Paracelsus’s Theory of Embodiment:

Conception and Gestation in Early Modern Europe

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Amy Eisen Cislo

The Body, Gender and Culture

Paracelsus (c.1493-1541) is the most famous physician of the sixteenth century. He has been called the father of modern chemistry and is legendary for his treatment of syphilis. He left behind a significant body of work in German that includes ruminations about alchemy, health, healing, mineralogy, theology, and nature. The re-publication of his writings during the twentieth century divided his work into medical and chemical tracts, and religious tracts. Cislo argues that to understand Paracelsus, modern scholars need to avoid dividing his oeuvre into modern categories of science and theology. By focusing on themes of conception and gestation, she explores how Paracelsus’s theological and medical interests overlapped, intertwined, and converged.

Cislo argues that Paracelsus developed an understanding of the body as composed of two distinct sexes, revolutionising early modern conceptions of the female body as an inversion of or flawed approximation of the male body. He compared human bodies to what he considered divinely created bodies, namely those of Christ, Mary, Adam and Eve. Paracelsus related human birth to these biblical figures and his thoughts about holy bodies lead him to delineate his understanding of the nature of human bodies and the spiritual quality of human life, namely the process of embodiment.

Readership

Early Modern Studies, History of Medicine, History of Sex, Women's Studies

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1 : Rethinking Sex: Imagining the Body in Early Modern Europe
Chapter 2: Predestined Conception: Seeds of Procreation and the Workings of the Womb
Chapter 3: What about Mary?: Contemplating Divine and Human Birth
Chapter 4: Adam, Eve and the Human Body: Paracelsus’s Nature Dilemma
Chapter 5: Paracelsus’s Reproductive Ideas in the Popular Press
Appendix Translation: Book about Birth

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