Pathologies of Love: Medicine and the Woman Question in Early Modern France by Judy Kem (review)

Historians of science and medicine have examined medieval and early modern physicians' observations about female anatomy and their contributions to prevailing (and often misogynist) beliefs about women's physiological and moral qualities relative to men's. Judy Kem complements this scholarship by focusing on medical aspects of the literary querelle des femmes in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century France. She analyzes the works of five writers, women and men (Christine de Pizan, Jean Molinet, Symphorien Champier, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and Marguerite de Navarre), who lived and worked in the French or Burgundian courts, many of whom had close ties to medical practitioners. She chooses as her central theme lovesickness, or mal d'amor, and related ailments. This book is of special interest today, with the reminder the Covid-19 pandemic carries with it of how closely humans still, and always, live in the presence of disease and death. Modern readers may see the "pathologies of love" that Kem discusses as representing two broad but separate types of conditions—physical (syphilis, infertility) and psychological or behavioral (sexual insatiability, death from excessive grief or spurned love). Like the authors whose works she analyzes, however, Kem makes no distinction among these maladies, meeting the texts on their own terms. She approaches the topic of lovesickness from diverse angles and is attentive to links between the medical and the hermeneutic. To begin, she considers Christine de Pizan's refutation of Jean de Meung's claim in the Roman de la rose that women should yield to the men who pursue them in order to spare their seducers the physical suffering of rejection. She shows how Molinet conflates spiritual and physical love in his allegorized reading of the Roman de la rose by associating Christians who lack the courage to risk their lives to conquer the Holy Land with fainthearted suitors unwilling to die for love. Her reading of Champier's warnings against early and immoderate sexual activity reveals that, although his main interest is curing male infertility and sexual dysfunction, Champier avoids the misogyny rampant in other works of the time. Lemaire, she finds, attributes the spread of syphilis to a breakdown in gender roles, a problem he suggests can be treated by Mercury, the god of eloquence, just as syphilis itself was treated by mercury, the element. Finally, she argues that Marguerite de Navarre highlights differences between men's and women's social positions with regard to lovesickness (real or feigned) and to a recommended but controversial remedy, therapeutic intercourse. The disparate chapters of this book, taken together, offer a multilayered and nuanced view of medical discourse in the querelle des femmes. Kem's meticulous research allows her to identify themes and debates in early modern medicine that readers today might otherwise miss. Her thoughtful and informative study will interest not only scholars of early modern French literature and of gender, but also in the medical humanities, as they consider cultural and ethical dimensions of health, illness, and healing across the centuries.