Maaike van der Lugt, Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7) / Institut universitaire de France

Program in History of Science and the Program in Medieval Studies, Princeton University

Thursday, April 8, 2010, 3:29 am EDT

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Place: 230 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University


Note: There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk.


Abstract. The central place of genetics in contemporary biology can make it easy to forget that a general, coherent, and "hard" concept of heredity has developed only recently, over the course of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. How did societies that had no clearly defined concept of heredity explain the differences and similarities between parents and off-spring, and, more generally, conceptualize the way in which organisms, especially human beings, acquire their characteristics?


Van der Lugt will concentrate on the ways in which medieval scholars answered these and related questions and analyse the conceptual tools they forged and used to discuss them. The scholastics invented the concept of hereditary disease — which would play a crucial role in the development of modern theories of heredity — by transferring the traditional, legal sense of the adjective (related to the transmission of goods) to the biological realm. Even so, generation (generatio), not heredity (hereditas) was the central concept in the medieval life sciences. The idea that the mixture of substances provided by parents (seeds, menstrual blood) determines the appearance and sex of the child coexisted, without contradiction, with the conviction that environmental and behavioral factors also play an important part. Now common distinctions between heredity and development, between the acquired and the inherited, have only limited relevance here.


Generatio wasn't just the stuff of scholastic speculation. As is the case today, debates about the mechanism of procreation, the nature of the substances involved, and the development of the seed into a viable human being had larger moral, legal and practical significance. I shall address several of these issues: whether abortion must be equated with murder, the treatment reserved for "monstrous" births, and the extent to which there was room, within the medieval concept of generatio, for eugenetics.


Maaike van der Lugt is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton.