Le corps féminin froid chez Oliva Sabuco

The Cold Female Body in Oliva Sabuco. Motherhood, Semen, and Milk

  

Talk by Jil Muller, Universität Paderborn

 

 Free webinar offered by the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance - CSMBR:

7 October 2026 - 5 pm (CEST) 

 

Did an early modern woman rethink the female body? Jil Muller shows how Oliva Sabuco (1562-1646) reinterpreted women's role in generation and breastfeeding by reworking the inherited traditions of Galenic, Hippocratic, and Avicennian medicine. In this lecture, she argues that Sabuco transformed the notion of the "cold" female body from a sign of weakness into a necessary condition of fertility and maternal nurture, while remaining firmly within the framework of early modern natural philosophy.