Introduction

In the Philosophical Transactions, Henry Oldenburg reported on a book by Jan Swammerdam called De Uteri Muliebris Fabrica, dedicated to the Royal Society. In the literature of the Royal Society, women in a Christian community were marked not only by the experience of pain in child-birth, but also by a vulnerability to the imagination. Robert Boyle's chapter on blackness situates women as the primary site for the introduction and passage of color characteristics, and imagination plays as prominent a role as sexuality. Blackness overwhelms the European woman with fear and renders her speechless at "the sight of a Negro". Boyle asserts that the mother's imagination is one possible explanation for how some of the originally white descendants of Adam could have turned black. The color of a European mother's newborn child leads the midwife to suspect the effects of the imagination. She finds that the non-Europeans that surround the mother have imprinted their color on the mother's imagination.