Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction
| By: | Read, Kirk D, Mr |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Print ISBN: | 9780754666325 |
| eText ISBN: | 9781409478553 |
| Edition: | 0 |
| Format: | Reflowable |
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The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France.
Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender