A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western ScienceIn this groundbreaking work of history, David Noble examines the origins and implications of the masculine culture of Western science and technology. He begins by asking why women have figured so little in the development of science, and then proceeds--in a fascinating and radical analysis--to trace their absence to a deep-rooted legacy of the male-dominated Western religious community. He shows how over the last thousand years science and the practices and institutions of higher learning were dominated by Christian clerics, whose ascetic culture from the late medieval period militated against the inclusion of women in scientific enterprise. He further demonstrates how the attitudes that took hold then remained more or less intact through the Reformation, and still subtly permeate our thinking despite the secularization of learning. Noble also describes how during the first millennium and after, women at times gained amazingly broad intellectual freedom and participated both in clerical activities and in scholarly pursuits. But, as Noble shows, these episodic forays occurred only in the wake of anticlerical movements within the church and without. He suggests finally an impulse toward "defeminization" at the core of the modern scientific and technological enterprise as it works to wrest from one-half of humanity its part in production (the Industrial Revolution's male appropriation of labor) and reproduction (the millennium-old quest for the artificial womb). An important book that profoundly examines how the culture of Western science came to be a world without women. |
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Page 113
... monastic warfare . Thus the monastic lit- urgy provided the outlet at once for both impulses : Christian love and ... reform upon which it was grounded , the Cluniac reform was masculine to the core and all but ignored women . To the ...
... monastic warfare . Thus the monastic lit- urgy provided the outlet at once for both impulses : Christian love and ... reform upon which it was grounded , the Cluniac reform was masculine to the core and all but ignored women . To the ...
Page 117
... monastic reform ; he dispatched one of his monks to Fleury to learn the correct reform discipline , and his monastery thereafter followed the Cluniac pattern . Before long , " men were flocking to Ethelwold in their desire for that ...
... monastic reform ; he dispatched one of his monks to Fleury to learn the correct reform discipline , and his monastery thereafter followed the Cluniac pattern . Before long , " men were flocking to Ethelwold in their desire for that ...
Page 118
... monastic circles , " one historian of the reforms has noted , " and are probably the conscious basis upon which the Council of Winchester was called and the Regularis Concordia drawn up . " In the place of Emperor Louis the Pious sat ...
... monastic circles , " one historian of the reforms has noted , " and are probably the conscious basis upon which the Council of Winchester was called and the Regularis Concordia drawn up . " In the place of Emperor Louis the Pious sat ...
Contents
PART | 41 |
The Scholastic Cloister | 138 |
Eight Revelation in Nature | 163 |
Copyright | |
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A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science David F. Noble Limited preview - 2013 |
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