Bleeding flowers and waning moons : a history of menstruation in France, c. 1495-1761

This thesis explores early modem perceptions of menstrual bleeding, demonstrating that attempts to understand menstrual bleeding extended beyond the early modem medical world and captured the imagination of an entire cross-section of French society revealing culturally- embedded concerns about marriage, progeny, the family, patrilineage and state formation. The thesis draws on diverse sources including medical, casuistic and judicial texts, court records and private documents. Chapter One outlines the database of medical texts which forms a cornerstone of the thesis. The database includes texts printed between 1495, with the French edition of a medieval Latin work by Bernard de Gordon, and 1761, with Montpellier physician Jean Astruc's treatise on women's diseases which introduced the term 'menstruation' into French medical vocabulary. Chapter Two examines medical notions of menstrual bleeding within the context of attitudes to blood, blood-related fluids and the humoral and mechanical bodies. Sixteenth-century casuistic interpretations of Biblical taboos surrounding sex during menstrual bleeding and notions of menses as polluting are cross-referenced with medical notions of the relationship of menses to conception demonstrating the overriding concern for healthy progeny. Chapter Three explores the significance of concepts of time and periodicity, in the context of the merging of blood-related fluids in the humoral body, as a key to early modem perceptions of menstrual bleeding. Chapter Four examines early modern debates on the length of gestation and the calculation of a woman's time on the basis of the monthly menstrual cycle relating these to Sarah Hanley's model of the 'marital regime'. In Chapter Five, the ambivalent nature of menstrual bleeding in the medico-legal arena is investigated and the different cultural meanings ascribed to various bloody discharges emanating from the living female body are analysed. In the sixth and final chapter the role of menstrual bleeding in issues of sexual difference and hermaphroditism is discussed

Bleeding flowers and waning moons : a history of menstruation in France, c. 1495-1761

This thesis explores early modem perceptions of menstrual bleeding, demonstrating that attempts to understand menstrual bleeding extended beyond the early modem medical world and captured the imagination of an entire cross-section of French society revealing culturally- embedded concerns about marriage, progeny, the family, patrilineage and state formation. The thesis draws on diverse sources including medical, casuistic and judicial texts, court records and private documents. Chapter One outlines the database of medical texts which forms a cornerstone of the thesis. The database includes texts printed between 1495, with the French edition of a medieval Latin work by Bernard de Gordon, and 1761, with Montpellier physician Jean Astruc's treatise on women's diseases which introduced the term 'menstruation' into French medical vocabulary. Chapter Two examines medical notions of menstrual bleeding within the context of attitudes to blood, blood-related fluids and the humoral and mechanical bodies. Sixteenth-century casuistic interpretations of Biblical taboos surrounding sex during menstrual bleeding and notions of menses as polluting are cross-referenced with medical notions of the relationship of menses to conception demonstrating the overriding concern for healthy progeny. Chapter Three explores the significance of concepts of time and periodicity, in the context of the merging of blood-related fluids in the humoral body, as a key to early modem perceptions of menstrual bleeding. Chapter Four examines early modern debates on the length of gestation and the calculation of a woman's time on the basis of the monthly menstrual cycle relating these to Sarah Hanley's model of the 'marital regime'. In Chapter Five, the ambivalent nature of menstrual bleeding in the medico-legal arena is investigated and the different cultural meanings ascribed to various bloody discharges emanating from the living female body are analysed. In the sixth and final chapter the role of menstrual bleeding in issues of sexual difference and hermaphroditism is discussed.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceArts and Humanities Research Board (Great Britain) (AHRB)France. Ambassade (Great Britain)Society for the Study of French HistorySociety for the Social History of MedicineGBUnited Kingdo

Women at the Centre: Medical Entrepreneurialism and 'La Grande Medicine' in Eighteenth-Century Lyon

We draw on Colin Jones’ framing of the Sisters of Charity as medical practitioners rather than charitable carers (1989) to centre the entrepreneurialism of Marie Grand and Marie Fiansons’ medical practice in eighteenth-century Lyon. Although historians recognize the significance of early modern European women’s (medical) work, they often assume such work existed in the shadows of the medical marketplace. Archival erasures and gendered narratives obscure the flexibility of women’s medical practices. Grand and Fiansons’ documents, analysed alongside adverts for local medical services, elucidate working women’s medical practices. As silk-workers and self-defined ‘chymists’ and herbalists, Grand and Fiansons were at the centre of healthcare and medicine. The breadth of their practice and networks emerges through the exceptional survival of their ‘counter-archive’ in the consular court archives. Their story reveals the fluidity and porousness of boundaries between domestic and occupational medicine, precarity and commodified care work, and charity and entrepreneurialism

Engendrer le tabou. L’interprétation du lévitique 15, 18-19 et 20-18 et de la menstruation sous l’ancien régime

This article criticises the traditional representation of early modern elite male attitudes towards menstruation as misogynist, arguing that a fuller and more nuanced analysis of such attitudes is needed. It proposes that this can be reached through the heuristic application of “taboo” to an analysis of one of the sources of elite religious attitudes to menstruation: Leviticus 15, 18:19 and 20:18. It compares linguistic changes in the expression of menstrual taboos found in Leviticus 15, 18 and 20 in 35 Catholic and Protestant Bibles between 1530 and 1768 and 22 contemporary dictionaries. It refutes the idea that the Levitican texts were misogynistic and argues that the early modern Catholic and Protestant translators situated the menstrual and seminal taboos above all in the context of procreation and conjugal sexuality. Far from expressing hatred or disgust for the menstruating woman, early modern French theologians and lexicographers respected the gender neutral tone of Leviticus 15. In early modern France Levitican taboos were part of a ‘procreative theology’ rather than an attempt to justify the inferiority of women