In the aftermath of a scientific controversy which has bordered at times on the outrageous, it is appropriate that historians should turn their attention to ‘The Roots of Sociobiology’. Of course, this is no easy task. For one thing, it is too early to be sure of the precise nature of the subject with which we are dealing. The biologist Richard Dawkins highlighted this problem recently, when he asked almost despairingly: ‘What on earth is sociobiology?’ According to the philosopher David Hull, this question cannot be answered in terms of a set of simple defining characteristics, or even by exclusive reference to the substantive content of the subject. Sociobiology, Hull argues, has no ‘essence’; in the last analysis it is what its practitioners make it. This approach introduces another element of uncertainty, since at the present time it is far from clear exactly who are the sociobiologists. When Edward Wilson published his massive volume Sociobiology. The New Synthesis in 1975, some biologists were surprised that so much fuss should be made over a subject which they had been teaching in undergraduate courses for several years, and others wondered whether they were not witnessing a ‘political game’ involving the naming and renaming of fields. Finally, the problems facing the historian are compounded by the fact that the sociobiology debate is highly polarized, and the literature abounds with tendentious and superficial historical judgements. At close range it is often difficult either to ignore these judgements altogether, or to bring them into the sharp focus which is necessary for the purpose of critical assessment.

6.1.1 Why do certain aspects of the notion of woman not change, while others undergo modification during the Renaissance? What are the main differences in the notion of woman which take place during this period? Is there a Renaissance ‘feminist’ movement (that is, a movement to improve the notional status of woman vis-à-vis man), and in what does it consist? The answers offered to these questions are necessarily tentative, as they relate to a study of fragmentary evidence culled from texts widely separated in date and place of publication. They are also offered in the awareness that the notion of woman has a wider context than that which has been considered here, and that it is affected by changes to the notion of ‘human being’ and ‘male’ which merit further investigation.

6.1.2 The main causes for stasis in the notion of woman which emerge from this study are, in different contexts, the desire to foster and preserve the scholastic synthesis, and the influence on thought of the institution of matrimony. The first of these causes is apparent in the interdisciplinary and recuperative features of theological, medical, moral and legal texts, and in the transmission of information between disciplines in the form of commonplaces. For a synthesis to be effective, it must embrace the whole encyclopaedia of knowledge, and must account for all known evidence, using a method adaptable to each individual discipline.

The names of Renaissance writers are given where possible in their vernacular form, except in cases where the Latin form is better known or used in library catalogues (e.g. Cornelius a Lapide, Justus Lipsius). For less well-known figures, the dates of birth and death, where known, have been given, and the date of the earliest recorded edition of their works which I could find. The major authorities consulted for this information have been Zedler's Universallexikon, Hirsch's Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Ärzte, Cosenza's Biographical and bibliographical dictionary of the Italian humanists, R.J. Durling's Catalogue of sixteenth-century printed books in the National Library of Medicine, The Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Cross and Livingstone, and C. H. Lohr's alphabetical list of Renaissance Latin Aristotle commentaries (Studies in the Renaissance, XXI (1974), 228–89; Renaissance Quarterly, XXVIII (1975). 689–741; XXIX (1976), 714–45; XXX (1977). 681–741). The first two authorities mentioned here are not wholly reliable, and the dates have been included more to indicate the approximate period of composition and publication of a text than in the belief that they are well established. I have occasionally used standard abbreviations (e.g. PL = Patrologiae cursus completus, series latino, ed. J. P. Migne, Paris, 1844–1904; PG = Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca, ed. Migne, Paris, 1857–1904). In the case of long quotations, the original text is given in the appendix; the original text of short quotations is given in the endnotes.

2.1.1 It is convenient to examine Renaissance attitudes to woman in theology and mystical writing principally in the light of scholasticism. There are several reasons for doing this: the problems considered and the methods of biblical analysis remain essentially the same for scholastics and Renaissance theologians alike; the influence of the Fathers is strong in both Catholic and reformed writing; furthermore, the scholastics' practice of drawing comparisons with Roman Law, Aristotelian medicine and ethics is continued in the Renaissance. There is no need for the purposes of this study to distinguish between systematic theology (strongly influenced, even in the case of Lutherans, by Aquinas) and biblical commentary, practised widely by theologians of all persuasions. It might be said that post-Tridentine Catholic commentators were more traditional in approach, whereas reformers were more insistent on the ‘claritas Scripturae’, and more concerned with achieving commonsense explanations of obscurities and plain exegesis for the widest possible public, but this is true only in the most general terms. A small difference between Catholic and reformed writers may be discerned by the latters' exclusion from the canon of apocryphal (deuterocanonical) books, especially Ecclesiasticus, which contains much material about women; but this difference is not sufficient to create a deep division of approach. For both Catholic and reformed theologians, the habit of total recuperation of the text (that is, the desire to make every statement fit into a coherent scheme) remains the same.

4.1.1 Any discussion of ethics and its related disciplines in the Renaissance is made difficult by the profusion of relevant texts, and the critical questions to which they give rise. Is there a European tradition of commentary-writing? Is this, if it exists at all, continuous from Aquinas to the seventeenth century? Is it possible to detect the influence of social, political and economic forces in commentaries – in other words, do the Reformation, the variety of forms of government in Europe, contemporary examples of female rule and economic activity by women affect the exegesis? Do Renaissance scholars attempt to see woman as described by Aristotle in historical or sociological terms? To what degree are commentaries affected by new textual discoveries, textual emendation and the study of the Greek as well as the Latin text? What is the relationship between contemporary political and moral philosophy (Machiavelli, Bodin, Montaigne, Vives) and the commentaries of Aristotle's works? To what degree does the content of the commentary vary according to the intended readership and pedagogical demands? It may not be possible in the confines of this investigation to provide satisfactory answers to all, if any, of these questions, but they should be borne in mind, as they form the critical basis of this enquiry.

4.1.2 The practice of producing expositions, commentaries and scholia as adjuncts to the ethical, political and ‘economic’ texts of Aristotle is medieval in origin; indeed, Aquinas's commentaries are still known and quoted with respect in the seventeenth century.

1.1.1 A comprehensive modern history of woman in Renaissance Europe has yet to be written. No doubt, when it appears it will show the evolution of woman's place in society and relate this to suitable models – demographic, anthropological, economic, sociological. Such a study will draw on data from a wide variety of sources, and make use of the information and conclusions of numerous monographs and theses. The present study aspires only to survey a narrow band of the spectrum which such a comprehensive history would need to cover; it does not set out to answer questions about society or demography, but is limited to the sphere of scholarship and scholarly texts. It is intended as a modest contribution not only to the study of attitudes towards woman in the Renaissance, but also to that of its intellectual infrastructure. It attempts to offer tentative answers to the questions: what is the notion of woman to be found in Renaissance texts, and how does it evolve? What is the relationship between the notion of woman and that of sex difference, and how is sex difference related in turn to other differences? Two presuppositions underlie these questions. The first is that there is less change in the notion of woman throughout the Renaissance than intellectual ferment and empirical enquiry of various kinds might lead one to expect. The second is that, at the end of the Renaissance, there is a greater discrepancy between social realities and the current notion of woman than at the beginning.

5.1.1 The primary focus of this investigation is on commentaries connected with academic disiplines; of these law is among the most wide ranging. No attempt is made here to survey systematically this vast field of study; such an undertaking is far beyond the limited scope of this enquiry. Nor will there be any systematic attempt to relate the theoretical status of woman to that which she actually enjoyed. Much work remains to be done in this area, although there exists a useful collection of essays, published under the auspices of the Société Jean Bodin in 1959 and 1962. It is hoped nonetheless that the inter disciplinary nature of the notion of woman and its ramifications in law will emerge from the very brief survey undertaken here.

5.1.2 Nearly all faculties of law on the continent of Europe in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance concern themselves with Civil and Canon Law. The great medieval Italian school is strongly influential from the fourteenth century onwards; it is associated with the names of Accursius, Bartolus and Baldus. Its method – the ‘mos italicus’ – led less to philological accuracy or historical truth than to an unhistorical interrelationship of all manner of law, and to a use of the interpretative methods of contemporary theology. This method was succeeded – although not eradicated – by the ‘mos gallicus’, which has its origins in Italy in the work of Lorenzo Valla (c. 1406–57), but is developed in France by Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), Andrea Alciato (1492–1550) and their pupils.

3.1.1 The subject of woman as seen by physiologists, anatomists and physicians is complex and multifaceted, because of its contiguity (and coincidence) with spermatology, hysterology, the science of the humours and theories of physical change. It is also very closely related to embryology, which exercises a deep influence on medical discussions about woman, and even determines to some degree the series of problems considered by medieval and Renaissance writers. In the excellent accounts of ancient embryology by Erna Lesky and H. B. Adelmann, this fact is pointed out, and the principal questions are listed: what is the origin of semen? do both sexes produce it? which part of the body develops first in the foetus? what determines sex and resemblance of children to parents? These questions give rise to a set of loci classici which are discussed by Renaissance doctors.

3.1.2 Renaissance medicine is distinct from the medieval discipline not only because of the work of humanists who produce the great editions, indices and commentaries of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen in the first half of the sixteenth century, but also because of the growth of experimental anatomy. The work of Andreas Vesalius, Gabriele Falloppio and Realdo Colombo is paralleled in the clinical sphere by the producers of consilia (case histories) and great writers on physiology, among them Jean Fernel. Although most doctors refer to ancient sects (the ‘practici’ who follow Averroes, the ‘peripatetici’, the ‘Galenici’, the ‘methodici’, the ‘empirici’), the vast majority of them are, according to Adelmann, ‘thoroughgoing Galenists at heart’, but influenced to different degrees by Aristotle, Avicenna and Hippocrates.

THEOLOGY

Chap. 2n.11

Aquinas, Summa, 1a 92,1: ‘videtur quod mulier non debuit produci in prima rerum productione. Dicit enim Philosophus quod femina est mas occasionatus. Sed nihil occasionatum et deficiens debuit esse in prima rerum institutione; ergo in illa prima rerum institutione mulier producenda non fuit…Per respectum ad naturam particuliarem femina est aliquid deficiens et occasionatum. Quia virtus activa quae est in semine maris intendit producere sibi simile, perfectum secundum masculinum sexum; sed quod femina generetur, hoc est propter virtutis activae debilitatem, vel propter aliquam materiae indispositionem, vel etiam propter aliquam transmutationem ab extrinseco, puta a ventis australibus, qui sunt humidi ut dicitur in libro De generatione animalium [IV.2 [766b 33]].

Sed per comparationem ad naturam universalem femina non est aliquid occasionatum, sed est de intentione naturae, ad opus generationis ordinata. Intentio autem naturae universalis dependet ex Deo, qui est universalis auctor naturae. Et ideo instituendo naturam non solum marem sed etiam feminam produxit.'

Chap. 2n.12

Cajetan, Commentarii in quinque Mosaicos libros, Paris, 1539, p. 25: ‘id quod philosophi tradiderunt de productione mulieris quae est vir laesus, hoc Moses sub metaphora tradidit. Multum tamen interest inter considerationem philosophorum et Mosi: quoniam illi productionem mulieris relative ad sexum consideraverunt, Moses vero productionem mulieris non solum ad sexum sed ad universam vitam moralem tradidit. Et propterea metaphora usus est constante ex multis partibus…Et ut metaphorice somnus [Ade] intelligeretur, describitur Adam dormisse, et tamen non describitur ipsum experge factum fuisse seu evigilasse.

Ktêsias, the Knidian, who wrote a treatise on India about four hundred years before Christ, speaks of reeds growing there, of “a height to equal the mast of a merchant ship of the heaviest burden”. This is believed to be the earliest European reference to the tribe of the Gramineae called Bambuseae, or bamboos. It seems to have been long before any exact knowledge of these “reeds” penetrated to the West, for there is little notice of them by European writers, between Pliny and the sixteenth-century herbalists, who make some slight allusion to them; Jerome Bock in 1552, for instance, mentions reeds which “in India…in arboream magnitudinem excrescunt”. The origin of the name bamboo is obscure. It may possibly be a trade corruption of the Malay word ‘Samámbu’, used for the Malacca-cane. Though the bamboo meant nothing to Western civilisation in early days, its extreme importance to the peoples of tropical countries is reflected in the position which it occupies in their folk-lore. It is said, for instance, that the Kings of Boeton—a small island near Celebes—claimed that they sprang originally from a giant bamboo. The story ran that in old days, when the people of Boeton had no king, a man entered the forest to fell bamboos for his own use. He was just attacking a fine stem, when a voice cried, “Man! do not destroy my foot, but insert your axe a little higher; I am in bondage here”.

It is now more than thirty years since, at my suggestion, Ethel Sargant sowed the grains of wheat and maize which formed the starting-point of work upon the grass seedling which we did together. Before her death in 1918, I had turned to a more general examination of the monocotyledons; but in course of time I began to feel that it might be possible to get a clearer view of the questions arising out of this study, if I combined it with more intensive work upon some one of the great monocotyledonous orders. With this in view, I returned to the Gramineae, and for the last ten years they have seldom been far from my thoughts. My concern with them was at first purely morphological, but, as I came to visualise the nexus of problems presented by the life of bamboo and grass, as well as by the history of the cereals—so inextricably interwoven with the history of man—these wider fields began to fascinate me almost as much as the more limited and technical facies of my own special studies.

The grasses are a vast group, and a correspondingly vast mass of information about them has been accumulated by botanists. If this information were brought together and correlated, it would form a library rather than a volume. In the present book I have had no such encyclopaedic aim, but I have deliberately limited myself to those aspects of the subject which happen to make the greatest appeal to me personally.

In the branch systems of grasses, each lateral shoot bears a bikeeled first leaf (prophyll) facing the axillant leaf and addorsed to the main axis (Fig. 182, B, p. 356). Opinion has been divided, in the past, as to whether this bikeeling indicates a derivation from two leaves, but the more recent evidence seems to me to favour the view that the prophyll is a single leaf, whose characters are those of a leafsheath. It probably owes its curious form to the pressure due to space conditions in the bud. Although the prophyll has two principal bundles, its symmetry is not really duplex, for one of the bundles is, as a rule, earlier in development, and larger, than the other. Moreover the bud axillary to the prophyll tends to occur opposite to this larger strand, which may thus, on all counts, be interpreted as the median bundle. These points are illustrated in Fig. 142, p. 280, and Fig. 143, A2 a−A2 c. p. 281. In one or more of the earliest leaves succeeding the prophyll, the sheath is apt to predominate, while the limb is absent or reduced (cf. Fig. 131, A, p. 265).

The mode of origin of the leaf members from the stem apex in grasses is a matter of some interest. A few years ago, it was reported that in Wheat the leaves develop from the dermatogen alone, whereas, in other families, not only the dermatogen, but deeper layers as well, play a part in leaf production.

The grass family is remarkable both for its naturalness and for its distinctness from neighbouring groups. Though other families have sometimes been included with it in the order Glumales or Glumiflorae, the most recent tendency is to treat it as a group apart, and to regard the resemblances which it shows, for instance, to the Sedge family (Cyperaceae), as indicating parallel development rather than affinity. If this view be accepted, I should like to suggest that the established word Gramineae might be retained for the order; the name Graminaceae could then perhaps be used for the only family included in this order.

Within the group itself, classification presents special difficulties; the subdivisions have even been described as “complétement artificielles”. The species are very numerous—they are estimated as 8000, or even more, grouped in about 550 genera—and their structural characteristics do not lend themselves to any obvious classificatory scheme. Indeed, as Kunth wrote, more than a hundred years ago, “dans les families eminemment naturelles, comme celles des Graminées, … on ne trouve que très-peu de caractères … qui puissent servir à distinguer les genres, et le plus souvent ces caractéres sont aussi vagues que minutieux”. In classifying the grasses, botanists have thus been obliged to rely, even more than usual, upon that intuitive faculty for detecting affinities, which can be cultivated to a high pitch by “la grande habitude de voir”. There is nothing magical about this faculty; it is the subconscious result of long labour acting upon an instinctive interest.