Homagium: Joan Cadden's "Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages"

Abstract

f today the fourteenth-century scholar Peter of Abano is almost a household name, at least among medievalists, we owe Joan Cadden for having brought to our attention this long neglected thinker without whom any account of medical thought during the Middle Ages would be incomplete. If today pleasure has been accorded its proper place in the history of medicine, generation, and sexuality, then the same scholar needs to be credited for many important insights into pleasure’s workings. If medievalism has remained a vibrant academic province, well populated and replete with intellectual excitement, we need to pay homage to Joan Cadden among others. Needless to say, these are only a few, selected achievements. What has made this scholarly success story possible is a history written at the seams: the seams of disciplines—namely, history of science, gender history, history of sexuality, social history, and intellectual history—the seams of womanhood and masculinity, the seams of natural and moral philosophy, the seams of prescription and description, as well as the seams between erudite and non-erudite reservoirs of learning. These Caddenish seams are anything but clear-cut. They are frazzled, at times surprising, if not productively confusing. Consistently, Joan Cadden has resisted a retreat into the loftiness of intellectual history. One of the many memorable sections of Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, Joan Cadden’s signature book of 1993, treats the question of misogyny. The author helped shatter the myth of an all-pervasive misogyny in medical discourse of the period. The picture that emerges from her treatment of the status of women in medieval discourse is one of staggering complexity. While men provided the model case for discussions of human anatomy and while what could be gleaned from I