ABSTRACT
The following discussion explores early-modern images of male creation which were figured as intellectual or imaginative masculine births. It suggests that a profound gender uncertainty was embedded in masculine figurations of creation and procreation. The essay focuses in particular on the explicitly masculine tropes of vigour and virility that were routinely attached to the representation of the seventeenth-century new scientific project. It argues that this overt masculinisation of scientific discourse was, in fact, profoundly destabilised by its own enquiries into the creative process.
