Giacomo Casanova: Lana Caprina: Une controverse médicale sur l’Utérus pensant àl’Université deBologne en 1771–1772 ed. by Paul Mengal, trans. by Roberto PomaLana Caprina: Une controverse médicale sur l’Utérus pensant à l’Université de Bologne en1771–1772 by Giacomo  Casanova; Paul  Mengal; Roberto  PomaReview by: rev. by Lucia DacomeIsis, Vol. 96, No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 108-109Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/432993 .

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108 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)

her hands-on experience has shaped the contentof Green Desireas much as her work as a his-torian of early modern literature and culture. Shealerts us to the implications of the passive gram-matical constructions in gardening manuals(then and now): they wipe out the presence ofthe people who do the hard, daily labor of mak-ing a garden fruitful and beautiful. When thevoices of unlettered weeding women, house-wives, yeomen, and “Tomkins the gardener (p.177)” do get heard in these treatises, their trust-worthiness is often at issue.

This is a rich, subtle, absorbing book, full offresh insights into the literature, science, and so-ciety of early modern England. Plan, however,to take notes as you go along. Infuriatingly, thebook lacks a handlist of primary sources, andyou will look long and hard to find the names ofany individual plants or gardens in the highlyabstract index.

KAREN REEDS

Giacomo Casanova.Lana Caprina: Une con-troverse me´dicale sur l’Uterus pensant a`l’Universite de Bologne en 1771–1772. Editedby Paul Mengal. Translations byRobertoPoma. (L’A ge des Lumie`res, 4.) 230 pp. Paris:HonoreChampion E´diteur, 1999.

In Pietro Longhi’s paintingLa lezione di geo-grafia (“The geography lesson,” ca. 1750–52),a domestic scene of learning is dominated by anelegant woman who rests one hand on a globewhile holding a compass. Books are piled up atone end of the canvas, coffee is ready to beserved at the other end, an atlas lies open on thefloor at the bottom, and in the centre one of thetwo gentlemen surrounding the woman looks ather in puzzlement and with interest through amagnifying glass. Longhi’s painting resonatedwith the cultural climate in which Francesco Al-garotti’s Il Newtonianismo per le dame(“New-tonianism for ladies,” 1737) famously inter-preted and celebrated a season of novel accessof women to the world of learning and naturalknowledge. How men were to react to the nov-elty remained to be determined.Lana caprinamay be easily read against this setting as it bringstogether three pamphlets written by men on thetopic of women’s place in the world of knowl-edge. The pamphlets appeared anonymously inBologna in 1771–1772. Although titled after thetext of the adventurer and savant Giacomo Cas-anova, which came last in the series, the volumealso includes Petronio Zecchini’sDı Geniali.Della dialettica delle donne ridotta al suo veroprincipio, which started off the medical contro-

versy on “the thinking womb,” and the reply ofGermano Azzoguidi through hisLettres de Ma-dame Cune´gonde.

Mixing anatomy, physiology and misogyny,in hisDı genialiZecchini, who was professor ofanatomy at the University of Bologna, arguedthat women’s intellectual capacities were influ-enced by their womb: as the womb lay at theorigin of women’s proverbial inconstancy andconcupiscence, women’s intellect was bound tobe equally unstable and unreliable. Azzoguidi,who also taught anatomy at the University ofBologna, replied with a defense of women, andshortly after Casanova joined in. Both Azzoguidiand Casanova defended women from the accu-sations of Zecchini by emphasizing the impor-tance of education, and downplaying the role ofnature in creating differences between the sexes.Casanova, for his part, did not spare Azzoguidifrom his invective and criticized both Universityprofessors. The debate enjoyed considerablepublicity. Travelers touring the Italian peninsulareported about it. And within fifteen days fromthe appearance of hisLana caprina,Casanovawas pleased with his gains (p. 8).

Paul Mengal has the merit of bringing togetherfor Francophone readers the texts of a contro-versy that developed some of the central themesof eighteenth-century medical and philosophicaldiscussions on the relationship between bodyand mind. Perhaps inevitably, the contention isapproached through the writing of the famouslibertine and is read, as it were, retrospectively,with Casanova’s piece dominating not only thetitle but also the introduction to the volume.Here, sections on “Casanova’s encounter withhysteria,” “the medical discourse on hysteria atthe time of Casanova,” and a brief historicaloverview of texts linking women’s reasoningwith their uterus, situate the controversy in thecontext of medical debates on nervous disorderssuch as the vapours, which were largely char-acterized as female afflictions. This approachun-doubtedly provides a useful framework to intro-duce the texts of the dispute. On the other hand,readers are left to draw their own conclusionsabout issues that are central to the debate suchas the relationship between eighteenth-centurymedical discourse on gender, shifting notions ofsexual identity, contemporary discussions on theeducation of women and women’s access to thearenas of knowledge. One wishes Mengal hadsituated the controversy in the socio-historicaltheatre in which it unfolded. In fact, the appear-ance of the pamphlets in Bologna was hardlycoincidental at a time in which the city had be-come a center of female learning and home to a

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005) 109

famous group of women including Laura Bassi,Anna Morandi Manzolini and Cristina Roccati,who studied and/or taught at the University. It isthen somewhat surprising to find that there ishardly any reference to this milieu. Those whomay want to know more about the setting of thedispute may turn to Marta Cavazza’s recent ar-ticle “Women’s Dialectics or the ThinkingUterus: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy onGender and Education” (Lorraine Daston andGianna Pomata, eds.,The Faces of Nature in En-lightenment Europe,Berlin: BWV Berliner Wis-senschafts-Verlag, 2003, pp. 237–257). Somereaders may also wonder about the significanceof an attack leveled by a lay savant at two Uni-versity professors. For here may ultimately liethe sense of the title of Casanova’s pamphlet(Lana caprina) and his criticism of the two anat-omists. In fact, drawing on a line of the Latinpoet Horace (EpistulaeI, XVIII, 15), where “toargue overlana caprina” (i.e., to argue overgoat’s wool) means to argue over nothing, Cas-anova seemed to use the expression “lana ca-prina” to point the finger at the pedantic point-lessness of academics’ contentions.

That said,dix-huitiemistesat large will enjoya controversy that brings together a significantexample of the debate generated by women’snovel participation in the world of learning, withdispute over the nature of intellectual pursuits,and polemics over pedantic versus polite ap-proaches to knowledge.

LUCIA DACOME

Andreas Gipper. Wunderbare Wissenschaft:Literarische Strategien naturwissenschaftlicherVulgarisierung in Frankreich. Von Cyrano deBergerac bis zur Encyclope´die. 378 pp., bibl.,index. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002.€52(paper).

In recent years the popularization of science hasceased to be considered a mere appendix of sci-ence itself. Work done in science studies as wellas the history of science suggests that the pop-ularization of science is an integral part of theproduction of knowledge with respect to the pub-lic acceptance, research focus, prestige, and fi-nancing of science.

Andreas Gipper adds substantially to thisscholarship with his habilitation thesisWunder-bare Wissenschaft.In his rereading of some ofthe key texts of the French Baroque and Enlight-enment from the 1650s to the 1770s, he identifiesa tradition of science popularization that has sofar been overlooked because scholars did not

consider this kind of literature worthy of in-depth study.

Gipper is particularly interested in how therhetorical devices of literature (in the sense ofbelles lettres) are employed to popularize naturalphilosophy, one example being the burlesqueand satirical defense of Copernicus in Cyrano deBergerac’s L’autre monde. In the processwhereby science writing and literature graduallydeveloped into two different and finally incom-mensurable genres, the latter was instrumental inpopularizing science and helping it to achieve itsautonomy. In his analysis of the different texts,ranging fromL’autre mondeto theEncyclope´-die, Gipper pays specific attention to the cate-gory of the “wonderful,” the miraculous in astrictly natural sense.

AbbePluche’sSpectacle de la nature(1732–1750) with its nearly 5000 pages in 8 volumesis a case in point. Little known today, theSpec-taclewas one of the most widely read works inthe eighteenth century with dozens of editionsand translations. For Gipper theSpectacleiseven a precursor of theEncyclope´die,despite itsgood dose of physicotheology. Just as Diderotdid, Pluche stresses the importance of crafts andagriculture. And unlike Fontenelle and his modelscience astronomy, Pluche is “down to earth,”focusing on natural history and mechanics. Thescience Pluche advocates is not a contemplativeor theoretical one but technical and practical.Gipper even draws connections to the utilitarianphilosophy of the nineteenth century.

A telling contrast is provided by Voltaire‘sElements de la philosophie de Newton.Voltaire,anhomme des lettreshimself, writes deliberatelyin an unadorned, nonliterary style. His rhetoricis to forgo on rhetoric. Unlike the flowery Fon-tenelle and his salon-compatibleEntretiens surla pluralite des mondes,Voltaire argues that thesciences are a thorny business. And while forPluche to be a scientist you only have to be cu-rious and make good use of your senses, Voltairepoints to mathematics as the indispensable wayto knowledge.

With respect to theEncyclope´die,Gipper ar-gues that this key work of the Enlightenmentshould be interpreted as an attempt to popularizescience. He reminds us that Diderot demandstransparency and circulation of knowledge. Gip-per identifies “irregularite´” and “diversite” asaesthetic principles of theEncyclope´die.The ar-ticles are of different length and have differentauthors, and as a result of the alphabetic orderingthe entries are mixed at random. For Gipper, theEncyclope´die therefore represents the “full and

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