Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction by Kirk D. Read (review)

Reviews 239 concerns of Classical civilization are indeed universal and relevant to studies of contemporary Africa. Mount St. Mary’s University (MD) Marco D. Roman Read, Kirk D. Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction . Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7546-6632-5. Pp. xiv + 205. $99.95. Birthing Bodies demonstrates the benefits of engaging a variety of genres in the discussion of a topos that can be read both literally and figuratively, for the birthing bodies in question are corporeal and textual. Further, by including theorists ranging from Thomas Lacqueur to Mary Daly to Judith Butler, Read deftly explores the intersections of gender, sex, sexuality, and performance in this corpus. As he examines a broad range of texts—poetry, novels, medical treatises, satires, polemics, travelogues— Read“dismantl[es] received ideas about gendered bodies”(12) and exposes the unease women’s bodies generate as well as how other bodies, male or hermaphroditic, appropriate the process of generation. Chapter one,“Spying at the Lying-in,” highlights the complicity between the male narrator and his newly delivered cousin in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622). The misogynistic tradition informing this text is ultimately subverted by the narrator himself. Hidden in the ruelle he experiences the recuperative powers of this female space. Next, “Staging the Competent Midwife” juxtaposes Rabelais’s depiction of the births of Pantagruel and Gargantua with Louise Boursier’s account of the birth of Henri IV’s children. Rabelais, author and doctor, brings his medical knowledge to these royal births, controlling the narrative as well as women’s bodies. His scenes of parturition stage a misogynistic superiority of the skilled doctor over ignorant midwives. In contrast, Boursier writing from personal experience reveals the skills of the competent midwife at the birthing moment and underscores“women’s strength and engagement in a noble profession”(74–75).“Touching and Telling”presents the mythological Athenian Agnodice (the first female gynecologist), as Read compares the physician Jacques Guillemeau’s retelling of Hyginus’s account of Agnodice to that of Catherine Des Roches. Guillemeau introduces the notion of shame as well as the particular challenges relating to women’s honor when men are the practitioners. In Des Roches’s poem,Agnodice represents not only the competent midwife but also the writer herself, pointing to a form of generation—literary production—typically associated with men.The second half of the study shifts its focus to female bodily functions assumed by males,indeterminate bodies,and gender performance.“Assimilation with aVengeance” explores themes of generation,birthing one’s text,and nurturance through the metaphor of male breast-feeding, especially among the Pléiade poets, as creating a type of perfect male self-sufficiency. “Unstable Bodies” looks at hermaphroditism and traces uncertainty in the limits of gender. Read points to ambiguous bodies as both a source of “intense fascination and anxiety” (121) and as a determinant of political and social fortunes. Jacques Duval’s Des hermaphrodits provides a medical and judicial context for the early modern hermaphrodite and reminds us of the consequences of gender re/assignment. The final chapter “Strange Fellows in Bed” addresses the practice of the couvade, the postpartum lying-in by fathers who themselves often exhibit physical and mental reactions of newly delivered mothers. From the medieval text Aucassin et Nicolette to André Thevet’s encounters with Brazilian ‘savages,’ a ‘protocolonial’ discourse emerges that connects gender transgression to otherness. Throughout his study, Read weaves the relationship of gender and creativity into the fabric of his discussion, interrogating and complicating binary concepts of sex and gender both in the early modern period and our own. He situates the early modern within current debates on transgenderism and deploys transgender theory to broaden those concepts. He foregrounds a corpus of what he terms“more generously gendered universes”that may have mitigated the“heterosexist, heteronormative ideologies that held sway”(189) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. This highly readable work merits a broad audience of scholars of the early modern period. San Diego State University (CA) Edith J. Benkov Schopp, Claude. Dictionnaire Dumas. Paris: CNRS, 2010. ISBN 978-2-271-06774-6. Pp. 659. 39 a. Frigerio, Vittorio. Dumas l’irrégulier. Limoges...