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The Ovary of Eve is a rich and often
hilarious account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
efforts to understand conception. In these early years of
the Scientific Revolution, the most intelligent men and
women of the day struggled to come to terms with the origins
of new life, and one theory -- preformation -- sparked an
intensely heated debate that continued for over a hundred
years. Preformation assumed that during Creation, God had
placed infinite generations of perfect miniature creatures
inside their future parents, much like nested Russian dolls.
But were these perfect beings in the egg
or the sperm? The answer mattered a great deal, because
both the Church and the larger society held women accountable
for the Fall and Original Sin, as well as for birth defects
and failures to conceive, while inheritance of social position
and titles, even kingdoms, passed through the male line.
The "ovists" debated the "spermists"
in palaces and cafes, in churches and at family dinner tables,
as the aristocracy, the Church, and the intelligentsia tried
to resolve what the ancient Greeks called "the mystery
of mysteries." Clara Pinto-Correia weaves the strands
of this debate into the cultural and social history of the
day and shows why intelligent men and women became committed
to a view of life that seems unbelievable to us today.
Clara Pinto-Correia is professor of developmental
biology, director of the Master's Course of Developmental
Biology at Universidade Lusofona, in Lisbon, Portugal, and
adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, She is the author of several nonfiction books,
several books of poetry, and six novels.
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