Medicalized Misogyny

Abstract

In the Middle Ages, the dismemberment of Agrippina, Emperor Nero’s mother, was not simply a gruesome family affair, but it had links to the emerging practice of dissection and the anatomical difference between the sexes. According to classical authors, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt involving a self-sinking boat, Agrippina was slayed by Anicetus upon Nero’s orders.1 In Roman History, Cassius Dio added that Agrippina opened her dress and asked Anicetus to strike at her womb “for this bore Nero.”2 Nero wished to see her corpse to verify the death, “so he laid bare her body, looked her all over and inspected her wounds.”3 The emperor examining the wound of the womb is transformed in the Middle Ages into the image of the ruler ordering the dissection of the female body.4 Jacobus de Voragine described such episode in the Golden Legend (c. 1260).5 Jean de Meun, in his continuation to The Romance of the Rose (c. 1275), wrote that Nero “had his mother dismembered so that he might see the place where he was conceived.”6 Jean de Meun is documented between 1265 and 1269 in Bologna, where post-mortem medical examination was practiced from the thirteenth century onward.7 Giovanni Boccaccio reports the story at length, including the wound of the womb, and mentions that in some sources “after her death Nero inspected the corpse, criticizing some parts of her body and praising others.”8