The Politics of Reproduction: Medieval Norwegian Kingship

Abstract

THE DOMINANT ROLE ATTRIBUTED TO THE MALE IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION may be the strongest and most startling illustration of patriarchy. For more than two millennia, Western thinkers, firmly rooted in biblical and Aristotelian concepts, depicted the female as a mere receptacle into which the male planted his seed. The mother produced the body, the father the soul, of a new human being.1 As a consequence, even in reproduction, in which the dramatic focal point might have been the woman giving birth, historians have centered on the man's role. From the fourth century, when Jerome translated Eusebius's world chronicle, and throughout the medieval period, universal history was framed in genealogical lists taken from the Bible. Demonstrating paternal succession, these lists monotonously repeat that father engendered (genuit) son.2 Only rarely do the names of women appear among a man's several sexual companions, usually as signposts to straighten and simplify the path of descent.3 The names of women occasionally appear in order to highlight the prestige brought to a man and his descendants when he acquired a wife from a higher social level than his own.4 But, more often,