Kirk D. Read
Childbirth for women at the turn of the sixteenth century was at once life-giving and life-threatening; to bring children into the world was to put oneself in danger. Birthing children of the mind through writing and publishing was an equally perilous enterprise for women in a society that marked all of their reproductive capacities, both biological and intellectual, with shame and suspicion. An investigation of the writings of both men and women surrounding childbirth can prove fruitful regarding the limits and possibilities of women’s expression, both of the body and the spirit.
The perception of childbirth as a dangerous event in the life of early modern women is the subject of no little debate, and the language and arguments used for framing the polemic are instructive in and of themselves. Lianne McTavish is wont to question overly dire statistics. She sees the exaggeration of reports on maternal mortality as participating in a transhistorical misogynistic tradition of condemning midwives’ incompetency. She says of recent historians of medicine, “By undertaking careful archival research, they have undermined longstanding assumptions about early modern childbirth. It is no longer possible to presume that female midwives were incompetent, women had no control over conception, and birth itself was extremely dangerous.”1 McTavish responds to the conventional and repeated wisdom of scholars such as Lawrence Stone who generalize broadly from what seems like much of the cautionary, hyperbolic literature from the early modern period. “For women, childbirth was a very dangerous experience, for midwives were ignorant and ill trained, and often horribly botched the job, while the lack of hygienic precautions meant that puerperal fever was a frequent sequel.”2 Commensurate with such predictions is the speculation of B.M. Willmott Dobbie, whose prose betrays not only the general mystery of the birthing process in the early modern era, but our knowledge of its history from that time to the present:
An enquiry into family structure in previous centuries reveals evidence of the high price in women’s lives of replenishment of the population. It could not be otherwise, for when Nature failed in her task, or was thwarted by such adversities as pelvic deformity or malpresentation, attempts to help were mostly fumbling in the dark, literally and metaphorically, and well-meant interference was almost certain to introduce infection, so often fatal.3
Dobbie’s characterization of Mother Nature “failing in her task” in the context of bumbling early modern midwives is, in itself, fodder for a rich discussion of gender and contemporary gynecological rhetoric about the past. While that metacritical study is not the focus here, it does serve to contextualize the work of McTavish and others who seek to put into question the assumptions that such characterizations validate. To be sure, however, Dobbie’s suppositions participate fully in the highly gendered discourse of this era that François Rouget and Colette Winn describe as clearly polemic:
C’est dans le dernier tiers du XVIe siècle que s’amorce le fameux conflit entre les practiciennes et les ‘hommes d’art’ opposant les femmes, fortes de leur expérience mais ignorantes des principes élémentaires de l’anatomie et de l’hygiène, qui refusaient de céder le monopole dont elles avaient joui jusquelà dans le domaine obstétrical, aux hommes, qui souvent n’avaient qu’une connaissance théorique des mécanismes de la parturition.4
(It is in the final third part of the sixteenth century that begins the famous conflict between female practitioners and the ‘men of science’ opposing these women who were fortified by their experience but ignorant of basic principles of anatomy and hygiene and refused to give up the monopoly they had theretofore enjoyed in the realm of obstetrics over men who often had only theoretical knowledge of the mechanics of birthing.)
Of concern to me here are the ways in which anxiety over the woman’s body in birth inflects this polarized debate. Rouget and Winn continue: “Le respect des traditions mais aussi les préjugés et les tabous, notamment la pudeur et la peur qu’avaient les femmes d’être souillée, ne cessaient d’alimenter le fameux débat sur ‘l’indécence aux hommes d’accoucher les femmes’” (“Respect for tradition but also prejudices and taboos, notably modesty and women’s fear of being sullied, did not cease from fueling the famous debate on the ‘indecency of men assisting women in childbirth,’” 17). If Dobbie raises the specter of well-intentioned birth attendants “fumbling in the dark,” so do I here take up the veiled and anxious discourse around who is privileged to fumble about; how early modern birth attendants approached their mission; and how their writing defended their decisions and livelihood.
Not surprisingly, Louise Boursier, whom Wendy Perkins hails as “the foremost female health worker in France,” plays a crucial role here.5 Midwife to the Parisian elite of her day, including, on six occasions, Marie de Médicis, Boursier sets the scene in her Observations diverses of 1609:
… je me trouvais un jour à l’accouchement d’une honnête demoiselle de mes bonnes amies, de laquelle le mari était absent; elle était assistée de trois ou quatre de ses amies, lesquelles me demandèrent l’état de son accouchement, je leur dis que l’enfant venait mal, mais que je l’aurais, aidant Dieu, sans danger de la mère ni de l’enfant; elles me prièrent d’avoir agréable de la faire voir au chirurgien; pour leur décharge, je leur accordai, pourvu qu’elle ne le vît point, d’autant que je savais que cela était capable de la faire mourir d’appréhension, et de honte. Je la persuadai de se glisser aux pieds de son lit. Je mis le chevet au milieu du lit et abattis le tour du lit du côté qu’il devait passer, et aux pieds: il la toucha comme je parlais, elle ne le vit point, et accoucha sans artifice ni aide, que de Dieu et de la nature.6
(… I found myself one day at the birthing of a proper lady known to my good friends whose husband was absent; she was attended to by three or four of her friends who asked me about the progress of the birth. I told them that the child was coming with difficulty but that I would receive it, God willing, without danger to the mother nor to the child; they asked me kindly if I would consent to having her seen by a physician; to assuage their fears, I consented, provided that she not be allowed to see him, for I knew that this could cause her to die of apprehension or shame. I persuaded her to slide to the foot of the bed. I put the pillow in the middle and built up the bed on the side where he would approach, as well as down by her feet. He touched her while I spoke, she never laid eyes on him and gave birth without any special intervention or help, either from God or nature.)
Such anecdotes are one of the most compelling features of the midwife’s or physician’s manual. Nestled in among Petrarchan sonnetry in the dedications, classical and folkloric allusions, herbal remedies and tips on everything from dry skin and vomiting to paternity and multiple births, the eyewitness account is what turns the pages. I saw, I attended, I saved. These are the terms that lend respect and veracity. Boursier’s story here is a particularly poignant one for what it says about the state of the increasingly medicalized view of childbirth. It betrays the moment where attending to women’s reproduction and birthing was literally slipping from the midwife’s hands.7
Boursier’s narrative is couched clearly in an atmosphere of mistrust regarding women’s capacities to oversee births, particularly in the case of difficult ones. In consenting to her client’s wishes to have a doctor present, she must stage an elaborate deception so that the birthing woman hears her, but is touched by the man behind the screen: “il la toucha comme je parlais, elle ne le vit point, et accoucha sans artifice ni aide, que de Dieu et de la nature” (“He touched her while I spoke; she never laid eyes on him and gave birth without any special intervention or help, either from God or nature”). She talks reassuringly and he touches. Boursier, related as she was through marriage to some of the most renowned surgeons of her day, is not overly begrudging; but we do sense in the “sans artifice ni aide”— meaning that no extraordinary measures were needed that would have required a doctor—that this was something that could have been handled (pun intended) between women. Louise Boursier reminds her daughter and the reader in her Instruction à ma fille:
Advisez ma fille, ce que vous pouvez estre plus que moy: estant petite fille de Phanerote, disciple de Lucine, maistresse de Mercure, à cause que Lucine l’a assujetty à vostre mere. Vous estes née dans l’exercice que ceste sage m’a monstré … Vous n’en manquerez nullement, d’autant que vous estes enfant de famille, un Docteur en medecine est mary de vostre soeur, vostre mary fait son cours pour l’estre, l’un de vos freres est Pharmacien, vostre pere est Chirurgien, et moy sage-femme; le corps de la medecine est entier dans nostre maison.8
(Consider, my daughter, that you can become even greater than I: being granddaughter of Phanerote, disciple of Lucina, mistress of Mercury because Lucina put her in your mother’s service. You are born into the work that this wise woman showed me … You can’t hardly fail, being a child in such a family, your sister’s husband is a doctor of medicine, your own husband is studying to be one, one of your brothers is a pharmacist, your father is a surgeon, and I, a midwife; the entire medical establishment is represented in our household.)
Louise Boursier’s husband, Martin Boursier, studied under Ambroise Paré and became one of the king’s surgeons. Boursier indulges both her actual lineage so redolent of medical acumen, and, more importantly, her female mythological forebears whom she uses to establish her credibility as a midwife. And for good reason, it would appear.
Professional medical men were increasingly implicating themselves into the process of childbirth; the written record of their advice regarding their profession reflects not only the fact of their involvement, but a certain anxiety regarding the tensions between men and women, surgeons and midwives, that clearly marked this period of transition.9 One can explore more closely this phenomenon through a shared narrative, a story taken up by the surgeon Jacques Guillemeau in his De l’heureux accouchement des femmes of 1609 and interpreted differently by another writer with more literary pretentions, Catherine des Roches, in her first published works, Les Oeuvres, of 1578. The story that both retell is that of Agnodice, the mythic first woman physician who attended to the women of Athens, fearful for their reputations lest they be seen and touched by men. The story came to both authors through Hyginus, a second-century Latinist as published in his Fabulae. Their respective approaches to this tale are the stuff of gendered authorship: What do they include? Why? Who constitutes their putative readership? What’s at stake?
Hyginus embeds his story in a chapter entitled “Inventors and their Inventions” wherein a variety of discoveries and inventions are discussed: wine, pruning, the needle, bronze, lead, arms, and then somewhat incongruously, herbs, which lead to a reference to Chiron, son of Saturn (first to use herbs in the medical art of surgery), Apollo (first to practice in the art of treating eyes) and Asclepius, his son, who purportedly began the art of clinical medicine. The story of Agnodice follows.
The ancients didn’t have obstetricians, and as a result, women because of modesty perished. For the Athenians forbade slaves and women to learn the art of medicine. A certain girl, Hagnodice, virgin, desired to learn medicine, and since she desired it, she cut her hair, and in male attire came to a certain Herophilus for training. When she had learned the art, and had heard that a woman was in labor, she came to her. And when the woman refused to trust herself to her, thinking that she was a man, she removed her garment to show that she was a woman, and in this way she treated women. When the doctors saw that they were not admitted to women, they began to accuse Hagnodice, saying that ‘he’ was a seducer and corruptor of women, and that the women were pretending to be ill. The Areopagites, in session, started to condemn Hagnodice, but Hagnodice removed her garment for them and showed that she was a woman. Then the doctors began to accuse her more vigorously, and as a result the leading women came to the Court and said: ‘You are not husbands, but enemies, because you condemn her who discovered safety for us.’ Then the Athenians amended the law, so that free-born women could learn the art of medicine.10
Hyginus then quite characteristically shifts gears and plunges straight away into a list of other inventions: compasses, statuary, astrology, dye, musical pipes, and so forth. This “invention,” as it were, is far more elaborated than any other items in Hyginus’s chapter; it seems to carry a lot more weight. His attention betrays a conscious and concerted attention to the issue of women’s health and the anxieties attached to it. Hyginus introduces this “invention” or origin story as being about female obstetricians. Yet it is curious to note how he has the Athenian women characterize it within his narrative: “‘You are not husbands, but enemies, because you condemn her who discovered safety for us’” (“Vos coniuges non estis sed hostes, quia quae salutem nobis inuenit eam damnatis”).11 In a gesture reminiscent of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, where sex is withheld for peace, the Greek women rise up and command the patriarchy into submission; the drama of their proclamation mirrors the drama of the central acts of disrobing and discovery. It is not hard to see the connections to the anxieties of covering, uncovering (“illa tunica sublata ostendebat se feminam esse” and “tunicam alleuauit et se ostendit feminam esse”), hiding and revealing, suffering and healing so crucial to the story I began with by Louise Boursier.
Of particular relevance to this investigation is the thoroughgoing work of Helen King, whose study of the historical Agnodice (Agnodike to this Hellenist) focuses heavily on the act of “anasyrmos,” the gesture of lifting of the garments to reveal the lower part of the body.12 King shows this gesture to be highly charged and enumerates its many meanings, whether to drive away evil forces, to invite fertility, to provoke laughter, to make oneself sexually available, to shame men in retreat in battle, to prove one’s sexual identity or, as in the case among women, to show solidarity. For the purposes of this study, it is these latter two impulses that take precedence, though the wartime scenario—literally, “Is this where you cowards are running back to, back to your mother’s womb?”—has some poignancy if we remind ourselves again of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, in which women’s sexual power is wielded with remarkable, transformative effect, though presumably to opposite ends. King aptly remarks the context in which the story of Agnodice is told: Hyginus’s “quis quid inuenerit”—more literally, who discovered what—with an emphasis on covering and un-covering. To find out how this was played out in the early modern France, we turn first to physician Jacques Guillemeau.
Guillemeau’s retelling of Hyginus is included at the beginning of Book II of his medical treatise wherein he devotes 13 pages to the duties of midwives (the entire book is 200 pages long). If the percentage of time spent on women’s role as practitioners at childbirth is relatively small, it might be explained in the rhetoric of danger and precariousness with which he approaches his subject:
Or comme ainsi soit que la plus grande maladie que les femmes puissent avoir, est celle des neuf mois, dont la crise & guarison se faict par leur accouchement: Il ne faut point douter que telles femmes ne se soient addonnees & exercees aux accouchemens des femmes, & qu’il y en a eu de tout temps.13
(Now since the greatest disease that women can have is that of the nine Moneths, the Crisis and cure whereof consists in their safe deliverie: we must not doubt, but that there have been some women addicted thereto, and practized therein, in all ages…)14
The audience is clearly marked as the fraternity of surgeons who must come to terms with the sorority of midwives, as it were, “addonnee & exercees” to the work that men were gradually taking over.
Guillemeau retells the story with clear emphasis on the crisis in women’s health:
…la necessité, maistresse des arts, a contrainct les femmes, les unes avec les autres d’apprendre & practiquer la Medecine: car se trouvans affligees & atteintes de plusieurs maladies en leurs parties honteuses, estans destituees de tous remedes: à faute de quoy plusieurs languissoient, & mouroient miserablement, n’ont osé se descouvrir, & deceler leur mal, qu’à elles-mesmes estimans cela deshonneste.15
(necessitie, (the mistresse of Arts) hath constrained women, to learne and practise Physicke, one with an other. For finding themselves afflicted, and troubled with divers diseases in their naturall parts, and being destitute of all remedies, (for want whereof many perished, and died miserably) they durst not discover, and lay open their infirmities, to any but themselves, accounting it to be dishonest.16
It is not surprising that Hyginus’s characterization of women “perishing for modesty” came to mind. The “discovering” and “laying open” here of infirmities is clearly related to women’s genitalia, the site of childbirth, to be sure, but also of intercourse, desire, shame, pollution, and the ever-threatening licentiousness of women’s exposed bodies—the “parties honteuses”—to which we will shall return. Guillemeau’s version sticks closely to the myth as told by Hyginus; his is a fairly faithful rendering of the tightly constructed drama of Agnodice’s desire for learning: the physical transformation of her hair and clothes; her uncovering of herself to the doubting Athenian women; her subsequent development of an enthusiastic following; the Athenian men’s accusation of transvestism and debauchery—ironically that she might be a man posing as a woman; the second “discovery” as her raised tunic proves them wrong; the charge of greater concern, that of studying and practicing as a woman; the Athenian women’s uprising and condemnation of the men’s objections; and finally, the revising of Athenian law to allow women to study medicine.
Two discrepancies are noticeable and significant. First, it is telling that in Guillemeau’s version, Agnodice is said to return from medical school (as it were) to practice first upon a woman characterized as “afflicted in her shameful parts”: “ayant esté advertie qu’il y avoit quelque femme malade en ses parties honteuses, alla vers elle, pour luy offrir son service: Ce que la malade recusa (sic), estimant que ce fust un homme” (Guillemeau, 144, my emphasis; “having notice of a certaine woman that was troubled in her naturall parts; she went unto her, and made proffer of her service; which the sicke party refused, thinking she had been a man,” Childbirth, 80) This is indeed how he introduced the idea of midwifery: a profession borne out of women’s shame. Hyginus’s description of Agnodice’s first client was, we may remember, unattached to shame (“et feminam laborantem audisset ab inferiore parte”); the “laborantem” does not necessarily suggest the labor of childbirth, as would “parturire.” Yet it is somewhat ironic that it would suggest, indeed, “suffering under bodily affliction,” but also “a state of being troubled or anxious;” in this case, Guillemeau is seen layering the narrative with the specter of shame and embarrassment more with respect to himself than to the woman. Guillemeau appears too troubled or anxious to call it like it is—this “inferiore parte”—without invoking the shamefulness of the woman’s vagina and uterus.
Interesting as well is the way in which the two authors describe the climax of the story wherein the Athenian women speak out against the unreasonable injunctions against women’s participation in medicine. From Hyginus, who gives them direct speech: “‘You are not husbands, but enemies, because you condemn her who discovered safety for us’” (Grant, 176; “Vos coniuges non estis sed hostes, quia quae salutem nobis inuenit eam damnatis,” Marshall, 197); and from Guillemeau: “qu’elles ne les tenoient aucunement pour leurs maris & amis, mais pour ennemis, de vouloir condamner celle qui leur donnoit la santé” (Guillemeau, 145; “that they did not account them, for their husbands, and friends, but for enemies; that they would condemne her, which restor’d them to their health,” Child-birth, 80). Hyginus tells his story in the context of inventors and inventions, people who discover. Agnodice is therefore the actor, the discoverer, the first woman gynecologist, who invents women’s safety. Hyginus’s women’s speech is direct; Guillemeau’s is reported. Guillemeau’s text remains one about healing and restoring health, a medical view of everything pertaining to women’s well-being; the intensity of the Athenian women’s dramatic declaration is diminished by the indirect discourse, their voices silenced. Agnodice remains in some ways transvested for Guillemeau. He makes no plea for changes in the laws of early modern France to allow women to practice medicine; for all of the drama that the transvesting narrative affords, Guillemeau’s tale is not meant to empower women to become doctors, but to remind men, the “we” in his text (the ubiquitous and unquestionably masculine “on”), that women may well continue to lay claim to this burgeoning profession.17
All the better, the reader might well surmise, from the description of bedside fumbling about in the dark that he describes in his “Au Lecteur”:
Or pour la dexterité, il n’y a rien de comparaison avec les autres o(pe)rations: car il ne se faict aucunes oeuvres en Chirurgie, où il ne soit necessaire de voir clair, soit par la lumiere, qui nous est donnee du jour, ou de la chandelle, & que la partie que l’on traicte & manie, ne soit apparente & manifeste à l’oeil. Au contraire, en ceste operation, tant pour la presence de ceux qui assistent, que pour la crainte que pourroit avoir la femme, l’on est contrainct de cacher seulement l’entrée par laquelle il faut mettre la main, puis icelle y estant mise, il faut chercher l’enfant en quelque situation qu’il soit, sans le pouvoir voir…18
(Now for the dexteritie: there is no comparision betweene this and other practises; for there be no workes to be done in Chirurgery; where it is not necessary, to have the benefit either of daylight or candle light, and the part which is to be handled, and dressed must be apparent and laid open to the eye. Whereas contrariwise in this worke as well by reason of the company present, as also, least the woman should be afraid, the very entrance, whereby hee should put in his hand, they are constrained to hide: and then his hand being there, he must search for the child (howsoever it be placed) not being able to see it.)19
Guillemeau’s text suggests the challenge of men practicing upon women in a society fearful of women’s exposure or discovery in public: here we have the physician’s version of what it was like to attend to a birth such as the one described by Louise Boursier from the beginning of this essay; Guillemeau betrays the compromised nature of this fumbling delivery himself. There is nowhere to look without fear or shame, and yet Guillemeau bravely flaunts the social proscriptions, reaches in and touches, delivers. Tellingly, while Guillemeau is often suspicious of midwives’ competency in their vocation because of their gender, he does bring them on the scene in his manual when it comes to the “internal exam” to verify pregnancy:
… un signe aussi bien certain est recogneu par la Sage-femme, en mettant son doigt dedans le col de la matrice, duquel elle touchera le col interieur d’icelle: si la femme est grosse, elle la trouvera si exactement fermee, que la pointe d’une esguille n’y pourroit pas entrer, il sera mollet neantmoins, & sans estre accompagné d’aucune dureté, lequel pareillement sera retiré en haut, s’estant raccourcy retroussé à raison du corps de la matrice qui s’est resserree en soy, pour embrasser la semence, ce qui est cause que ladite Sage-femme n’y peut toucher que difficilement.20
(…another certaine signe may be perceived by the Midwife, who putting up her finger into the wombe to touch the inner orifice thereof, if the woman be with child she shall finde it so close shut, that the point of a needle will scarse enter therein, yet soft, and without any hardnesse, which also will bee drawn upward being shrunke and as it were trussed up, because the body of the Matrice doth gather it selfe together to embrace the seed, which is the reason that the Midwife can very hardly come to reach it with her finger .)21
Such intimate knowledge of the woman’s cervix is best recounted, it would appear, with a woman’s probing finger in mind. What Guillemeau mitigates for, ever so circuitously here, is safer delivery. His rhetoric of “shameful parts,” however, suggests that while the birth of the child may be inevitable, the birth of truly enlightened knowledge and safety regarding women’s reproduction may be a ways off.
Turning to Catherine des Roches’s retelling of the myth of Agnodice, one finds illuminating counterpoint. Inserted in a poetic collection whose themes betray an enthusiastic appraisal of women’s community and their literary and domestic lives, this Agnodice becomes a touchstone for women’s health and knowability in a way far beyond the scope of Guillemeau.
Catherine des Roches is no physician; she is, however, in the more generous and radical sense of the term, an avid gyn-ecologist (with thanks to Mary Daly).22 Her version of the Agnodice myth appears in the context of a woman writer coming to terms with bodies of writing, writing bodies, and all of the rich attendant allusions to safety, patriarchal control, and sisterhood that we have observed so far in Louise Boursier and Jacques Guillemeau. Her Agnodice is told by an author who has eschewed births of living children in favor of children of the spirit. As she says to her mother in the preface to the volume that includes the Agnodice:
J’ay seulement pensé de vous monstrer comme j’employe le temps de ma plus grande oisiveté, et vous supplie humblement (ma mere) de recevoir ces petits escrits qui vous en rendront tesmoignage; si vous en trouvez quelques-uns qui soient assez bien nez, avoüez-les s’il vous plaist pour voz nepveux, et ceux qui ne vous seront agreables, punissez-les à l’exemple de Jacob qui condemna la famille d’Isachar pour obeir à ses autres enfans.
(I have only thought of showing you how I employ my idle time, and humbly beseech you (my Mother) to receive this little collection of writing that bears witness to you; if you find some of them well enough conceived, please acknowledge them as your very own progeny, and those that you do not find agreeable, punish them in the same way Jacob condemned the family of Issachar to serve his other children.)23
Catherine des Roches presents her writings to her own mother as the fruits of her scholarly labor. The “nepveux” of whom she speaks is a play on her mother’s birth name, Neveu, felicitously combined with the latinate neveux (from nepotes) or descendants.24 What Catherine des Roches gives birth to is a broad-ranging collection of dialogues, sonnets, occasional poems, dedications, epitaphs, a theatrical piece, and the retelling of several biblical and mythological tales. It is a large family she has spawned. The favorite daughter, for my purposes here, is her 177-line verse rendition of the tale of Agnodice.
Her mother Madeleine des Roches has previously shown herself predisposed to literary rather than flesh-and-blood grandchildren; indeed her Ode 1, included in this joint publication, presents one of the most unglamorous and cranky diatribes against wedlock and motherhood one could imagine:
Noz parens ont de loüables coustumes,
Pour nous tollir l’usage de raison,
De nous tenir closes dans la maison
Et nous donner le fuzeau pour la plume.
Trassant noz pas selon la destinée,
On nous promet liberté et plaisir:
Et nous payons l’obstiné desplaisir,
Portant le dot sous les loix d’Hymenée.
Bientost apres survient une misere
Qui naist en nous d’un desir mutuel,
Accompagné d’un soing continuel,
Qui suit tousjours l’entraille de la mere.25
(Our parents have laudable customs
To deprive us of the use of our reason:
They lock us up at home
And hand us the spindle instead of the pen
Conforming our steps to our (female) destiny,
They promise us liberty and pleasure:
But we reap continuous displeasure,
When we lose our dowry to the laws of Marriage.
Then soon after comes a new misery,
Born within us of mutual desire,
Accompanied by those continuous cares
That always burden the mother’s womb.)26
Real progeny seem like the end of a raw deal, wherein bright women are robbed of their study time (giving up the pen for the distaff, an image that her daughter will take up directly in her poem “A ma quenoille”) and burdened with the inequitable rules and duties of marriage. One might imagine a far warmer depiction of the arrival of a child than her “misere/qui naist en nous d’un desir mutuel” followed by constant worry by a mother reduced to a burdened gut. One might also imagine a more tempered depiction, given the embeddedness of her poem within the works of her very own, cherished daughter; history suggests however, that Catherine was fully aware of the hardships of the married, childbearing life, a path she chose to avoid to the bafflement and consternation of a multitude of suitors, but not, presumably, of her mother.27
Who then, does Agnodice become for Catherine des Roches? Agnodice arrives as a stranger to rescue the Athenian women who are condemned to a life robbed of learning as a consequence of the death of Phocion and the anger of Envy. Envy induces all husbands to become tyrants, forbidding their wives to read books thereby sapping them of the desire or force of will to live. To one such victim she growls:
Car en despit de toy j’animeray les ames
61
Des maris, qui seront les tyrans de leurs femmes,
Et qui leur deffendant le livre et le sçavoir,
Leur osteront aussi de vivre le pouvoir.28
(For to spite you, I’ll incite
Husbands to become the tyrants of their wives;
By keeping learning and books from them,
They’ll take away their very desire to live.’)29
Des Roches thus embellishes the Hyginus tale at the onset by positing the source of women’s torment, not as the pangs of labor, nor the onset of some gynecological disorder, but as a physical reaction to the privation of their vocational, or better, literary aspirations. The decree causes a physical malaise that soon afflicts the spiritually bereft women:
Les dames aussitost se trouverent suivies
73
De fiebvres, de langueurs, et d’autres maladies;
Leur faisoit supporter incroyables tourmens.
Aymant trop mieux mourir que d’estre peu honteuses
76
Contant aux Medecins leurs peines langoureuses,
Les femmes (o pitié!) n’osoient plus se mesler
De s’aider l’une l’autre; on les faisoit filler.30
(The women soon found themselves beset
By fevers, faintness, and other illnesses,
Envy forced them to bear incredible torments.
They preferred death to the shame of
Telling the (male) Doctors about their debilitating troubles.
The women (what a pity!) did not dare
To help one another, they were made to spin.)31
The “tourmens” and “peines langoureuses” are quite clearly references to the women-and-knowledge boilerplate text from Genesis, that the torments of labor are a reminder of woman’s original sin, the sin of desire for knowledge whose consequences are likewise linked to her reproductive capacities.
Enter Agnodice.
Ceste Dame, cachant l’or de sa blonde tresse,
92
Aprist la medecine, et s’en feit grand maistresse.
Puis se resouvenant de son affection,
Voulut effectuer sa bonne intention,
95
Et guerir les douleurs de ses pauvres voisines32
(This young woman, hiding the gold of her blond locks,
Learned medicine, and became quite expert at it.
Then, remembering her original intent,
She wanted to carry out her plan
To heal the sufferings of her poor sisters)33
Agnodice returns and the crucial scene “self-disclosure” or “self-discovery” is enacted:
Agnodice, voyant leur grande chasteté,
106
Les estima beaucoup pour ceste honnesteté;
Lors descouvrant du sein les blanches pommes rondes,
Et de son chef doré les belles tresses blondes,
Monstre qu’elle estoit fille, et que son gentil cueur
110
Les vouloit delivrer de leur triste langueur.
Les Dames admirant ceste honte naïsve,
Et de son teint douillet la blanche couleur vive,
Et de son sein poupin le petit mont jumeau,
Et de son chef sacré l’or crepelu tant beau,
115
Et de ses yeux divins les flammes ravissantes,
Et de ses doux propos les graces attirantes,
Baiserent mille fois et sa bouche et son sein,
Recevant le secours de son heureuse main.34
(Agnodice, seeing their great chastity,
Esteemed them all the more for their virtue,
And uncovering then the white round apples (of her bosom),
And the beautiful blond tresses of her golden head,
Showed that she was a maiden, and that her kind heart
Wished to deliver them from their sad predicament.
The Ladies admiring her innocent modesty,
And the lively whiteness of her soft complexion,
And the little twin mounts of her adorable breasts,
And the beautiful golden shine of her blessed head,
And the ravishing flames of her divine eyes,
And the engaging gracefulness of her sweet words,
Kissed a thousand times both her mouth and her breast,
As they received help from her blessed hands.)35
The story here becomes ever more lyrical, ecstatic, and erotic; the women of Athens are delivered from their “langueur”—the illness induced by the privation of learning—into a state of delirious contentment. In contrast to Hyginus and Guillemeau (and most poignantly, perhaps, to Boursier), the woman’s body is touchable, and knowable in a way that flies in the face of accusations of licentiousness: des Roches participates fully in the rhetoric of love poetry, and of the blazon in particular as she delineates the woman’s body in all its glorious detail. She lingers specifically on the breast, “les blanches pommes rondes” (the white round apples) reiterated in “son sein poupin le petit mont jumeau” (the little twin mounts of her adorable breasts) illuminated by the “flammes ravissantes” (ravishing flames) of her heavenly countenance. The scene culminates in rapture as the Athenian women kiss her mouth and breast while receiving the help of her blessed hand.
Other possible allusions from the ancient world attest ever more suggestively to a view to women’s empowerment and community. In Greek myth, Baubo, in an attempt to relieve the torment of grief, was said to have joked with the bereaved goddess Demeter by painting a face on her stomach and then pulling her dress over her head and dancing. The anger and anguish that the Athenian women express is clearly fueled by grief over their neglected sisters. The sisterhood of the goddess Diana surrounded by her nymphs is clearly another reference, especially given the physical descriptions: Diana is the chaste female figure par excellence whose very existence relied on the exclusion of men for her survival (and when you got too close, you got eaten by your own dogs…). Helen King remarks this possible allusion to the original Agnodice, placing it squarely in the context of Hyginus’s work. In Fabula 189, he retells the story of Procris, a woman, who cuts her hair and dons a tunic and challenges and beats her husband in a hunt. He asks for the javelin and the dog that Diana had given her in exchange for money; she asks instead for sex and reveals herself posthaste as a woman: “tunicam leuauit et ostendit se feminam esse et coniugem eius” (King, 61). The utopian gynaceum that des Roches depicts is rich with the erotic potential of her ancient predecessors, here to the exclusion of men.
Such a contrast we have here to the plight of Guillemeau whose unhappy hand gropes about blindly in the dark, ashamed both for himself and for his patient. Des Roches’s women, on the other hand, have found not only health and safety, but a renaissance in letters rendered through this particular climactic moment, an act that would be impossible, inappropriate, indeed unspeakable, by Agnodice’s male counterpart. Agnodice arrives and is given this excited welcome by women thanks to the fact that they have at last a healer who, with no sense of impropriety or shame, can touch them. When word gets around that Agnodice is attending to these women to their obvious well-being and delight, the same scene of revelation is enacted for the male authorities who, in a fantasy of stunning conversion, stand in mute, awed acceptance:
Depuis qu’elle eut parlé, oncq une seulle voix
155
Ne s’esleva contre elle; ains toute l’assistance
Monstroit d’esmerveiller ceste rare excellence;
Ils estoient tous ravis, sans parler ny mouvoir,
Ententifs seulement à l’ouyr et la voir.
Comme l’on voit parfois apres un long orage,
160
R’asserener les vents, et calmer le rivage.36
(After she had spoken, not a single voice
Was raised against her; on the contrary, the entire audience
Marveled at her rare excellence;
Everyone was filled with wonder, and no one moved or made a sound,
Attentive only to hearing and seeing her.
In like manner one sometimes sees, after a long storm,
The winds die down, and the waves become calm.)37
And so Catherine des Roches dispenses with the scene wherein Agnodice is condemned and then subsequently defended by her Athenian sisters; in her version, Agnodice’s compelling oratory on her own behalf stuns the men into submission. The storm of controversy surrounding women attending to women is calmed entirely by one learned and persuasive woman. Agnodice singlehandedly transforms the Envy-tainted society that has banished women from books and learning and begins the work of repairing wounded minds and bodies. Agnodice is the midwife of children of both the body and the spirit. The labor is difficult and noble and cherished for women in a society suspicious and highly proscriptive, a society that links women’s unworthiness constantly to the messiness, the shame, and the mutable nature of their bodies. And so Agnodice arrives to dispel such mythologizing and indeed to turn such opinion on its head: perhaps women are worthy and capable because of this ability to reproduce.
I hope to have demonstrated that the retelling of the myth of Agnodice by a physician, Jacques Guillemeau, and an early modern female poet, Catherine des Roches, means different things for the authors and constituencies concerned. Guillemeau’s version is retold in the context of a sincere coming-to-terms with the anxieties and exigencies surrounding women’s health at the time; he is not immune to the illogical, silly, and ultimately dangerous proscriptions against men’s “illumination” with regard to women’s health—he does not use the tale of Agnodice, however, to propose education for women that would allow them to take over his role. He is interested in producing responsible midwives who know when to call the doctor. Catherine des Roches, on the other hand, extols the glories of women as at once (re)producers, midwives, and physicians as a metaphor for protecting women’s livelihood in the realm of letters. Their ecstatic enthusiasm comes in equal measure to the immense oppression we saw quite clearly and sadly drawn in her mother’s first ode.
To conclude, I would direct us to a document of keen interest to this discussion from a contemporaneous translation of Guillemeau’s text. It is the anonymous translator’s epistle wherein he feels compelled to defend himself for having brought such delicate material to light. It is he who makes the most eloquent bridge between literary and anatomical production one could imagine. His anxiety is everywhere apparent:
Thus far hath the Authour pleaded for him selfe, whom while I Translate, least the fault be translated upon me, I will speake somewhat for my selfe, before I be accused, there be no bodie to speake for me: If therefore it be thought prejudiciall, either to the literarie common-wealth of Physicke, that I have exported and made common a commoditie, which the learned would have had private to themselves: or if I have been offensive to Women, in prostituting and divulging that, which they would not have come to open light, and which beside cannot be exprest in such modest terms, as are fit for the virginitie of pen and paper, and the white sheetes of their Child-bed. I must (as well as I can) defend my selfe from these imputations, and shew my care to keep both learning and modestie illibate, and inviolable … As for women (whom I am most afraid to offend) they must be content to have their infirmities detected, if they will have helpe for them, which I wish might not come to any eare or eye, but to those which they themselves would have acquainted therewith, and as well for their sakes, as mine owne satisfaction: I have endevoured to be as private and retired, in expressing al the passages in this kind as possibly I could.38
The translator thus declares himself appropriately concerned with bringing “to open light” the woman’s body with all of the attendant discourse of shame and licentiousness: prostitution, divulging, violation. He is in concert with Guillemeau in this way, and he appears not to shy from promoting a sort of public-health message of his own that encourages women to benefit from this wisdom and swallow the inevitable shame: his prose is potentially life-saving. It is the arresting image of the virgin pen and the white sheets of childbed that remain with us, however. The productive pen must spill ink to express itself; no childbed sheets remain white for very long.
It is a document created for feminist critic Susan Gubar’s discovery and delectation. Her groundbreaking work on women’s creativity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, most notably “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” airs women’s dirty laundry, as it were, and sees in both the stained sheets of the virgin’s wedding bed and those that emerge shockingly pristine in the case of her lapsed sisters, a history of women—their bodies, their beds, and their books—as perpetually interwoven.
Because of the forms of self-expression available to women, artistic creation often feels like a violation, a belated reaction to male penetration rather than a possessing and controlling. Not an ejaculation of pleasure but a reaction to rending, the blood on the royal marriage sheets seems to imply that women’s paint and ink are produced through a painful wounding, a literal influence of male authority. If artistic creativity is likened to biological creativity, the terror of inspiration for women is experienced quite literally as the terror of being entered, deflowered, possessed, taken, had, broken, ravished—all words which illustrate the pain of the passive self whose boundaries are being violated.39
Guillemeau and his translator are clearly dealing with the post-virginal woman’s body, yet the ravishing of which Gubar writes is entirely consonant with the extreme trepidation with which male physicians approached the woman’s body during birth. As for the translator’s virgin pen—well, never has a case of phallic anxiety been more clearly construed. He as well fears the wrath of accusations for the improper use of his instrument. Alas, ink must be spilled in order to save women’s lives, says he. Again, from Gubar:
This model of the pen–penis writing on the virgin page participates in a long tradition identifying the author as a male who is primary and the female as his passive creation—a secondary object lacking autonomy, endowed with often contradictory meaning but denied intentionality. Clearly this tradition excludes woman from the creation of culture, even as it reifies her as an artifact within culture. It is therefore particularly problematic for those women who want to appropriate the pen by becoming writers.40
Des Roches’s experience is radically transformative of this notion of creativity as issuing from wounding or phallic penetration. The Athenian women greet Agnodice—the discoverer of their safety, the guardian of their health—with deep sensual, if not sexual, pleasure at the rediscovery of their learned selves, not far removed from the ejaculation of pleasure of which Gubar writes, yet utterly feminized: Catherine has, in effect, called upon Agnodice to lead her mother out of the misery of marriage and childbirth and shown light on a powerful, supportive, grateful, ecstatic community of women, free at last to touch and to tell.
1 Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), p. 8.
2 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 79. For countervailing argument and evidence in a variety of European examples, see Roger Schofield’s “Did the Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality in ‘The World We Have Lost,’” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (New York: Blackwell, 1986).
3 B.M. Willmott Dobbie, “An Attempt to Estimate the True Rate of Maternal Mortality, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Medical History, 26 (1982): 79.
4 François Rouget and Colette Winn, “Introduction” to Louise Boursier, Récit veritable de la naissance de messeigneurs et dames les enfans de France; Instruction à ma fille et autres textes (Geneva: Droz, 2000), p. 16. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
5 “Between 1601 and 1609 she was midwife to Marie de Médicis, queen of France, delivering all six of her children. Her rise to prominence was in fact meteoric: having passed the official examination only in 1598, she had by 1601 delivered the future Louis XIII and was assured of a successful, influential career.” Wendy Perkins, Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. 1.
6 Louise Boursier, Observations diverses sur la stérilité … ed. Françoise Olive (Paris: Côté femme, 1992), p. 187.
7 Of insight in this realm of investigation, particularly with regard to the example of Louise Boursier is Wendy Perkins’ study, Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France; Rouget and Winn’s edition of Boursier’s Récit véritable is highly useful with regard to primary work by Boursier and biography. Of interest as well is the more universal study of women and medicine by Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Un Corps, un Destin: La femme dans la médecine de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 1993).
8 Rouget and Winn, 124.
9 Of primary importance to this discussion—and of some help in my conception of a title for this essay—is the work of Caroline Bicks on Shakespearean midwives: “What distinguishes the early modern midwife from the other women of the birthroom, however, is the fact that she was recognized as a sanctioned shaper of men’s, women’s, and children’s bodies. Although any birth attendant was theoretically privy to a new mother’s secrets, the midwife had an acknowledged duty to handle bodies and interpret their secrets. Given that European men had participated in making the midwife an integral part of their countries’ institutional structures and less tangible cultural operations, her tales and touch posed a particular challenge to male claims about women’s bodies and children’s origins—and to the masculine identities that those claims helped underwrite.” Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), p. 12. See also Lianne McTavish’s cautionary interpretation of this issue as discussed in my introduction, where she warns against an overly polemicized debate according to gender.
10 Hyginus, The Myths of Hyginus, ed. and trans. Mary Grant (Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1960). The identity of the author Hyginus remains subject to ardent debate. Mary Grant seems clear that he was not the commonly accepted C. Julius Hyginus, freedman of Augustus and librarian of the Palatine Library, but paints an ample portrait of the author, based upon evidence from the text itself and contemporary sources. The recent French edition, edited by Jean-Yves Boriaud (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), still accepts this attribution of Hyginus as a learned freedman, friend of Ovid, erudite and close to the seats of power in contrast to Grant (relying heavily on H.J. Rose’s critical edition) who sees evidence in this early work of little more than “a mere schoolboy, and not a very alert one at that” (Grant, p. 3). In any case, it appears clear that the text of the Fabulae (known in the original, presumably, as Genealogiae) was a type of reference for writers wishing to utilize Greek and Roman myths in some way (Grant, p. 4).
11 English translation, Grant, p.176; Latin original, Hyginus, Fabulae, ed. Peter K. Marshall (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2002), pp. 196–7.
12 Helen King, “Agnodike and the Profession of Medicine,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 32 (1986): 53–77.
13 Jacques Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement des femmes, où il est traicté du gouvernement de leur grossesse, de leur travail naturel et contre nature; du traictement es tant accouchées et de leurs maladies (Paris, 1609), p. 146.
14 Jacques Guillemeau, Child-birth or, The Happy Deliverie of Women, anonymous translation (London, 1612), p. 81.
15 Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement, 143–4.
16 Child-birth, 80.
17 For a contemporaneous example of the battle of the sexes and professions that was played out in print, one need only consult the reports of surgeons regarding the death of Marie de Bourbon Montpensier, 5 days after giving birth while attended by Louise Boursier. The report implicates Louise Boursier as negligent, a charge to which she replies in her Fidelle relation de l’accouchement, maladie et ouverture du corps de feu MADAME. For both see Rouget and Winn’s modern edition of Boursier’s Récit Véritable, Appendices I & II, pp. 97–120.
18 Guillemeau, e i.
19 Child-birth, 7b.
20 Guillemeau, 10.
21 Child-birth, 7.
22 The radical connection that Mary Daly makes in her groundbreaking work between women’s physical and intellectual and spiritual health is most pertinent to this discussion, though perhaps worthy of elaboration elsewhere: “This book is primarily concerned with the mind/spirit/body pollution inflicted through patriarchal myth and language on all levels … Phallic myth and language generate, legitimate, and mask the material pollution that threatens to terminate all sentient life on this planet. The title Gyn/Ecology is a way of wrenching back some wordpower. The fact that most gynecologists are males is in itself a colossal comment on “our” society. It is a symptom and example of male control over women and over language, and a clue to the extent of this control.” Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 9.
23 Catherine des Roches, Les Oeuvres (1578), ed. Anne R. Larsen (Geneva: Droz, 1993), p. 185. Translation, Anne R. Larsen, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches: From Mother and Daughter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 87.
24 See Larsen’s edition of Les Oeuvres, p. 185, n. 11.
25 Oeuvres, 86–7.
26 Larsen, From Mother and Daughter, 53.
27 See the judgments of the family friend Estienne Pasquier as he ruminates over Catherine des Roches’s reticence in matters of marriage: “Il n’y a qu’une chose qui me déplaise en ceste maison, qu’estant la fille belle en perfection tant de corps que d’esprit, riche de biens, comme celle qui doit estre l’unique heritiere de sa mere, requise en mariage par une infinité de personnages d’honneur, toutes-fois elle met toutes ces requestes sous pied; resolue de vivre & mourir avec sa mère” (“There is but one thing that displeases me in this household, that the daughter, possessed of a perfect beauty of both body and soul, wealthy (as she is her mother’s sole inheritor), all the same, she refuses all suitors, resolved to live and die with her mother”). Estienne Pasquier, Letter to Monsieur Pithou, Seigneur de Savoye (Book VI, Letter 11 of his Lettres familières) in Anne R. Larsen’s edition of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Les Missives (1586) (Geneva: Droz, 1999), pp. 348–9.
28 Oeuvres 1578, 335–440.
29 Larsen, From Mother and Daughter, 124–5.
30 Oeuvres, 336.
31 Larsen, From Mother and Daughter, 126–7.
32 Oeuvres, 336.
33 Larsen, From Mother and Daughter, 126–7.
34 Oeuvres, 337.
35 Larsen, From Mother and Daughter, 127, 129.
36 Oeuvres, 339.
37 Larsen, From Mother and Daughter, 131
38 “Translator’s Preface,” in Guillemeau, Child-birth, p. 2.
39 Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity” in Elizabeth Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 80.
40 Gubar, 70.