ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In the Early Modern period, attempts to describe the female body were central to the medical and broader scientific enterprise. With the development of anatomy, the insides of the human body had come to light, but narratives of discovery and uncertainty informed anatomical descriptions of the female body. Research in the field of the history of medicine has shown that scientific attempts to understand it are intertwined with political, social, and religious efforts to establish social norms, moralize and regulate sexuality, and exercise control over generation and family structures. This organized session aims at decentralizing and contextualizing the role of early modern institutional medicine in the description of female bodies within the wider landscape of scientific and cultural discourses.

We explore the role of non-medical knowledge, particularly of Latin and Greek literature, in the construction of learned physicians’ authority over the regulation of sex categories, such as that of the tribade. Moreover, we highlight the plurality of knowledge surrounding female bodies in different settings. We suggest that women who described their defloration and pregnancy in courts of law were active carriers of medical knowledge surrounding their bodies. We argue that canonization processes constitute a key source for analysing the role of women in articulating their own gendered illness narratives. Finally, we analyse the relationship between the knowledge of male surgeon-obstetricians and of female midwives in the field of women’s medicine.

Through these examples, we explore the multiple voices and disciplines that intertwined in the description of the female body, questioning which goals, interests and discourses shaped the early modern construction of and regulation of the female body as a sex category.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Sarah Seinitzer, Universität Wien / Università di Bologna

Individual Presentations

• Anatomy, Ancient Literature, and the Construction of Sex Categories in 16th-Century Learned Medicine - Martina Ravaioli, University of Bonn - CRC 1329 "Cultures of Vigilance"

• Narrating defloration: medical knowledge in court depositions (Bologna, 17th-18th century) - Laura Schiavone, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich - Università di Bologna

• Women, Miracles and Illness Narratives in Early Modern Spain - Laura Guinot-Ferri, University of Valencia

• Rewriting Pathological Childbirth: Marie-Louise Lachapelle and the Revision of Obstetrical Nomenclature at the Turn of the 19th Century - Elena Danieli

Session Organizer

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