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“Be Fruitful and Multiply”: Genesis and Generation in Reformation Germany*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Kathleen Crowther-Heyck
Kathleen Crowther-Heyck*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
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Abstract

This essay analyzes vernacular texts on reproduction from sixteenth-century Germany. It examines religious texts, including sermons and devotional treatises for pregnant women, as well as medical texts, such as midwifery manuals, books on the “secrets of nature,” and anatomical treatises. Vernacular authors, both medical and clerical, ascribed enormous spiritual and symbolic significance to human generation. Conception, pregnancy, and birth were linked to the biblical account of the creation and fall of mankind. In the creation of the child in the womb, sixteenthcentury Germans saw an echo of the original divine act of creation. And in the sufferings of a woman in labor they saw a reenactment of Christ's Passion. Discussions of reproduction thus served as a starting point for meditations on original sin, human mortality, and the relationship between body and soul.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2002 , pp. 904 - 935
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2002

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Footnotes

*

It gives me great pleasure to thank Mary Fissell, Pamela Long, Lorna Jane Abray, and Hunter Crowther-Heyck for their very insightful comments and criticisms on drafts of this article. Earlier versions were presented at the Colloquium of the Department of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology of the Johns Hopkins University, in February, 2000, and at the German Historical Institutes Young Scholars Forum in March, 2001.1 am grateful for the helpful responses of the participants on both occasions.

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