Kathleen P. Long
This collection proposes an exploration of the relationship of women and questions of gender to the scientific domain in early modern Europe, particularly but not exclusively continental Europe. The essays in this volume present new views of this relationship by scrutinizing two very different fields: alchemy, where the existence of women practitioners has gone largely unacknowledged until quite recently, and obstetrics, a field in which women lost considerable ground as practitioners over the course of the seventeenth century.1 Alchemy, in the wake of the pioneering work of Allen Debus,2 has been ably rehabilitated as a scientific pursuit by a number of scholars, among them Bruce T. Moran,3 Didier Kahn,4 William R. Newman,5 Tara Nummedal,6 and Lawrence Principe.7 The social importance of its more spiritual and philosophical aspects has yet to be thoroughly explored, although the volume edited by Principe moves convincingly in this direction; this collection proposes some further steps in this direction.
Similarly, the social significance of surgeons replacing midwives in the birthing room will be the focus of Bridgette Sheridan’s essay on Louise Bourgeois (Boursier) and on Kirk Read’s essay on Catherine des Roches. Essays on cultural manifestations of scientific notions, particularly in the form of literary reworkings, demonstrate the broader reception of scientific innovations and traditions. The guiding thread that unites all of the essays in this collection is a very different notion of gender roles than that presented in mainstream university science of the early modern period. Alchemy and midwifery provide an intellectual realm in which women can act as practitioners, scientific investigators in their own right.
Not only did alchemy and midwifery provide women with a context in which they might gather knowledge and practice their skills, these pursuits also, since they were marginalized from the realm of more carefully (officially) controlled disciplines, provided the opportunity to construct theories about the role of the gendered individual in the world at large, theories that did not necessarily conform to official (theological and political) discourses concerning the proper roles of men and women in society. As Meredith Ray points out in her essay on Caterina Sforza’s recipe or receipt book, Experimenti, and as Jayne Archer points out in her essay on Sarah Wigges’ receipt book, alchemical practices create communities of knowledge in which women can communicate and confirm their own discoveries and ideas. In a period in which women are largely excluded from official domains of scientific inquiry, these disciplines offer a means of exchanging knowledge with other women and with men. As in the case of literary salons, women create their own intellectual communities.
But these domains, no doubt at least in part because of their separation from zones of power and authority (except in the case of royal births), also present very different notions of gender and of the feminine than do officially sanctioned discourses. For example, while the University of Paris continues to promote Aristotelian notions of gender, according to which the male alone is the perfected form of humanity, many alchemical treatises portray the conjunction of male and female as necessary to the process of perfecting the individual and nature; this conjunction is most frequently portrayed in the form of the alchemical rebis, or double being. The presentation of gender similarity or identification as well as difference confounds the simple hierarchy promoted by Aristotelians. Midwifery, as the example of Louise Bourgeois demonstrates, allows women to take on authority vis-à-vis the lords of state. Granted, this authority was evidently seen as threatening to the assumption of male superiority, and thus was almost constantly under attack. But both midwives’ manuals and alchemical treatises provide alternative views of gender roles over a significant period of time. These views seep into other aspects of culture, thus extending their reach.
From the groundbreaking work of Debus, alchemy has been linked to the early development of modern science. Moran and Newman restate this link eloquently, demonstrating how alchemical pursuits, as questionable as their objects might have been, were crucial to the development of forms of experimentation and informed attitudes towards nature present (for better or worse) in much of modern science.8 This collection will focus on how the period before and during the shift towards empirical science created these intellectual spaces where new ideas could be tried out, old ideas given new twists, and women could participate. The essays in this collection will also explore how this fluidity becomes hardened, notions of gender become more hierarchical, and women are excluded, as male practitioners strive to make science more “respectable.”
The ubiquity of alchemy throughout early modern culture, from household recipe books to treatises on secret societies, and on to arcane poetry produced at court and elsewhere, suggests that alchemy is much more than an early form of chemistry. It is this wider purpose of alchemy that links it to such concepts as that of astral magic, discussed by philosophers and alchemists as a means of perfecting nature, particularly the human spirit, as Elliott Simon demonstrates in his essay on Pico, Paracelsus, and Dee. As Lynn Thorndike9 and Frances Yates10 made clear in their monumental works, natural magic and experimental science were closely linked in the medieval and early modern periods, as means of exploring the causes and connections between various natural phenomena, as well as means of influencing those phenomena. The belief that all things have particular properties or essences joins these two fields, as well as practical approaches to isolating, intensifying, or mitigating those properties through distillation, fermentation, production of compounds, and other methods. The talismanic practices of Marsilio Ficino’s natural magic11 are echoed in the images of alchemical emblem-books, which serve as a code for specific materials and practices, but also serve a meditative purpose. The joining of these diverse strains brings forth a different sort of alchemy, one that serves as a spiritual or philosophical exercise rather than only a science of physical transformation. In this process, the imagination rather than the intellect serves a central role, as a means of understanding the place of the divine in the world and of seeing that which is not immediately apparent or visible. The imagination leads human beings to perfection, in the feminine form of the Shechinah, from the Kabbalah, a divine wisdom superior to the intellect. This view of wisdom, along with the mystical, Gnostic, kabbalistic, and alchemical notion of a male/ female divinity, consonant with the hermaphroditic Adam, the perfect and unfallen form of human existence, passes into western European philosophy via Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and is echoed in the works of Paracelsus and Dee. Just as alchemy on one level perfects the physical form of things by means of purification, so astral magic works through the imagination to perfect human nature. This perfection can only be achieved by the joining of body and soul, “animal” and “sidereal” spirits, male and female. The theory of gender presented by Pico, Paracelsus, and Dee is not hierarchical or Aristotelian, but one that recognizes both difference and resemblance between the sexes. The male/ female binary is not effaced, but complicated by the notion that perfection can only be achieved by uniting these two aspects. The opposition of male and female, the fragmentation of human identity into these two roles, is at the root of human imperfection, and the practitioner of astral magic must imagine a reunification of fragments, a resolution of the binaries, in order to see the way to human perfection.
Alain Ekorong, in his essay on “Guillaume Postel, the Shechinah, and the Feminine Principle,” emphasizes the revolutionary nature of the introduction of the mystical practices of Kabbalah into the alchemical/scientific arena. In particular, he links the Shechinah, considered a feminine principle, to the feminist discourses of Guillaume Postel, a noted translator and editor of Arab astronomical treatises as well as of an Arabic version of Euclid’s Elements, thus placing scientific practices in a wider cultural context. Postel clearly saw the possibility of world harmony as achievable only through the conjunction of masculine and feminine principles, and even favored the feminine, and women, as superior vehicles for mystical and intellectual illumination, in spite of their inferior status in European society. He also questions the factitious division between masculine and feminine in his works, suggesting that both masculine and feminine principles are present in all of humankind.
Postel’s work raises another issue vis-à-vis early modern alchemy and mysticism, one that has been discussed by Leah DeVun in her study of John of Rupescissa,12 but that merits further exploration: alchemy can be read as a response to, and a way of dealing with, crisis. As Ekorong suggests, Postel very presciently saw the divisions between religions in the post-Reformation era as destructive; he included Judaism and Islam as well as the newly divided Christianity as candidates for some form of reunification, in a move reminiscent of Pico’s 900 Theses. The alchemical rebis becomes in this context a very different model for the union of opposites, suggesting that individuals and groups with significant differences can coexist peacefully without relinquishing their distinct identities.
This is the conclusion that Michel de Montaigne seems to be drawing as well in his very alchemical reading “Of a Monstrous Child,” which I analyze at the end of my essay on “Odd Bodies: Reviewing Corporeal Difference in Early Modern Alchemy.” Comparing the images in Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens to those predominating in anatomical treatises of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, I suggest that alchemy appropriates the clearly gendered (generally masculine) images of these treatises in order to turn them to more ambiguous ends. Alchemical figures mimic the classically inspired Vesalian Man, but with a twist, and alchemical treatises offer a very different vision of the human body than that of the classical models of early modern anatomical imagery. Montaigne gives a similarly doubled body a very political interpretation, hinting at a broader context for the alchemical images. For, while these images are coded as symbols of stages of the alchemical process, they also resonate with other forms of knowledge familiar to their early modern audience: not only anatomy, but also religion and political theory. Christ, in alchemical treatises, does represent a stage of perfection, but he is also Christ, and early modern audiences would recognize the religious aspect of many alchemical images, as well as their alchemical purpose. Thus, the rebis represents the stage of conjunction, but also resonates with very active debates in that period concerning gender roles and gender ambiguity. What I am suggesting is that the alchemical code can work both ways: the royal, religious, and medical metaphors can represent alchemical materials and processes, but they can also become a means of expressing certain beliefs and opinions that might not be easily expressed in a more direct fashion.
In a very different context, Sean Teuton presents alchemy as a repository for notions of the effacement of difference, which allow the possibility of thinking beyond racial and gender differences, of at least pretending to transcend them, while manipulating their more typical representations to serve various ideological ends, such as the justification of conquest and the discrediting of imperial rivals. The America series, a collection of accounts of the discovery, exploration, and conquest of the western hemisphere by Europeans, gathered and voluminously illustrated by Theodor de Bry, his son, and son-in-law, present the cultural other as monstrous, often resembling the strange forms of humanity that appear in alchemical emblem-books. Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, probably illustrated by Matthäus Merian, a son-in-law of Theodor de Bry, is a superb example of such an emblem-book, displaying gender ambiguity and other forms of difference as objects of contemplation. Both the America, based as it is on imaginative recreations of scenes from the so-called “New World,” and the Atalanta seem to express basic fears and desires lurking in the European imagination, fears of being swallowed up (or of swallowing oneself), fears of and desires for reversal of social roles, fears of the essential ambiguity of individual identity. The Atlanta fugiens offers a series of images that resolve the other into the same; in fact, as in the work of Pico, perfection is attained by uniting seeming opposites into a harmonious whole. Such assimilation seems only to work in one direction: monstrous images in the America of Tupinamba cannibals eating Europeans suggests that absorption of the European same by the American other is too profoundly disturbing. Thus, while alchemical works can be seen as inculcating a more nuanced understanding of difference, they can also be read as a justification of the brutal assimilation of the other by means of conquest. The confusion of gender that arises with some frequency in the America’s depiction of the indigenous people of the western hemisphere merely confirms the monstrosity of the cultural other, with its effeminate men, even hermaphrodites, and violent and ugly women. This seeming confusion of gender roles is seconded by the blurring of lines between species as some native Americans are depicted as hairy and animalistic. This association of blurring of gender difference with animal appearance and even monstrosity is echoed in literary works invoking the “New World,” as Simone Pinet’s essay suggests. The America and Atalanta engravings, when compared, reveal some of the possible political implications of alchemical theories of gender and difference, and these implications can be read as both revolutionary and profoundly conservative (in the sense of preservation of traditional gender and power hierarchies).
Pinet, in her essay on “The Animal Within,” also traces the intersection between the literary and scientific domains, this time in the context of medieval and early modern Spain. Early modern Spanish chivalric romance combines the imagined monsters of the New World with more typically medieval European monsters (it should be noted that a number of place-names in the Western Hemisphere come from the names of monsters in Spanish literature – Patagonia and California being striking examples). This should serve as a reminder that early modern science was still entangled in its medieval roots. Her focus on monsters as the result of deviant desire in the Amadis reflects attitudes in a number of medical treatises of the period, but also speaks volumes about the politics of early modern Spain. Pinet points out that monsters reveal not only the problematic boundary between animal and human, but also between male and female. In the Primaléon, however, feminine beauty and sweet rhetoric (also associated with the feminine) become means for resolving the divide between monstrous and human, thus underscoring both the potential of the civilizing process to render the animal or monstrous human, but also conversely revealing the potential for monstrosity or some form of radical alterity in all humans. The Primaléon, very possibly authored by a woman, distances the monstrous from gestation and birth, thus reversing the trend apparent in most medical treatises of the period. Women become part of the ennobling process, helping to restore order to disorderly Nature, rather than being key contributors to disorder. In short, Pinet presents the chivalric novels of the period of Isabella as responses to the misogyny of medical treatises, a revision of gender roles and the association of the feminine with the monstrous towards a conceptualization of women’s role in constructing social order and power.
While the monstrous patrols the boundaries of gender roles, both in medical treatises focusing on teratology and in literary works that feature monstrous forms, even if those works also seem to call those boundaries into question, alchemical bodies offer striking alternatives to the long-standing gender hierarchy. In the hermetic works of the early modern period, gender ambiguity becomes crystallized in one figure, that of the alchemical hermaphrodite, or rebis, or double being, which plays a central role in most representations of the process. Most frequently portrayed as male on one side and female on the other, with two heads, one clearly designated as masculine by means of short hair, and the other feminine, with long hair, the rebis symbolizes the stage of conjunction in the alchemical process. Conjunction itself is represented as the union of opposites, in which the properties of those opposites are united to create a perfected being. This being is then destroyed by calcination, eerily portrayed by Merian as a form of death by “slow fire,” an Inquisitional torture in the early modern period, or by putrefaction. Distillation might be used to further purify the compound; the essence distilled from it is then used to revive the material in some way. This process is always portrayed in a gendered way, with the masculine and feminine principles joining in a sexual union. The rebis thus formed does not subsume one principle into the other; rather, both are joined and yet maintain their separate identities or properties, as suggested by the two heads and the body divided into two sexes.
This insistent and unconventional gendering of the rebis does more than serve as a code for various alchemical processes; it provides a language and a set of images that play with established gender roles. Ambroise Paré’s discussion of hermaphrodites is fairly typical of the medical and legal response to intersexed individuals in the early modern period. He divides them into four categories, mostly male, mostly female, neuter, and double, but then insists that the double hermaphrodites (that is, having both male and female characteristics in more or less equal measure in the same body) must choose which sex they will be.13 To put it simply, the rebis not only evades that choice, but suggests that the ideal being transcends simple gender divisions. Not only is the feminine revalorized, as it is in the Kabbalah in the form of the Schechinah, but it is reintegrated into a larger, human, whole that is not so easily designated as masculine or feminine, but encompasses both identities in a fluid process of transformation. The rebis is already presented in alchemical imagery of the late Middle Ages, and is presented in some as “Mercurial” and others as “diabolical.”14 The medieval alchemical hermaphrodite is a complex figure, as Leah DeVun has demonstrated, that encompasses a series of opposing qualities, human and divine as well as male and female. It is the perfect solution to a number of challenges faced by alchemists:
For alchemists pondering the philosopher’s stone, the metaphor of the hermaphrodite was an attractive solution. Ovid’s stories of metamorphosis mirrored the alchemists’ goal in metal transmutation – the change of one thing into another – and the hybrid nature of the hermaphrodite provided a useful model for the hybrid philosophers’ stone. The metamorphosis of two individuals into a single creature of biform sex was particularly useful to characterize the sexed elemental qualities with which alchemists believed they worked, as well as the biform quality of the alchemical product. The hermaphrodite also satisfied the need to solve the linguistic puzzle of the “rebis,” or “two thing.” Moreover, the image fit readily within the conventional vocabulary of sexual reproduction used in scholastic natural philosophy.15
Medieval alchemy saw the hermaphrodite as a useful metaphor for the alchemical process; in true scholastic manner, this metaphor could be read in bono or in malo, either as a symbol of the divine or of the diabolical.
What changes between the Middle Ages and the early modern period is the rediscovery and revalorization of the Corpus Hermeticum, translated and commented upon by Ficino.16 The Corpus privileges a double-gendered deity as the source of all creation.17 After this revival of Hermes Trismegistus in the late fifteenth century, the diabolical aspect of the hermaphroditic rebis seems to be effaced from the alchemical corpus, and its place as a means to perfection in the alchemical process seems assured.
From these more theoretical representations of gender, relative to alchemical treatises and historical narrative, the collection moves on to a more precise question: what is at stake when women participate in scientific enterprises and discourses? In what contexts do women engage in scientific inquiry, how might that engagement be limited, and how do women bypass or overcome these limitations? Three articles in this collection present an overview of continental European women engaged in alchemical practices. This collection neglects Germany, since the work of Tara Nummedal on Anna Maria Zieglerin,18 as well as her book on Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, cited above, already provide a fair amount of information on that region. Meredith Ray’s essay on the alchemical receipt or recipe book of Caterina Sforza shows how this pursuit played a significant role in the life of this powerful woman, and how it was intricately woven into her efforts to maintain or regain her power. At the same time, exchanges of letters between Sforza and others show how alchemy was practiced through networks of men and women sharing information. Women are not merely the audience for a number of alchemical works (particularly the receipt books), but they are actively producing them – and scholars are becoming increasingly aware of how widespread these practices were among elite women. As Ray points out, popular medicine, frequently practiced by women, involved early forms of organic chemistry, particularly distillation, the production of elixirs, and the production of compounds. Sforza also seems to have been involved in studying metallurgy in her role as regent, responsible for the financial well-being of her state. It is clear from her book of Experimenti and from her correspondence that she was actively engaged in experimentation. The practicality of her pursuits is not unusual for women of her period. But what is most striking is that a woman of this stature would be engaged in these pursuits, which thus become more than an artisan’s way of making a living. Intellectual and scientific curiosity clearly provides other motivations for elite women in this period.
Penny Bayer presents a number of alchemical manuscripts from France and the Swiss cantons, ascribed to or prominently referencing women alchemists. These manuscripts do raise the question of authorial identity, as the term “philosopher’s daughter” was used to designate the soul, but may also have been used as code for the identity of a woman alchemist. Certainly the frequent use of pseudonyms blurs authorial identity for many alchemical treatises; this practice might well have permitted women to participate in alchemical inquiry undisturbed, but could also have served to marginalize them from the most active and public discussions of this art. In fact, recent research, including Jayne Archer’s essay in this volume, suggests that the participation of women in alchemical practices was more widespread than previously recognized, in part because this participation was largely a private, unpublished activity, nonetheless creating significant networks among women as well as among women and men, as they shared recipes for perfumes and medicines, ideas about spiritual perfection, and references to useful or particularly enlightening books. That this activity had a spiritual as well as practical dimension suggests that officially sanctioned theological versions of spirituality might not have been as satisfying to women as more privately elaborated forms. Also, excluded from universities, women developed their own ways of acquiring and sharing knowledge. Objects of inquiry and doctrine in these public domains, women become subjects of inquiry in the context of alchemical practices. A Madame de la Martinville is treated as a respected practitioner of the art by Théodore de Mayenne, a member of Joseph du Chesne’s circle – du Chesne himself being one of the foremost French Paracelsians of his time.19 These French women alchemists in du Chesne’s circle focus primarily on the more elevated pursuits: the transformation of base metals into gold, making medicine, and spiritual and philosophical inquiries. Manuscripts ascribed to Madame de la Martinville reveal a woman engaged in chemistry experiments who references a broad range of learned alchemical treatises, including Paracelsus, Arnold de Villanova, and Bernard Trevisan. She is quite aware of the metaphorical aspect of alchemy as well as its practical potential, and is conversant with the allegorical images used to designate the stages of the alchemical process (as well as various aspects of each stage). She is apparently practicing chymistry as well as spiritual alchemy. If anything, the woman designated as Quercitan’s daughter is even more learned, having read Aristotle, the Turba philosophorum, and the Book of Morienus. While many male alchemists sought to appropriate the female procreative role, from Paracelsus on, she seeks to claim both the masculine and feminine roles in creating a resurrected alchemical body. The manuscripts written by Madame de la Martinville and Quercitan’s Daughter are different enough in style and terminology that they most likely are the work of two different authors. Madame de la Martinville’s language uses a full range of symbolic imagery; Quercitan’s Daughter uses a more limited range of symbols, focusing more on experiments. Insertions and annotations in several of the manuscripts indicate a strong resistance to the notion of women practitioners, a resistance that persists today, in that women practitioners are not mentioned in general histories of alchemy.
Jayne Archer’s essay on the receipt book of Sarah Wigges suggests how alchemical thought may have filtered into a broader section of women’s culture and become a part of their everyday life, with the Philosopher’s Stone sharing space with medical recipes and sugar-craft. This receipt book suggests not only that women may have practiced alchemy in greater numbers than scholars have previously suspected, but also that alchemy was a much more widespread and open practice, not merely a marginal occult discourse, but a part of everyday life for a number of people, perhaps even ordinary in some respects. Some early modern texts suggest that the conjunction of housekeeping and alchemy – or “chymistry” as Principe prefers to call it, to mitigate the contrast between alchemy and modern chemistry – was fairly common. Arguments are made in support of the view of alchemy as “women’s work,” a common metaphor for the alchemical process, particularly the stage of solution or dissolution, compared to washing. A tradition of books on housekeeping includes discussion of the importance of medical knowledge for women, particularly knowledge of how to make and dispense medicines. Receipt books demonstrate a wide range of skills required of women, and often reveal a considerable amount of erudition. Sarah Wigges’ manuscript reveals a sharing of this knowledge among women, with recipes passed down from her mother-in-law, among others. This manuscript and others reveal that women also received advice from men they knew and from male authors, in this case Andreas Libavius, Boethius, Nicholas Culpeper, and Paracelsus, among others. Women’s experience in distilling essences and making compounds made them skilled practitioners of “chemical medicine.” These practices were also linked to the notion of perfectability of all things: the essences were generally considered to be the purer or more perfect form of something. Focusing on women practitioners of chymistry also radically transforms our understanding of early modern science as a pursuit that existed in the context of practical, everyday experimentation and often with utilitarian ends, rather than as an isolated and abstract debate among elite men.
As Dorothea Heitsch demonstrates, Marie de Gournay reinvents herself in this context of alchemical practices. Not only does she follow in the footsteps of previous women practitioners, performing her own experiments, but she uses the philosophical aspect of alchemy in order to situate herself as an intellectual woman who transcends the stereotypical gender roles of the period. The freedom that alchemy granted to women practitioners also allows her to define herself as a woman writer, one who uses mixed gender identities to construct a newer, transmuted self freed from the constraints of a misogynist society. While clear references to her own practical experiments are evident in her works, suggesting that she was continually involved in this practice, metaphorical references found throughout her works suggest that alchemy offered her an intellectual framework that supported her unconventional approach both to writing and to the status of women. What Gournay’s work suggests, and this is true for the alchemical pursuits of a number of women, is that alchemy served both as a source for practical experiments to enhance physical well-being and a philosophical framework within which one could reimagine and reinvent oneself and the world. This returns us to the association that both Yates and Thorndike have made between magical thinking, alchemical thought, and early modern science.
Private alchemical pursuits might have provided a space for the freeplay of women’s intellectual interests, but where women practiced a profession openly, their status was subject to increasingly stringent limitations by male authority figures. So, as alchemy is opening up new avenues for women, midwifery is being shut off as a profession, and the power over childbirth being transferred to men. In this context, Bridgette Sheridan traces the increased marginalization of midwives in the seventeenth century. Whereas before this period, birth was almost exclusively a female domain, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries male practitioners, both physicians and surgeons, increasingly claimed authority over pregnancy and birth, first regulating midwives and then taking over their roles. By the late seventeenth century, there was a clear preference for male birthing experts, even among artisan women. This marginalization of midwives was reinforced by the power struggle between physicians and surgeons. Surgeons sought to enhance their status by linking their practices to the new empirical forms of medicine, often by means of treatises vaunting both their erudition and their practical experience. They also sought to broaden their clientele, and thus began to push midwives out of the profession. By means of newly created regulations, both physicians and surgeons gained control over midwives. Sheridan focuses particularly on the polemical attacks of Jacques and Charles Guillemeau, father and son surgeons, against Louise Bourgeois, as well as her defense of her status, as examples of these new limitations on women’s work. Jacques Guillemeau was an apprentice of Ambroise Paré, thus already at a young age in an elevated status in his profession. But he enhanced the status of this profession even more by his learning; he had studied with physicians and could read and write Latin. As a woman, Louise Bourgeois was excluded from most of these avenues to success: university education, apprenticeship, and training with experts linked to and protected by political authorities. While she did not have any of these initial aids to success, Bourgeois did rise to preeminence in her field, becoming the midwife to Marie de Medicis in 1601. She had apparently made connections at court. She also enhanced the status of midwives by publishing a manual as well as accounts of her experiences at court. She was unusual among midwives because of her use and creation of written works, in the form of treatises on childbirth.
In the early seventeenth century, the role of a surgeon in childbirth was intervention if something went wrong in the birthing process. Midwives had a more continuing relationship with the pregnant mother, and mediated various situations. Guillemeau père and Bourgeois published their manuals in 1609, and neither work expressed a widely divergent view. According to both, midwives had a longstanding role in the birthing process, and surgeons or physicians were to be called in at any sign of trouble.
The ambitious Guillemeau fils was a different matter, desiring to impose himself as the expert in all matters medical. The death of Marie de Bourbon-Montpensier, sister-in-law of Louis XIII, a week after childbirth, fueled the confrontation between Charles Guillemeau and Bourgeois. The autopsy report, prepared by five physicians and five surgeons, implied that Bourgeois had failed in her duties. She published a defense of herself, but in the end Guillemeau’s attacks on her competence ended her career at court. This effacement of women’s role in the birthing process became more and more general over the course of the seventeenth century.
We have seen how women, already excluded from academic disciplines, were pushed out of professions and practices of knowledge that they had occupied up until the seventeenth century. We have also seen how women created their own networks of knowledge, in the absence of any institutional acceptance, and how those networks included men and tapped into more institutionally accepted forms of knowledge, as well as more marginal forms. The subversion and critique of masculinist structures of knowledge extended into the wider cultural sphere. Discourses of alchemy, childbirth, and monstrosity, all present in the works discussed in the first five essays of this collection, allow literary authors to redefine or reimagine women’s roles in society and their place in the world.
As Kirk Read points out in his essay on “Touching and Telling: Gendered Variations on a Gynecological Theme,” nowhere is gender, and the divide between men’s and women’s perspectives on a subject, more evident than in the practice of obstetrics in the early modern world, for obvious reasons. The appropriation of obstetrics and childbirth from midwives by male surgeons over the course of the seventeenth century underscores the differences between men’s and women’s approaches to scientific knowledge. For example, the poet Catherine des Roches retells the story of Agnodice, the first woman doctor according to an account by Hyginus, as a recreation of intellectual community by, of, and for women, a community destroyed by patriarchy’s refusal to grant women access to intellectual pursuits in any officially sanctioned manner. The joy and pride women experience in the community they have created with Agnodice’s guidance contrasts sharply with Jacques Guillemeau’s account of the male surgeon groping pregnant women’s bodies, shamefully and in the dark. Where men dare not look, women may intervene without shame. This contrast renders the insistence upon male surgeons’ control of the birthing process by practitioners such as Guillemeau absurd. The proclamation by Catherine des Roches of the importance of intellectual communities of women is echoed by the sense of community evoked by women’s receipt books, in which other women’s ideas are cited openly, and the participation in alchemical thought delineated by Jayne Archer and Penny Bayer in their essays.
Indeed, what this collection proposes to its readers is the picture of an early modern scientific culture very different from that presented until very recently by the history of science. For, in the shadow of a university, church, and state-based culture run by, for, and primarily about men, lived alternative cultures that perceived gender in a range of ways and that created communities of intellectual women sharing ideas with each other as well as with men. What this picture suggests is that other ways of understanding social order and the relations between men and women always already existed, only covered over by the discourse of institutions intent on protecting themselves and the social hierarchies they thrived upon from alternative world views.
1 See in particular Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), but also Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973), Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), Jacques Gélis,La sage-femme ou le médecin: une nouvelle conception de la vie (Paris: Fayard, 1988), Wendy Perkins, Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996).
2 For example, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols (New York: Science History Publications, 1977) and The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
3 For example, his Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
4 Including his magnum opus Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567–1625) (Geneva: Droz, 2007).
5 Prominent among his work is Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
6 Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
7 Among his considerable corpus is Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2007).
8 See, for example, Newman’s chapter on “The Art-Nature Debate and the Issue of Experiment” in Promethean Ambitions, pp. 238–89.
9 Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–1958), 6 vol.
10 For example, Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
11 Yates, “Ficino’s Natural Magic,” in Giordano Bruno, pp. 62–83.
12 Leah Devun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), particularly chapter 3, “John of Rupescissa’s Vision of the End,” pp. 32–51.
13 Ambroise Paré, Des Monstres et prodiges, Jean Céard, ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1971), pp. 24–5.
14 See Barbara Obrist, Les Débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIVe–XVe siècles) (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), pp. 152–65.
15 Leah DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 69/2 (April 2008): 193–218 (215).
16 Yates, “Ficino’s Pimander and the Asclepius,” in Giordano Bruno, pp. 20–43.
17 From The Theological and Philosophical Works of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian Neoplatonist, John David Chambers, trans. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1882), pp. 4–6.
18 Nummedal, Tara, “Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin,” Ambix 49 (2001): 56–68.
19 Debus, French Paracelsians, pp. 51–9.