Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France write by Lianne McTavish. This book was released on 2017-03-02. Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Throughout the early modern period in France, surgeon men-midwives were predominantly associated with sexual impropriety and physical danger; yet over time they managed to change their image, and by the eighteenth century were summoned to attend even the uncomplicated deliveries of wealthy, urban clients. In this study, Lianne McTavish explores how surgeons strove to transform the perception of their midwifery practices, claiming to be experts who embodied obstetrical authority instead of intruders in a traditionally feminine domain. McTavish argues that early modern French obstetrical treatises were sites of display participating in both the production and contestation of authoritative knowledge of childbirth. Though primarily written by surgeon men-midwives, the texts were also produced by female midwives and male physicians. McTavish's careful examination of these and other sources reveals representations of male and female midwives as unstable and divergent, undermining characterizations of the practice of childbirth in early modern Europe as a gender war which men ultimately won. She discovers that male practitioners did not always disdain maternal values. In fact, the men regularly identified themselves with qualities traditionally respected in female midwives, including a bodily experience of childbirth. Her findings suggest that men's entry into the lying-in chamber was a complex negotiation involving their adaptation to the demands of women. One of the great strengths of this study is its investigation of the visual culture of childbirth. McTavish emphasizes how authority in the birthing room was made visible to others in facial expressions, gestures, and bodily display. For the first time here, the vivid images in the treatises are analysed, including author portraits and engravings of unborn figures. McTavish reveals how these images contributed to arguments about obstetrical authority instead of merely illustrating the written content of the books. At the same time, her arguments move far beyond the lying-in chamber, shedding light on the exchange of visual information in early modern France, a period when identity was largely determined by the precarious act of putting oneself on display.
Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy
Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy write by Jennifer F. Kosmin. This book was released on 2020-08-31. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating the secrets of women’s sexuality and the processes of generation. By the eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth century were not strictly medical developments but rather socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor, shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting female honor. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious history, social history, and Early Modern Italy.
Pregnant Fictions
Pregnant Fictions - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Pregnant Fictions write by Holly Tucker. This book was released on 2003. Pregnant Fictions available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Pregnant Fictions explores the complex role of pregnancy in early-modern tale-telling and considers how stories of childbirth were used to rethink gendered "truths" at a key moment in the history of ideas.
Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France
Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France write by Suzanne Desan. This book was released on 2010-11-01. Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France
Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France write by Kirk D. Read. This book was released on 2016-04-15. Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.
