The Secrets of Conception: Somatogenic and Magical Approaches to Love in Learned Medicine and East European Jewish Books of Secrets

Abstract This article traces four learned non-Jewish approaches to lovesickness informed primarily by the humoral formulation of illness. These competing theories will be further examined in the writings of professionally trained Jewish physicians and in the manuscript compilations of East European ba‘alei shem , who combined materia medica with Jewish magic and practical Kabbalah in their therapeutic remedies. The article demonstrates that in premodern times, love – in all its emotional and somatogenic facets – was a gendered phenomenon. Within the hierarchy of social and religious power, Jewish women’s bodies were disproportionately subordinated to male desires and subject to male manipulation and exploitation.