1. History 102, Lecture 7 Bodies

3. 1. Eroticising the Body Venus de Milo (Greece 2ndC BCE); Apollo of the Belvedere (Roman copy of 5thC BCE original)

4. Courtly lovers from the Manesse Manuscript, Switzerland c. 1305-40

5. Hans Memling, Adam and Eve, c. 1485

6. Hans Memling, Bathsheba, c. 1482

7. Hugo van der Goes, The Fall, c. 1470

8. Botticelli, Birth of Venus, c. 1485-6

9. Michaelangelo, Creation of Adam (Sistine Chapel, c. 1508-12)

10. Michaelangelo, Fall and Expulsion from Eden (c. 1508-12)

11. Peter Paul Rubens, The Three Graces, c. 1640

12. Piers Paul Rubens, ‘Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat’ (1636-9)

13. Peter Paul Rubens, St Sebastian, c. 1618

14. 2. Sexing the body The ‘one-sex’ model of the body (Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex)

15. Galen, 2ndCE. ‘Think first, please, of the man’s external genitalia turned in and extending inward between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uterus with the testes [ovaries] lying outside, next to it on either side…’
‘Think too, please, of…the uterus turned outward and projecting. Would not the testes then necessarily be inside it? Would it not contain them like a scrotum? Would not the neck [the cervix and vagina], hitherto concealed inside the perineum but now pendant, be made into the male member?’
Quoted in Laqueur, Making Sex, pp

16. The four humours: blood (sanguine), choler (yellow bile), melancholy (black bile), phlegm. Female associated with the cold humours on the left; male with the hot humours on the right

18. Medieval ‘seven-cell’ uterus; female infants were conceived in the left chambers, male in the right, and hermaphrodites in the middle

19. 3. Aspects of the Premodern Body
“Discovery” of the clitoris (Columbus 1559; Fallopio 1561)

20. “Vagina”, from the Latin for “scabbard” (sword sheath); became an English word for “the neck of the womb” in the 1680s.

21. Fifteenth-century ‘ballock daggers’, from Le Musée de l'Armée, Paris

22. Nocturnal emissions and medieval anxieties about feminising of the body

23. Premodern anxieties about women becoming hermaphrodites
Medieval hermaphrodites (Jacob van Maerlant, Der Naturen Bloeme, Flanders c. 1250).

24. Conclusion Bodies have a history
It is not only perceptions of sexual appeal that change, but also ideas of what constitutes sex differences and ideas about fundamental workings of the sexed body.