The Ovary of Eve
Egg and Sperm and Preformation
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- $46.99
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- $46.99
Publisher Description
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. Clara Pinto-Correia traces the history of this much maligned theory through the cultural capitals of Europe.
“The most wonderfully eye-opening, or imagination-opening book, as amusing as it is instructive.”—Mary Warnock, London Observer
“[A] fascinating and often humorous study of a reproductive theory that flourished from the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century.”—Nina C. Ayoub, Chronicle of Higher Education
“More than just a good story, The Ovary of Eve is an object lesson about the history of science: Don’t trust it. . . . Pinto-Correia says she wants to tell the story of history’s losers. In doing so, she makes defeat sound more appealing than victory.”—Emily Eakin, Nation.
“A sparkling history of preformation as it once affected every facet of European culture.”—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Modern-day biological marvels like miniature cameras that capture the moment of conception lull us into a false sense of knowledge; the final answer to the question of where we come from is still up for grabs. Scholars of the 17th century, operating in the context of Descartes's mechanistic world view, proposed the explanation of preformation. Unlike epigenesists, who uniformly contended that an undifferentiated egg went through a process of structural elaboration, preformationists were divided into the "spermists," who thought that Adam's sperm contained Russian doll-like homunculi perfectly coiled and ready to spring forth, and "ovists," who supposed the origin was in Eve's eggs. Pinto-Correia, a biology professor in Lisbon who has published poetry and novels as well as nonfiction, has written a wondrous if enigmatic trip through the history of science. In her nonchronological history of the doctrine of preformation, she threads a maze of global myth and religion, covering diverse topics as mnemonics and the work of 13th-century Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull or the magical Golem of Rabbi Jehuad the Hasid. Given the breadth of her learning, Pinto-Correia stays amazingly focused, even when the discussion jumps forward to modern-day misconceptions like the dinosaur eggs in Jurassic Park. Readers accustomed to books organized around brief "information bytes" may become impatient with this one. If the epilogue seems outmoded in light of the recent success of cloning by nuclear transfer technology, reading Pinto-Correia is still a delightful intellectual exercise, and her audience will cut across the usual academic borders.
