HIST 150: The Family in Premodern Europe (Fall 2024)

At the turn of the sixteenth century in Paris, midwifery was an emergent profession regulated by the church. This article analyzes fourteen entries in the Registre de causes from the archdeaconry of Brie, 1499-1504, within the context of midwives' relationship with the church. It suggests that midwives were important appendages of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Midwife regulation was one aspect of the French church's attempts to maintain its autonomy against secular powers. Regulation by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy provided midwives with professional advantages and disadvantages. The ecclesiastical bureaucracy played a vital role in creating and sustaining midwifery as a profession, but also circumscribed midwives' practices. Overall, however, bureaucratic control was unsystematically applied, and midwives were often left to negotiate their own professional and social positions.

Summarizes the history of midwifery in France and explores its rationalization in Marseilles during the 19th century. Measures to regulate midwifery had been taken by both the Catholic Church and the French government since the 16th century with varying degrees of success, but midwives generally were able to maintain their independence. The postrevolutionary period, with its ideology of reason, progress, and science and its pro-natalist policy, however, contributed to the decline of midwifery. Although training programs for midwives were established, stringent rules surrounded the admission and conduct of students, and as the male medical profession advanced, midwives were forbidden to use instruments or prescribe drugs. The decline of midwifery is illustrative of the negative consequences for women stemming from the rationalization of professions.

Examines portraits of 17th-century French 'accoucheurs' [men-midwives] that regularly appeared as the first plate in their obstetrical treatises, representing the body from which the text had issued. The article argues that these visual documents were forms of strategic display in keeping with the wider goals of the treatises - to present their authors as cultivated, skilled, and vastly experienced experts in childbirth. At a time when the visual evaluation of character was commonplace within medical and other contexts, author portraits presented the public image of 'accoucheurs.' Before analyzing the idealized images of men-midwives, however, the article explores the author portrait of Louise Bourgeois, royal midwife to Queen Marie de Médicis, 1601-09, and the first French woman to write obstetrics treatises.

Although there has been much recent work on the contribution of midwives to early modern medical practice in Europe, there has been less investigation of the participation of other women outside of the corporative or professional medical arena. This article seeks to examine how elite women were involved in medical discussion of reproduction, using the 16th-century correspondence surrounding the reproductive health of Elisabeth de Valois (1545-68), queen of Spain. Letters passed between the courts of France and Spain demonstrate that control of Elisabeth's reproductive health became a source of conflict between the Spanish and French. National rivalries created possibilities for women to be authoritative contributors in medical discussion with the support of university-trained physicians.

Birthing Bodies demonstrates the benefits of engaging a variety of genres in discussion of a topos that can be read both literally and figuratively, for the birth bodies in question are corporeal and textual. Further, by including theorists rang from Thomas Lacqueur to Mary Daly to Judith Butler, Read deftly explores the in sections of gender, sex, sexuality, and performance in this corpus. As he examin broad range of texts—poetry, novels, medical treatises, satires, polemics, travelogu Read "dismantles] received ideas about gendered bodies" (12) and exposes the une women's bodies generate as well as how other bodies, male or hermaphroditic, ap priate the process of generation. Chapter one, "Spying at the Lying-in," highlights the complicity between the male narrator and his newly delivered cousin in Les caqu de l'accouchée (1622). The misogynistic tradition informing this text is ultimat subverted by the narrator himself. Hidden in the ruelle he experiences the recup tive powers of this female space. Next, "Staging the Competent Midwife" juxtapo Rabelais's depiction of the births of Pantagruel and Gargantua with Louise Boursi account of the birth of Henri IV's children. Rabelais, author and doctor, brings medical knowledge to these royal births, controlling the narrative as well as wom bodies. His scenes of parturition stage a misogynistic superiority of the skilled do over ignorant midw