Secrets of women

Secrets of Women explodes the myth that medieval religious prohibitions hindered the practice of human dissection in medieval and Renaissance Italy, arguing that female bodies, real and imagined, played a central role in the history of anatomy during that time. The opened corpses of holy women revealed sacred objects, while the opened corpses of wives and mothers yielded crucial information about where babies came from and about the forces that shaped their vulnerable flesh. In the process, what male writers knew as the "secrets of women" came to symbolize the most difficult challenges posed by human bodies—challenges that dissection promised to overcome. Park´s study of women´s bodies and men´s attempts to know them—and through these efforts to know their own—demonstrates the centrality of gender to the development of early modern anatomy.