Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France by Cathy McClive (review)

The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert declared, “Women’s menses are one of the most curious and difficult phenomena of the human body.”¹ Cathy McClive’s excellent study explores the complex meanings of this “most curious” phenomenon in early modern France. Her book challenges existing scholarship that emphasizes the negative associations with menstruation and misogynistic elements of the early modern discourse on menstruation—“the myth of menstrual misogyny.” McClive does so by masterfully bringing to light diverse interpretations of menstruation and its role in reproduction and health in early modern France.

Her work focuses on elite perceptions of menstruation through the careful examination of theological, medical, legal, and personal sources. It first turns its attention to early modern French translations of the Bible, specifically the passages in Leviticus prohibiting sex during menstruation. In this complex and nuanced chapter, McClive argues that neither Catholic nor Protestant translations of Leviticus promoted the view of menstruating women as physically unclean but instead expressed concerns about the ritual or spiritual impurity of not only menses but also semen. In her analysis of medical theorists’ responses to religious prohibitions on sex during menstruation, McClive stresses the uncertain connection between procreation and menstruation. While some early modern medical texts such as Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the popular sex manual first published in seventeenth-century London, identified sex during menstruation as a cause of monstrous births, McClive argues that learned French texts did not link menstruation to monstrosity but did consider the possibility of adverse health consequences for a fetus conceived during a woman’s menses. French medical authorities questioned when was the optimal timing of sex during the menstrual cycle for healthy conception and what was an appropriate quantity of menses, which was understood to provide nourishment for the fetus during pregnancy.

Physicians and jurists shared a preoccupation with issues of menstrual regularity and irregularity that shaped various civil and criminal cases. One of the most remarkable cases was the famous trial involving Catherine Cadière, who accused her Jesuit confessor Jean-Baptiste Girard of seduction, “spiritual incest,” bewitchment, and abortion. Cadière in turn was accused of faking the stigmata with her menses. McClive offers a new perspective on the cause célèbre by analyzing how Cadière’s menstrual calendars were used in legal contests over the questions of whether she had indeed been pregnant and whether she could have used her menses to fake the stigmata. McClive scrutinizes other medicolegal affairs involving declarations of pregnancy required of unmarried or widowed women to avoid possible charges of infanticide, medical reports in assault cases where women claimed to have a pregnancy endangered by the attack, and cases of contested legitimacy, particularly for a six-month or eleventh-month pregnancy. Her analysis reveals that the cessation of menstruation was not considered certain proof of pregnancy. Some women could menstruate or bleed heavily through pregnancy, while others could be pregnant without ever having menstruated. The signs of pregnancy, the duration of an individual pregnancy, and the possible minimum and maximum lengths of gestation were all uncertain and contested.

In her final chapter, on accounts of menstruating men and bleeding hermaphrodites, McClive suggests that male periodic bleeding, such as nosebleeds and bleeding hemorrhoids, was connected to “vicarious menstruation,” or regular periodic bleeding from a nonvaginal orifice, in early modern French humoral medicine. McClive challenges the widely held view that menstruation became seen as an exclusively female phenomenon by the late eighteenth century. Although McClive traces certain shifts in medical understandings of menstruation over the course of the early modern period, her account is one of continuity. Presumably more significant changes, including a more essentialist association between menstruation and the female body, emerged during the nineteenth century, and the link between ovulation and menstruation was established. Without further studies, it is unclear whether understandings of menstruation varied and shifted at different points across Europe and across the...