Conches

I just got back home from spending an afternoon at the Conches-en-Ouche annual fair, which is held on the second week-end in September, in celebration of Saint Cyprien, the patron saint of our little town in the middle of Normandy not that anyone would actually be able to give you any information about this holy man though!

Country fairs and Ferris wheels Rene Meertens 2010

Small in size, but playing with a lot of heart, are the Jewtown Conches who are traveling to Mitchieville all the way from India.

Archive 2007-08-01 2007

In William of Conches 'dialogue, Dragmaticon philosophiae, the

Literary Forms of Medieval Philosophy Sweeney, Eileen 2008

While other sources — and other sections of The Questions — followed the assumption that the menses fed the fetus, one particular question denied the possibility of such a phenomenon, citing the same language that William of Conches had used to describe the menses: It is asked, Why are children not nourished by menstrual blood, as is asserted by certain people?

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

Both traditions agreed that contact with menstrual blood led to negative consequences, but, while Levitical tradition emphasized both spiritual and physical impurity, medical writings stressed only the physical or material dangers. 70 By including only the Pliny passage in their texts, the thirteenth-century encyclopedists explained in a purely physical sense the negative attributes found in the writings of William of Conches.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

The belief that women and their bodily fluids were cold and in need of assistance parallels notions central to Aristotelian natural philosophy as understood and expounded in the century following William of Conches.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

William of Conches describes the "long work" attempted by each fetus in the seventh month, based on the idea that the fetus was extremely active then and would have to rest for another month if its attempt to exit the womb failed. 86 By the seventh month, the fetus was no longer simply the passive recipient of nourishment from the mother's body but actively sought to separate itself from her.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

Many authors, influenced in part by William of Conches, emphasized the danger posed by raw, undigested menstrual blood.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

The fetus who developped in the right-most cell would be male and very masculine, because it was closest, again, to the source of heat (and hence of masculinity), the liver: Conches, Phil., p. 90: … si in dextra parte remaneat, quia hepar est in dextra parte matrici vicinum, meliore et calido sanguine nutritur fetus, masculus efficitur.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005

See Conches, Phil., p. 88 on "incurable infirmities" of the parents.

A Tender Age: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 2005