new life into eighteenth-century studies. In the intervening years, scholars — including many contributors to the volume here under review — have challenged what they have perceived as an over-schematic history of the body, identifying cultural continuities, variations, and inconsistencies — even in the same text. Eighteenth-century models and theories of the body and reproduction, the old and the new, overlapped and intersected and proliferated (the reproductive metaphor is apt). Nearly thirty years after Laqueur, Stephanson and Wagner’s collection sets the standard for the next generation of reproductive scholarship.