Bibliographie
Abbreviations
CB1: al-Baġdādī, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, Šarḥ al-Fuṣūl, Chester Beatty, Dublin, MS AR. 5458.
E5: Galen, Tafsīr Ǧālīnūs li-Fuṣūl Buqrāṭ, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (trans.), Escurial, Madrid, MS árabe 789.
G: al-Sinǧārī, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭāhir, Kitāb taysīr al-wuṣūl ilā tafsīr al-Fuṣūl li-Abuqrāt, Fondation Salem, Aleppo, MS Ar. 1037.
GA: Aristotle, Generation of Animals, Arthur Leslie Peck (trans.), Loeb, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1943.
H: Ibn Abī Ṣādiq, Šarḥ Fuṣūl Abuqrāṭ, Houghton Library, Harvard, MS Arab SM4272.
HA: Aristotle, History of Animals I, Books I-III, Arthur Leslie Peck (trans.), Loeb, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965.
L6: al-Kilānī, Ibn al-Qāsim, [Untitled], The British Library, Oriental MS Or. 5939.
S4: al-Sīwāsī, ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Mūsā, ʿUmdat al-fuḥūl fī Šarḥ al-Fuṣūl Abuqrāṭ, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, Şehid Ali Paşa, MS 2045.
Th4: Ibn al-Quff, Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq, Šarḥ Fuṣūl Buqrāṭ, Gotha, Landesbibliothek MSS 1895.
Y: Ibn al-Quff, Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq, Šarḥ Fuṣūl Buqrāṭ, Yeni Camii, Istanbul, MS Yeni Camii 919.
Working Tools
Hava, J.G., Arabic English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, Goodword Books, New Delhi, 2001.
Steingass, Francis Joseph, A Learner’s Arabic-English Dictionary, Librairie du Liban, Beirut, n.d.
Ullman, Manfred, Wörterbuch der Klassischen Arabisch, Band (Lām), Otto Harrassowitz, Weisbaden, 1989.
Primary Sources
Aristotle, Arisṭūṭālīs: Ṭibāʿ al-ḥayawān, tarǧamat Yūḥannā ibn al-Biṭrīq, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (ed.), Wakālat al-Maṭbūʿāt, Kuwait, 1977.
Aristotle, The Arabic Version of Aristotle’s Parts of Animals. Books XI-XIV of the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, Remke Kruk (ed.), Brill, Amsterdam, 1979.
Aristotle, The Generation of Animals, the Arabic Translation Commonly Ascribed to Yaḥyā Ibn al-Baṭrīq, J. Brugman, Hendrik Joan Drossaart Lulofs (eds.), Brill, Leiden, 1971.
al-Azdī, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Abū al-Muṭahhar, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim al-Baġdādī, published as Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (attributed), al-Risāla al-baġdādiyya, ʿAbbūd al-Šālǧī (ed.), Manšūrāt al-Ǧamal, Koln, 1980.
Galen, “On the Anatomy of the Uterus”, Charles Goss (trans.), The Anatomical Record 144, 2, 1962, pp. 77-83.
Galen, Galen, De Semine, CMG V 3.1, Phillip De Lacy (ed. and trans.), Berlin, 1992.
Galen, Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, Margaret Tallmadge May (ed.), 2 vols., Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1968.
Hippocrates, Hippocrates, with an English Translation, W.H.S. Jones (ed.), vol. 4, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. & London, 1959.
Hippocrates, Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, Émile Littré (ed.), 10 vols., Baillière, Paris, 1893-1961.
Hippocrates, Šarḥ Fuṣūl Abuqrāt, Yūsuf Zaydān & Māhir ʿAbd al-Qādir (eds.), al-Dār al-Miṣriyya al-Lubnāniyya, Beirut, 1991.
Ibn al-Quff, al-ʿUmda fī al-ǧirāḥa 2, Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, Hyderabad, [1356/1937-1938].
Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb, 3 vols., Būlāq, 1294/1877.
Paulus Aegineta, The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta, Francis Adams (trans. and comm.), 3 vols., Sydenham Society, London, 1844-1847.
Rufus of Ephesus, Rufus of Ephesus: On Melancholy, Peter Pormann (ed.), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2008.
Secondary Sources
Badawī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Commentaires sur Aristote perdus en grec et autres épîtres, publiés et annotés, El machreq Éditeurs, Beyrouth, 1971.
Barkaï, Ron, Les Infortunes de Dinah, Les éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1991.
Conger, George, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1922.
Davidson, James, The Greeks and Greek Love, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2007.
Dean-Jones, Leslie, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994.
Flemming, Rebecca, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature and Authority from Celsus to Galen, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.
Gadelrab, Sherry Sayed, “Discourses on Sex Differences in Medieval Scholarly Islamic Thought,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 66, 1, 2010, pp. 40-81.
Gutas, Dimitri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbasid Society, Routledge, London, 1998.
King, Helen, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece, Routledge, Londres, USA, Canada, 1998.
King, Helen, “Sex and Gender: the Hippocratic Case of Phaethousa and her Beard,” EuGeStA 3, 2013, pp. 124-142.
Park, Katharine, “Cadden, Laqueur, and the ‘One-Sex Body’, ” Medieval Feminist Forum 46, 2010, pp. 96-100.
Pormann, Peter, The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia, Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2004.
Pormann, Peter, & Joosse, P., “Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms in the Arabic Tradition, the Example of Melancholy,” in Pormann, Peter (ed.), Epidemics in Context, Walter de Gruyter, Pertis, 2012, pp. 211-249.
Preus, Anthony, “Galen’s Criticism of Aristotle’s Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 10, 1, 1997, pp. 65-85.
Rispler-Chaim, Vardit, Disability in Islamic Law, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 32, Springer, 2007.
Rosenthal, Franz, “Ar-Râzî on the Hidden Illness,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52, 1978, pp. 45-60.
Rowson, Everett, “The Effeminates of Early Medina”, JAOS 111, 4, 1991, pp. 671-693.
Rowson, Everett, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists,” in Epstein, Julia & Straub, Kristina (eds.), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Routledge, New York, London, 1991, pp. 50-79.
Schiefsky, Mark, Hippocrates on Ancient Medicine, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, 2005.
Szombathy, Zoltan, Mujūn: Libertinism in Mediaeval Muslim Society and Literature, Gibb Memorial Trust, 2013.
Weisser, Ursula, Zwugung, Vererbung und Pränatale Entwicklung in der Medizin des arabisch-islamischen Mittelalters, Hannelore Lülung, Erlangen, 1983.
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Notes
Authorship of the text is disputed by scholars. For a discussion of the ‘Hippocratic question’, that examines the issue of contested authorship of works in the Hippocratic Corpus, see Schiefsky, Hippocrates, pp. 1-2, 65-71.
See Pormann, Joosse, “Commentaries,” pp. 211-249; for influence of Hippocratic Aphorisms on medical theory and practice, p. 211; and use in medical teaching, p. 248.
The gynaecological Aphorisms appear in the fifth section of the treatise; Hippocrates, Hippocrates, Jones (ed.), Aphs. 5.28-5.62, pp. 165-175; there are also a few stray aphorisms related to women scattered elsewhere in the collection, e.g., Aph. 7.43.
Modern scholarship on gender theory and the history of the body is divided concerning the degree to which sex difference in men and women was elided in the pre-modern period. See Park, “Cadden,” pp. 96-100; Gadelrab, “Discourses on Sex Differences,” pp. 40-81.
We have thus far been unable to access the copy found in Maragheh Public Library Manuscript number 37, and have therefore relied solely on L6 in this paper.
Aph. 7.43; this is the numbering used in Hippocrates, Hippocrates, p. 203, fn. 3, Jones (ed.) summarises the interpretations given to Aph. 7.43 by some ancient commentators, echoed in Ibn al-Quff’s entry.
There is the alternative reading in the Arab commentaries in which a ‘hand’ is mutilated; (see e.g. Ibn Abī Ṣādiq (d. after 1068), MS Arab. SM 4272, online at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/10811895; f. 104v° line 13). The confusion is due to the similarity in rasm of the Arabic word for both body parts in unvowelled texts.
See Galen, Galen, May (ed.), vol. 2, Book 7, section 22, pp. 380-381.
Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, pp. 44, 167; the left-right/hot-cold paradigm is considered in its philosophical and cultural context in Greek thought; see also King, Hippocrates’ Woman, p. 8.
See Paulus Aegineta, The Seven Books, Book VI, section LXIX, p. 381.
See Ibn al-Quff, al-ʿUmda 2, p. 215, line 7.
See Ibn al-Quff, al-ʿUmda 2, p. 215, line 14.
See HA, vol. 1, 497b 32, p. 76.
See Badawī, Commentaires sur Aristote, p. 206, lines 16-17.
Literally, “Possesses two right hands.”
See e.g. al-Sīwāsī (early 14th cent.), S4, f. 53a, lines 11-14.
GA, 775a 15, transl. pp. 460-461. The three zoological works of Aristotle were rendered into Arabic in the ninth century during the Abbasid translation movement. In the Arabic tradition, The Book of Animals (Kitāb al-ḥayawān) was composed of three books divided into nineteen sections; Historia Animalium (1-10), De Partibus Animalium (11-14) and De Generatione Animalium (15-19) as described by H.J. Drossaart Lulofs in Aristotle, The Generation of Animals, p. 2. Here is the edition of the Arabic Fī kawn al-ḥayawān (De Generatione), Brugman and Drossaart Lulofs (eds.). For De Partibus Animalium in Arabic (Aǧzāʾ al-ḥayawān) see Kruk (ed.). For Historia Animalium in Arabic (Ṭibāʿ al-ḥayawān), see Badawī (ed.).
See Flemming, Medicine, pp. 283-358.
For an overview of the translation movement, see Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture.
For a description by Galen of the similarities between female and male genitalia and their respective configuration inside and outside the body, see Galen, Galen, De Semine, CMG v 3.1, pp. 189-193. See also Galen, Galen, May (ed.), Book 14, p. 268-269 on similarities between male and female genitalia.
See Galen, Galen, May (ed.), p. 631.
عظيمتاً] correxi : L6 عظيما.
In addition, (not quoted in this paper) al-kilānī (L6, f. 154b-155a) on Aph. 5.62, describes the anatomical correspondence of male and female sex organs, similarly inspired by Galen. For Galen’s view, see Galen, Galen, May (ed.), Book 14, section six, pp. 628-629.
For a brief overview of Ancient Greek conceptions of the body and modern gender theory, see King, Hippocrates’ Woman, pp. 7-12.
For a discussion of the significance of the doctrine of ‘innate heat’ in the Hippocratic Aphorisms, see Hippocrates, Œuvres, Littré (ed.), vol. 4, pp. 406 and 427-430.
The Arabic here is unclear.
Ibn al-Quff actually uses the masculine pronoun here because he is describing one of two “types” (صنف, a masculine word) of human being (sc. the warm and the cold of nature).
ليغلب عليه الكسل والفشل لتصلح الملازمة المسكن وتدبير أمره وتربية الطفل Y, f. 249a.
لاهتمام الطبيعة في شأنه L6, f. 162a.
The word raḥim can refer to either the womb or (euphemistically) the vagina.
Weisser, Zwugung, pp. 273-279; section on the longevity of the left-right theory, pp. 278-279.
Weisser, Zwugung, p. 274.
See Galen, Galen, May (ed.), p. 637.
See Galen, Galen, May (ed.), p. 638.
ناقصين] correxi: G ناقصان.
Franz Rosenthal based his article on this treatise on several manuscripts contained in the General Library in Rabat, Morocco, as he describes (p. 159).
Al-Rāzī’s treatise also contains a discussion of the infertility of the mule and the nature of its semen, a subject that also appears in the commentaries on the gynaecological aphorisms (see, e.g. G, f. 98a).
Rosenthal, “Ar-Râzî,” p. 45.
Rosenthal, “Ar-Râzî,” p. 54. See King, “Sex and Gender,” pp. 124-142 for a discussion on the way culture historically determines sex and gender identities.
Al-riqāb could refer to slaves of either sex.
Rosenthal, “Ar-Râzî,” p. 57.
Rosenthal, “Ar-Râzî,” pp. 57-60.
“Their disease is one of the imagination, not a physical one. Things that break the desire, such as worries, hunger, vigils, detention, and beatings constitute useful treatment,” trans. Rosenthal, “Ar-Râzî,” p. 50. Ibn Sīnā further attributes this “disease” to the “soul’s downfall, a wicked nature, bad habits, and womanly constitution” (al-Qānūn 2, p. 549).
Rosenthal, “Ar-Râzî,” p. 60.
For a useful overview of melancholy in this medical tradition see Rufus of Ephesus, On Melancholy, Pormann (ed.).
Rowson has devoted considerable scholarly attention to the question of homosexuality and cases of blurred gender, and provides a useful overview of how one might use literary sources when discussing the social and historical occurrence of these phenomena in the beginning of his article “The Categorization of Gender”, pp. 50-53. See Szombathy, Mujūn, for an introduction to this playfully obscene style of literature.
Rowson, “The Effeminates,” p. 675.
يا مخنّث، يا مؤنّث، يا ملوّث، يا مطبّل، يا مكرّع، يا مدفّف : al-Azdī, Ḥikāyat Abī al-Qāsim, p. 352.
This insult carries the implication that the woman described is sexually ravenous.
Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn 2, p. 562.
Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn 2, p. 555.
Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn 2, p. 563.
Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn 2, p. 603.
See Paulus Aeginata, Seven Books, Book VI, section LXX, pp. 381-382.
Hippocrates, Œuvres, Littré (ed.), vol. 7, lines 1-2, pp. 478-479.
Hippocrates, Hippocrates, Jones (ed.), On Regimen 1, XXVIII, pp. 266-269. See also King, Hippocrates’ Woman, p. 9.
For more on the understanding of the ovaries in the Greek medical tradition, and Herophilus, see King, Hippocrates’ Woman, pp. 38, 140, 182.
For an overview of the salient points in Galenic and Aristotelian conception theory, see Preus, “Galen’s Criticism.”
GA, 765b, Book IV, ch. 1, pp. 385-389.
GA, 727b, Book 1, ch. 20, p. 101.
GA, 765b, Book IV, ch. 1, p. 385.
Galen, De Semine, p. 153.
Galen, De Semine, p. 175.
L6, f. 162b.
إن الجنين يتكون من مني الذكر كما يتكون الجبن عن الأنفحة ويتكون من مني الأنثى كما يتكون الجبن عن اللبن.
“… He [al-Rāzī] said, ‘The flowing of fluids one on top of another results in many different things, for I have known a medicine which, when poured on another medicine, generates something like milk in its white colour, although if the second is poured on the first, it is like ink. This is for no other reason than that it makes the low high and the high low’.
… His saying that one of the two [seeds] at one time or another will be high and the other low is meaningless, and he only commits this error because he thinks that creation is brought about by the two semens, and he did not know that the power of semen in a woman is its power over the menstrual blood. For if there were no fertilizing blood, there would be no use for her semen. The semen [of a woman] is only needed for her desire for intercourse, but when it is expelled, the womb-nature [al-ṭabīʿa al-raḥimiyya] wakes up to propel the fertilising blood to the womb to join with the masculine semen, and from this creation is achieved,” H, ff. 71a-71b, ed. & tr. ARABCOMMAPH.
إذا كانت الأخلاط في بدنها هائجة Aph 4.1, Th4 f. 2b.
The first and third sections only are quoted here.
Galen did not do human dissection, so it would appear that Ibn al-Quff is relating a passage where Galen speaks about comparative anatomy conducted on female animals and refers to the results of human dissections conducted by Herophilus; see e.g. Galen, “On the Anatomy of the Uterus,” pp. 77, 81.
For a similar account of nocturnal emissions and the widow voiding excess semen, see Galen, De Semine, pp. 150-151; Galen uses the term νοσήματα ὑστερικά, p. 151 line 6, rendered as ‘hysterical diseases’ by De Lacy, p. 151, line 7.
For more on the mobile womb in ancient Greek thought, see Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, pp. 69-71; King, Hippocrates’ Woman, ch. 11 on the ‘hysteria’ tradition, pp. 204-206.
See Pormann, The Oriental Tradition, pp. 29-31; here is an account of ‘suffocation of the womb’ by the Syriac author Ibn Sarābiyūn (9th cent.) that is preserved in Arabic.
See Ullman, Wörterbuch Band (Lām), laḥiǧa – to get stuck, p. 276 (and pp. 276-279).
Aph. 5.39, L6, f. 166b.
For an overview of uterine suffocation in the Arabic tradition, see King, Hippocrates’ Woman, pp. 238-241; King identifies vapours as ‘a new explanatory device’ in selected Arabic accounts of conditions in which the womb affects other parts of the body, p. 241.
Compare to al-Kilānī’s assertion that “original moisture” (الرطوبة الأصلية), which comes from the natural heat in which woman are naturally deficient, is the “most noble of the humors” (أشرف الأخلاط), L6, f. 142a. Ibn al-Quff writes elsewhere that blood (also generated by heat) is the noblest of the humors, Th4, 151b.
In Arabic this trope is called fasād al-zamān, “the rottenness of the age.”
The philosophical concept of man-as-microcosm is found in many different contexts, from many different cultures, over the course of many centuries. Its application to medical discussions (both in ancient Greek and classical Arabic) is only one of its many uses. For an overview of some of the manifestations of this theory, see Conger, Theories of Macrocosms.
See e.g. Hava, Arabic English Dictionary, p. 438: “Menses Filth, dirt. طمث” (sic). Steingass, A Learner’s Arabic-English Dictionary, p. 644: “menses; dirt, impurity, pollution; vice.” Ibn Manẓūr, Lane, and Wehr also associated it with the blood of a deflowered virgin.
For a discussion on this in the context of Jewish medieval medicine, see Barkaï, Les infortunes, pp. 47-57.
The typology is rooted in Aristotelian and Hippocratic physiology. For a discussion of this, see e.g. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, pp. 219-222. See also Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn, 2, p. 559, lines 13-14.
See e.g. Aph. 5.39, G, f. 90 a.
For more on the link between the womb and breasts in ancient Greek medical conceptions of anatomy, see King, Hippocrates’ Woman, pp. 34-35, and Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, pp. 215-217.
HA, 522a, 11-21, Books I-III, transl. p. 227; for this citation and a discussion on male lactation in Aristotle, see Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, pp. 216-217.
For a discussion on sex difference and gender in medieval Islam, see Gadelrab, “Discourses on Sex Differences.”
For a more thorough discussion of conception theory in medieval Arabic medicine see Weisser, Zwugung, pp. 145-149. Entries in the commentaries on Arab medicine often foreground the uterus and paternal seed as main influences on the gender of the foetus, sidelining the female seed, as noted by Ursula Weisser. Of particular note in the Arab tradition which departs somewhat from Galenic conception theory is a more complex inter-sex theory of gender determination developed by al-Baladī (10th cent.) as described in detail by Weisser. This theory is loosely predicated on the Left-right paradigm posited by Galen in which male babies were aligned with the warmer right side of the womb and females with the left. However, whereas Galen interpreted the Left-right theory with an emphasis on the heat and cold of the uterine cavities which determined gender outcomes, al-Baladī introduces a greater set of variables that can affect the gender of the child. His theory accommodates a highly schematic typology of body types deviating from a male standard. The theory, as Weisser notes, resonates with the embryology theory outlined in the Hippocratic work, Regimen, discussed below. Of particular note, as Weisser states, is that al-Baladī’s typology embraces more factors than the Greek theory outlined in Regimen, a theory Weisser claims al-Baladī was unaware of as the work was not translated into Arabic.
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