Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France PDF Author: Cathy McClive
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France PDF Author: Cathy McClive
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317097351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.

The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing

The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing PDF Author: Alison M. Downham Moore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192654527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors' professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women's ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women's ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

Blood Matters

Blood Matters PDF Author: Bonnie Lander
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Blood Matters explores blood as a distinct category of inquiry in medieval and early modern Europe and draws together scholars who might not otherwise be in conversation.

The Medical World of Early Modern France

The Medical World of Early Modern France PDF Author: L. W. B. Brockliss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 992

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Book Description
This is a unique history of French medicine between the sixteenth century and the French Revolution. Brockliss focuses on physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, providing an overview of long-term changes in their ideas about medicine and their craft. But he also discusses other denizens of the medical world-- quacks, charlatans, wise women, midwives, herbalist and others--setting them within the broader context of social, economic, demographic, and cultural change.

Yale French Studies

Yale French Studies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description


The Western Experience: The early modern period

The Western Experience: The early modern period PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description


Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment

Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Lindsay Blake Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"In Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment Lindsay Wilson takes a new approach to the social history of medicine by focusing on the key role that women played as both providers and recipients of health care during the Ancien Regime. Wilson pays special attention to three medical controversies involving maladies des femmes in eighteenth-century France: the "miraculous cures" claimed by the Convulsionaries of St. Medard, the uncertainty over the maximum length of pregnancy (and its implications for the legitimacy of heirs) and the debate over the medical effectiveness of mesmerism." "Wilson's analysis of these debates reveals how social and political concerns affected the medical community's efforts to establish an enlightened science of medicine which would, in turn, legitimize its own authority. But because the issues of legitimacy, hierarchy and authority raised by the medical causes celebres resonated so deeply throughout French society, debate extended far beyond medical circles to an increasingly engaged public. Such debate reflected a significant shift in the center of politics from the institutions of court, academy, and parlement to journals, theaters, and the streets." "Wilson's description of these debates provides insight into the forces that were transforming the family, the church, corporate society, and the state on the eve of the Revolution. She argues for a re-assessment of a period that has been all too easily categorized as an age of triumph - either for enlightenment or for repression. Her work also offers concrete examples of the ways in which sexual symbolism can he employed to maintain social order or promote change. Based on medical treatises, medical topographies, official reports, judicial documents, physicians' correspondence, and memoirs of eighteenth-century women, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment is a thoroughly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social history of medicine, women's studies, Enlightenment thought, and French social history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Sodomy in Early Modern Europe

Sodomy in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Tom Betteridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This fascinating collection of essays reflects closely the main areas of debate within gay historiography.

Male Delivery

Male Delivery PDF Author: Sherry Marie Velasco
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Using the one-act comedy El parto de Juan Rana (John Frog Gives Birth) as a point of departure, Velasco argues that the figure of the pregnant man in early modern Spanish culture was not merely comic entertainment, but also served an important role as a physical representation of the anxieties about the changing roles of men and women at the time. Men were increasingly taking over medical duties--especially surrounding childbirth--usually left to women and, as their medical knowledge increased, they became aware of bodies and behaviors--both male and female--that transgressed gender norms. The anxieties about men who acted in ways seen as increasingly womanly (from acting effeminately to participating in homosexual activity) played out in the character of pregnant Juan Rana. Then, Velasco turns to Hollywood and asks if we might not use the lessons of Juan Rana to help explain why contemporary America is also fascinated by the idea of male pregnancy--think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior--and our increasing anxiety over the changing face of masculinity in our own culture.

Scholars of Early Modern Studies

Scholars of Early Modern Studies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Historians
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description