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1. SurveyBefore 1500, that is, before the period of gross dissection, medical scholars considered the womb (uterus) a central and metaphorically charged site in the female and – occasionally – male body. In scholarly thought, a pregnant man was an exception but conceivable, since until about 1600 the womb was understood in Aristotelian tradition primarily as a penis turned inward; only later was it thought of more as an anatomically distinct, specifically female organ (in the tradition of the Greco-Roman physician Galen). The womb was viewed alternatively as a shelter, a “shell” [3.…

1. Concept and researchHistorically, childhood  is open to description and study less as a biological fact than as a culture-specific social construction (Curriculum vitae). Experiences of being a child and the role in the history of life that was ascribed to childhood thus differed widely even within the early modern period. Scholars to date have primarily shown interest in (normative) ideas and concepts of childhood. This is legitimated by the peculiar situation in the sources: children do not le…

1. Concept The term incest generally denoted criminal relations between relatives. The definition narrowed to sexual relations only around 1600, before narrowing further to relations between blood relatives in the modern sense around 1800. Studies on the first centuries of the early modern period in particular show that legal and real-world positions regarding the legitimacy of such relations differed and relate to the wider context of the importance of kinship and material and emotional interests.Claudia Jarzebowski 2. Law Prohibitions of incest are recorded throughout…

1. BackgroundGuardianship of women basically denotes the normative idea that women need a legal guardian. Guardianship of women goes back to the practice, documented since the early Middle Ages, of assigning a guardian to orphans (Guardianship) or designating the leader of the family group as “primary guardian” ( Obermunt) in the sense of a legal representative of the group. The guardianship of women played a specific role, since it affected women exclusively on account of their gender. In the early modern period, as daughters, women we…

“Lesbian” in its modern sense differs drastically from its meaning before 1850: “from the island of Lesbos” (the home of the poet Sappho). From the middle of the 18th century, relations between women increasingly became a subject of medical and legal discourses that sought in a controlling way to tie women into a heterosexual gender order (Gender roles), and that consistently biologized female sexuality. The term “Lesbianism” is first attested in its contemporary sense from 1870, and in German the expression  lesbische Liebe (“Lesbian love”) dates from the late 18th century [5].…

Circumcision (Hebrew berit milah, Arabic khitān) is an ancient ritual, the origins of which are unclear, but which was adopted into the traditions of Jewish and Islamic faith practices. The ritual applies solely to males. In Judaism, circumcision represents the bond between the tribal ancestor Abraham and God (Gn 17, 10). Circumcision symbolizes belonging to the tribe and hence to the Jewish community, that is, the People of Israel. It should be performed on the eighth day of life, even if that day is the  Shabbat (Gn 17, 12). From the start of the early modern period to t…

1. IntroductionSexuality is a relatively recent topic of historical research. Until the 1970s, the general assumption was that sexuality was a biological phenomenon fulfilling the purpose of procreation, and that it was therefore a historical constant. Without doubt, the historical perspectivization of sexuality achieved its breakthrough with Michel Foucault’s study  L’histoire de la sexualité (3 vols., 1976-1984), the main focus of which was on the social and societal consequences of speech and silence about sexuality, and which was able to show …

1. Concept and principlesLove is one of the most complex historical concepts, deeply rooted in both philosophy and the history of religion. Throughout the course of European history, love connoted key relationships in the exercise of power and in the interpersonal sphere. Until the 18th century, love for God and the love of God formed the constitutive and legimatory reference point for all relationships of secular love. The very different meanings and qualities of the concept are well suited to rev…

1. Concept Recent studies in the history of male and female homosexuality contend that the now-usual identification of a certain form of erotic desire with a specific subjectivity cannot be said to be universally valid throughout history. ‘Homosexuality’ is thus a problematic concept, for it presupposes that modern notions of an identity-bound sexuality existed in premodern societies. In fact, premodern European cultures regarded same-gender sexual activity among women and men primarily as an acci…

1. Concept and researchThe Old English cwen originally simply meant “woman” or “wife” (compare modern Swedish kvinna, Danish  kvinde), but gradually acquired the specific sense of “wife of a king.” The distinction between queenship by marriage and queenship as authority is expressed by qualification, respectively “queen consort” and “queen regnant.” The focus of the present article is on the latter, and the exercise of female rule.Queens regnant were no rarity in the early modern period, despite the prevailing view in older scholarship that they were, to s…

1. Medicine 1.1. Humoral pathologyUntil the early 18th century, blood was thought of as the moist, well-tempered “sap that fills the blood vessels and is thought [by physicians] to consist of four particular humors: phlegm, yellow and black bile, and the blood proper” [1]. In the view of humoralism, the humors with their associated qualities (blood: warm, moist; yellow bile: warm, dry; phlegm: cold, moist; black bile: cold, dry) are produced by digestion (Latin coctio, literally “cooking”) of food; they are always present in whole blood in varying proportion. The o…

1. Introduction A universally valid definition of identity is as elusive for the early modern period as for the late. The concept derives from two distinct traditions of research. Anglophone social psychology characterizes identity as a characteristic of the modern individual [6], whereas German ethnology prefers the term Identität in clear rejection of the older and ideologically explosive term  Volksgeist (“folk spirit”) [2]. The concept of iden…