Reviewed by: L'hérédité entre Moyen Âge et Époque moderne: Perspectives historiques Silvia De Renzi Maaike van der Lugt and Charles de Miramon, eds. L'hérédité entre Moyen Âge et Époque moderne: Perspectives historiques. Micrologus' Library 27. Florence: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008. vi + 412 pp. Ill. €58.00 (978-88-8450-309-1). With a programmatically broad scope, this volume investigates whether and how heredity was conceptualized centuries before the scientific view with which we are familiar emerged in the nineteenth century. The focus is on the late Middle Ages, and in the three sections "Heredity, Law and Religion," "Heredity and Nobility," and "Heredity and Nature," the contributors' wide-ranging expertise brings to life the variety of languages, concepts, and discourses within which the question was articulated. No tight definition of heredity is provided, but at the core of most chapters is the issue of the transmission of traits, moral and physical, from one generation to the next. So explorations of theological debates—here the exceptionally interesting issue was the transmission of original sin—are followed by chapters on the law—the definition of marriage in the canon law brought blood kinship into unprecedented relief—and on politics—in medieval Italian cities and in fifteenth-century France alike controversies over the sources of nobility hinged on the opposition between lineage and individual virtue. Nonmedievalists may be tested by the details of some of the chapters, but they will be rewarded with evidence of the richness and political importance of the intellectual conflicts. For example, fifteenth-century controversies over the conversion of the Jews drew on broader assumptions about the nature of humankind—either fundamentally one, [End Page 680] making the Jews' complete conversion possible, or rather based on unalterable racial differences. Far from being the outcome of the encounter with the New World, the volume argues, a vigorous anthropological debate was already taking place in the late Middle Ages; in this framework, the editors claim, a "tournant héréditaire" (p. 13) should rather be located in the fourteenth century. The relations between the domains in which heredity was discussed could have received more sustained attention, but historians of medicine will be interested in the consensus that overall theories of generation had little impact on legal and political discourse. However rich in itself, natural and medical knowledge did not provide a unifying and coherent resource for thinking about transmission, not even when the nature of noble blood was at stake. Yet medicine has an important place in the volume. The final section includes a chapter on physiognomy and two on hereditary diseases. It was only within scholastic medicine that a specific language and interest in them emerged, including a rich, if not dominant, debate about their definition. But just as age could change complexions—for some the result of mixing semens—so environmental factors, including during pregnancy, made the transmission of diseases from parents to children much less inexorable than their twentieth-century equivalent. The last chapter of the volume takes the history of these diseases up to the eighteenth century, when physicians became key actors in the development of a modern notion of heredity. Such an extended chronology is applied only to medical knowledge, and the implication seems to be that, despite crucial changes, it is here that we should find one of the strongest threads connecting the Middle Ages to recent times. Projects recapturing the remote history of concepts that have come to define modern science raise questions about continuity and breaks. The editors and some of the contributors look at the Middle Ages as a creative intellectual workshop where key ideas and practices were forged for the first time. But they have also commissioned an epilogue by two historians of science whose own cultural history of heredity argues for a very different periodization. In their powerful survey, Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger identify a cluster of innovations between 1500 and 1850, including a greater mobility of people, plants, and animals, as providing the conditions for the slow and fragmented emergence of a notion of heredity linked to reproduction. While arguing for fundamental epistemological shifts in approaches to the...
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Jan 1, 2012
Jonathan Marks 
