Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France, by Cathy McClive

Menstruation is ineluctably associated with the female body, and most accounts assume that an entirely negative view of menstruating women prevailed in the past. Cathy McClive persuasively challenges what she calls the ‘myth of menstrual misogyny’, demonstrating instead that medical, theological and legal understandings of menstruation were complex and ambivalent. McClive acknowledges the path-breaking analysis of Patricia Crawford, but challenges Crawford’s essentialist assumptions. McClive understands gender and sex as flexible and co-constituting, and her agenda includes ‘troubling’ and ‘queering’ menstruation by means of a deeply-grounded, empirically-rich study. Focusing on France, McClive opens by examining translations (Catholic and Protestant) of Leviticus as the originary locus of misogyny toward menstruation. McClive finds that translations between 1530 and 1798 moved from ‘immonde’ (unclean) to ‘impur’ (impure) in crucial passages, and scholars contextualising Leviticus understood that the text reflected important distinctions between ritual and physical impurity. Moreover, scholars understood Leviticus as procreative in intention and gender-neutral: both male and female emissions were problematic.

Ambivalence · Essentialism · Menstruation · Mythology · Protestantism · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Medical History and Innovations · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology