Person:

Park, Katharine

This essay reflects on the ambivalent reception of The Death of Nature among English-speaking historians of early modern science. It argues that, despite its importance, the book was mostly ignored or marginalized by these historians (as opposed to historians interested in feminist or environmental studies) for a variety of reasons. These included the special role played by the "Scientific Revolution" in the grand narrative that increasingly shaped the historiography of science beginning in the 1940s and the subsequent "hyperprofessionalism" of the discipline as a whole. The essay concludes by placing Carolyn Merchant's work in the context of feminist utopian writing of the late 1970s and calls for renewed attention to the history of the utopian genre as a resource for teachers and feminist scholars of the history of science.

This article provides a transcription and translation of four notarized declarations describing the events surrounding a postmortem caesarean section performed in 1545 in Vercelli, a small city in the Duchy of Savoy. After her death in the late stages of pregnancy, Isabella della Volpe’s body was opened and her fetus excised by a local barber, aided by a surgeon and a midwife. The article argues that the postmortem caesarean section was a well-known and widely accepted procedure and that it might be motivated by financial and legal as well as religious concerns; not only was it important to baptize the child for its salvation, but the fate of the mother’s dowry, as in this case, might depend on whether she died with or without living issue.