ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Narrating defloration: medical knowledge in court depositions (Bologna, 17th-18th century)

• In Event: Decentralizing Women’s Medicine: Plural Voices Describing Female Bodies in the Long Early Modern Period

English Abstract

Trial records for cases of sexual crimes offer a rich contribution for studying the history of the female body “from below.” In their depositions, women who had lost their virginity or gotten pregnant before marriage often spoke about their bodies in ways that reflected knowledge about signs of defloration and pregnancy. While it is important to be aware of methodological issues related to these types of sources, an attentive reading allows to reconstruct forms of “lay” knowledge over the female body. In the legal setting, this knowledge was equally, if not more, relevant than that reported by medical experts (midwives, surgeons, physicians).
This contribution analyses three selected case studies from the Bolognese secular and ecclesiastic courts, dated between the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. It argues that women often included medical notions within the description of their defloration and of the discovery of their pregnancy: they spoke of bleeding, pain, swollen bellies, menstrual retention. Moreover, women did not simply repeat these signs, but related them to medical explanations and used them to support their case in ways that made them active carriers of knowledge. We can interpret this knowledge as part of a collective discourse over the female body, shared by members of communities such as neighbourhoods or rural villages. Thus, the study of sources like trial records reveals systems of knowledge falling outside the networks of “official” medical education, and yet remaining in dialogue with it.

Author

• Laura Schiavone, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich - Università di Bologna