Children of love and purity: Mandrake, Monarchy, and Botanical Futurism in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

This article examines representations of female fertility and marital sexuality at a time of reproductive crisis. In 1665, King Philip IV of Spain’s death, leaving the four-year-old Charles II as his sole potential heir, created a perceived crisis for Habsburg succession. I analyze a text by the royal family’s personal physician, Tomás Murillo y Velarde, which promotes the mandrake plant as a fertility aid, arguing that Murillo’s herbal medical text grapples with two fundamental paradoxes of early modern marriage: that patriarchal inheritance depends upon the procreative capacity of the female body, which is described in medical texts as inherently defective, and that procreation cannot take place without sexual pleasure, deemed sinful even within marriage in the early modern imaginary. Murillo uses examples of biblical women and female plants and animals to suggest that an active role in sexual relations can be licit without loss of chastity, displacing sexual desire onto the aphrodisiac plant, thereby creating a chaste form of active female sexuality even as he is careful to bound this within male authority in the form of the physician. Consequently, Murillo’s treatise contests norms of female comportment that urged subservience, making medical literature a site that resisted the general Counter-Reformation trend towards reinforcement of female subordination within marriage. At the same time, his account of fertility and the reproductive futurism of the Spanish state clearly place blame for infertility and divine disfavor on the female body. Thus, his account both upholds and contests hegemony as it reinstates reproductive futurism through and over the female body.