One way or another, the offending book caught the attention of Pope Innocent X, who put it on the Index of Prohibited Books (Decree of June 18, 1651). Others were pretty indifferent about the matter, and looking on themselves as mere machines, hoped to set their springs so well agoing as to make the men stark mad.” Not all the ladies were silent, and the splendidly named Archangela Tarabotti wrote A Defense of Women. One gathers from a commentator that “the ladies of Italy took this system very differently. It was now in Italian, and was entitled Women do not have a soul and do not belong to the human race, as is shown by many passages of Holy Scripture. The pamphlet, however, often bound with the refutation by Simon Geddicus, survived, and it appears that it was published at Lyons in France in 1647. Simon Geddicus, a Lutheran scholar, launched a mighty counter-pamphlet entitled A Defense of the Female Sex, in which he proposed “manfully” (he actually uses the word viriliter) to “destroy each and every one of the arguments put forward by Valentius,” who, the reader will learn with regret or satisfaction as the case may be, took a seizure and died. If he thought the pamphlet would amuse, he was grievously wrong. In Latin the word homo, like the word man in English, primarily means “a human being, male or female, young or old,” but has the secondary meaning of “adult male.” Valentius thought it would be fun to use this ambiguity to “show” that in the Bible only adult males have souls. He thought to turn an honest penny by publishing a “diverting” pamphlet. A young scholar, Valentius Acidalius, was working as a teacher in Silesia, and, like many young scholars, he was short of money. The story begins, innocently enough, in the late sixteenth century. The bishops of course decreed no such thing, for if women do not have a soul how could they be baptized, how receive the Eucharist, how be venerated as martyrs in heaven? Yet it may be worthwhile to look at the story of this alleged decree, for one can see a myth in the making. 585 decreed that women do not have a soul. (Actually, he explicitly denies this no fewer than five times.) There are those who know that Aristotle said that a woman is a deficient male-a description based on an appalling mistranslation.Īnd there are those who know that an early council of bishops, held at Macon in Burgundy, France in a.d. Josh Billings remarked profoundly that “the trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much as ain’t so.” There are those who know John Chrysostom said that “the image of God is not found in Woman.” (Actually, he said that “the image of God is not found in Man or Woman.”) There are those who know that Thomas Aquinas said that a woman is a defective male.
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