Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction (review)

In the Introduction to this latest volume of the Ashgate series Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, the author presents his study as the result of his having been 'radicalized' (p. 17) at college by a visit to campus by the feminist Mary Daly, who excluded male participation in her seminars. Birthing Bodies, consequently, represents for Kirk Read 'my way in' to the gynocentric universe. It is not altogether a surprise, therefore, that the first of the six chapters examines in detail the 1622 anonymous text Les Caquets de l'accouchée, in which a male narrator conceals himself next to the bed of his woman cousin who has just given birth. From that vantage point he writes down the gossip of the women visitors. Read compares Les Caquets with other often misogynistic works such as Les Quinze joies de mariage (early fifteenth century) as well as to studies of later ruelle culture from the seventeenth century. The second chapter compares Rabelais's birth stories of Pantagruel and Gargantua with the only slightly later writings of Louise Boursier, a midwife who gave accounts of the births of Marie de Médicis. Chapter 3 compares accounts of the legendary Athenian woman gynaecologist Agnodice: one written by the surgeon Jacques Guillemeau and the other by the better-known Catherine des Roches. In Chapter 4 Read turns to the metaphorical use of breastfeeding in Pléiade poetics to convey the bond between male mentor and disciples. This trope, which may appear far-fetched to more recent readers, is shown to be consistent with 'single-sex' models of human sexuality prevalent in the Renaissance. The fifth chapter discusses hermaphroditism and parturition by male-identified bodies, and it mentions a large number of sixteenth-century texts concerning hermaphroditism, gender instability, and transvestism, some of them taking the form of travel narratives, others concerning more directly the Valois court. Chapter 6 concerns stories of couvade (OED: 'a series of customs according to which, on the birth of a child, the father performs acts or simulates states natural or proper to the mother, or abstains for a time from certain foods or actions, as if he were physically affected by the birth'), ranging from Aucassin et Nicolette in the thirteenth century to sixteenth-century works by Rabelais, André Thevet, and Antoine Biet. Birthing Bodies concludes with an afterword, entitled 'Postpartum', in which the author finds in Aucassin's experience of male self-loathing and envy of women the way towards 'a more expansive, healthy, and liberated future' (p. 189). This study ranges widely over a surprising number of texts of the period and includes extensive references to current gender theory. There are fourteen useful illustrations.