Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps

This volume brings together essays which develop diverse aspects of the conceptualisation of the female body in early modern France. Women rarely wrote about their own bodies in the early modern era, especially in ways that reflected the reality of their experiences of menstruation, fertility and the ‘menopause’ (a term in use only since the nineteenth century). This book unites case studies of different modes of writing about women's bodies in order to push back the limits of knowledge concerning female physiology and its relationship to constructions of gender more generally. Laurence Moulinier-Brogi starts the collection with a fascinating examination of the practice of analysing women's urine in the medieval and early modern period. It was believed that numerous pieces of information could be gleaned from this science of uroscopy, such as the sex and sexual status of the patient and the sex of a pregnant patient's eventual child. Évelyne Berriot-Salvadore looks at the textual transition of medical and aesthetic knowledge about women in manuscript and printed books. From their pages emerges an image of woman as a perfect but fragile beauty, protected and conserved by medical and cosmetic procedures. Marie-Élisabeth Henneau examines representations of women's bodies within the conventional setting. It could be assumed that in a life of spiritual devotion the individual's physical experiences would be subordinated to the life of the community. However, through close analysis of spiritual biographies Henneau shows that the experience of the body could be channelled through union with Christ, one of the principal organizing metaphors of these third-party accounts. Nicole Pellegrin explores the writing of stigmata, an over-determined phenomenon at the intersection of spirituality and sexuality, purity and sin. Pellegrin skilfully reveals the extent to which stigmata is associated metaphorically with the marks of the criminal and although ostensibly demonstrates that one has been chosen by God, also potentially leaves one's body vulnerable to the devil. Helen King discusses the dedication to Diane de Poitiers of a treatise on menstruation by Jacques Dubois translated from the Latin by Guillaume Chrestien. This work makes the claim for a distinct branch of medicine dedicated to women and urges the latter to call upon the expertise of a doctor instead of self-medicating with their own treatments. Eugénie Pascal's fascinating essay uses correspondence between princesses to chart aristocratic women's attitudes to fertility, childbirth and child raising. This is one of the most intriguing articles in the collection and contains numerous precious nuggets which together help recreate female, albeit socially elite, views on these subjects. Elizabeth L’Estrange examines the heterogeneous physical and spiritual remedies offered to women in childbirth, concluding that the mother was as much the subject of care as the newborn child and rejecting the hypothesis that childbirth was seen as a punishment for woman's sinful nature. Lianne McTavish analyses the ambivalent attitude to women's bodies in early modern French obstetric texts. The female body, although seen as generous in reproduction is also somewhat eclipsed by the male-authored discourses that encase its representation in these works. In an age when producing a son and heir was seen as the focus of many aristocratic women's lives, few medical conditions can have been as overburdened with meaning as the subject of Lisa Wynne Smith's chapter, sterility. She finds that women's fertility was very much a matter for the community, who informally policed procreation both within and outside wedlock for religious and moral reasons. Susan Broomhall's chapter uses notary acts to understand further the sexual practices of the poor in early modern France. They reveal the variety of motivations for pursuing legal actions related to sexual conduct, particularly sex outside marriage, where it produced illegitimate children. Broomhall concludes that the most common reason for legal pursuits was to ensure the material welfare of the offspring, most probably because this could not be assured by the mother alone. Stephanie Gaudillat Cautela's rigorous and lengthy study of representations of rape in legal and literary documents concludes that rape was subject to the same kinds of vicissitudes as other constructions of woman in the sixteenth century. Although considered, then as now, a serious crime rape rarely resulted in punishments such as the death penalty that could in theory have been imposed. Finally, Cathy McClive uses the histoire prodigieuse of a 79-year-old woman believed to have been pregnant for seven years to examine the ways in which early modern French culture perceived the issues of women's age, fertility and the ‘menopause’.

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Early modern period · Fertility · Gynecology · Humanities · Menstruation · Period (music) · Population · Sexual life · Sociology · Demography · European Political History Analysis · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Medicine