The Uses of Inventories in Early Modern France, from the Bureau de la Ville de Paris to Antoine Furetière’s »Roman bourgeois«

202 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) alimentary or any other fashion, appears dangerous in this collection of poems where ‘experience as possession … seems under assault’ (p. 206), particularly in the earlier version of ‘The Holy Communion’in the W. Manuscript. Rather than a decorous Anglican ‘middle way’, Netzley discerns a struggle between sensuality and pragmatism being played out in the poems. All primary texts are translated, the Index is comprehensive and the few typographical errors are minor ones. Mary Scrafton Adelaide, South Australia Kettering, Sharon, Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France (Variorum Collected Studies Series CS738), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; cloth; pp. xvi, 286; £55; ISBN 0860788814. This Variorum edition brings together eleven of Sharon Kettering’s articles on patronage. Originally published between 1989 and 1993, these essays follow upon Kettering’s seminal Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France of 1986. Covering patronage from its apogee in the sixteenth and early to mid- seventeenth centuries through its decline during the reign of Louis XIV, the collection forms an exceptionally coherent whole with minimal repetition (one exception is that Kettering twice challenges Kristen Neuschel’s thesis that clientage is anachronistic applied to sixteenth-century warrior culture, put forward in her Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France, in I and again in IV). The first set of four essays provides an overview of the topic, laying out and considering the categories modern historians use for understanding patronage. In ‘Patronage in Early Modern France,’ Kettering critiques some of the prominent recent positions on the language of patronage, re-affirming that the patron/client relationship was a material one motivated by self-interest and justifying her historical method of taking into account both the social scientific approach, which is necessary to ‘distinguishing long-term trends and causal explanations often imperceptible to contemporaries’ (I, p. 856) and the cultural historical approach, which seeks to determine how contemporaries experienced their situations.The distinction between the system as it actually existed and the system as it was perceived by those who lived within it is an important one, and it should be maintained, Kettering argues in relation to historical models that understand patronage as a primarily linguistic phenomenon. In her second essay, ‘Gift-Giving in early modern France’, she Reviews 203 Parergon 21.2 (2004) proposes a model of patronage based upon the obligatory reciprocity of gift-giving as analyzed by Mauss. She puts the overlapping categories of kin and friendship into the context of patronage in ‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France’ and ‘Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France’, examining in particular the wide semantic field of the word ami. The second set of two essays investigates female patronage. ‘The Patronage Power of Early Modern French Noblewomen’suggests that because ‘members of all-male political clienteles were often initially connected by kinship or marriage ties to women,’women ‘affected the formation and dissolution of political alliances’ (V, p. 819). They exercised considerable power as brokers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The careers of several women in noble households are traced in ‘The Household Service of Early Modern French Noblewomen’. The role of brokers is the subject of the third set of two essays, ‘The Historical Development of Political Clientelism’and ‘Brokerage at the Court of Louis XIV’. Here Kettering proposes a ‘broker model of political integration’ (VII, p. 432) in states undergoing centralization.As the central government develops and expands, local brokers, individuals in a position to negotiate patron/client relationships between third parties, are crucial in mediating governmental integration into the different regions.The stronger the central government, the less necessary brokerage becomes; the chain from the royal court to the provinces becomes increasingly less significant during the reign of Louis XIV. Royal patronage became ever more important to noble fortunes, which had the effect of attenuating nobles’ties to their former clients and strengthening noble dependence upon the king. The final set of three essays, ‘Clientage During the French Wars of Religion’, ‘Patronage and Politics During the Fronde’ and ‘The Decline of Great Noble Clientage During the Reign of Louis XIV’ map the decline of noble patronage from the Wars of Religion...

Reviewed by: Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France by Cathy McClive Claire Cage Cathy McClive. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015. xi + 267 pp. $124.95 (978-0-7546-6603-5). The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert declared, “Women’s menses are one of the most curious and difficult phenomena of the human body.”1 Cathy McClive’s excellent study explores the complex meanings of this “most curious” phenomenon in early modern France. Her book challenges existing scholarship that emphasizes the negative associations with menstruation and misogynistic elements of the early modern discourse on menstruation—“the myth of menstrual misogyny.” McClive does so by masterfully bringing to light diverse interpretations of menstruation and its role in reproduction and health in early modern France. Her work focuses on elite perceptions of menstruation through the careful examination of theological, medical, legal, and personal sources. It first turns its attention to early modern French translations of the Bible, specifically the passages in Leviticus prohibiting sex during menstruation. In this complex and nuanced chapter, McClive argues that neither Catholic nor Protestant translations of Leviticus promoted the view of menstruating women as physically unclean but instead expressed concerns about the ritual or spiritual impurity of not only menses but also semen. In her analysis of medical theorists’ responses to religious prohibitions on sex during menstruation, McClive stresses the uncertain connection between procreation and menstruation. While some early modern medical texts such as Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the popular sex manual first published in seventeenth-century London, identified sex during menstruation as a cause of monstrous births, McClive argues that learned French texts did not link menstruation to monstrosity but did consider the possibility of adverse health consequences for a fetus conceived during a woman’s menses. French medical authorities questioned when was the optimal timing of sex during the menstrual cycle for healthy conception and what was an appropriate quantity of menses, which was understood to provide nourishment for the fetus during pregnancy. [End Page 329] Physicians and jurists shared a preoccupation with issues of menstrual regularity and irregularity that shaped various civil and criminal cases. One of the most remarkable cases was the famous trial involving Catherine Cadière, who accused her Jesuit confessor Jean-Baptiste Girard of seduction, “spiritual incest,” bewitchment, and abortion. Cadière in turn was accused of faking the stigmata with her menses. McClive offers a new perspective on the cause célèbre by analyzing how Cadière’s menstrual calendars were used in legal contests over the questions of whether she had indeed been pregnant and whether she could have used her menses to fake the stigmata. McClive scrutinizes other medicolegal affairs involving declarations of pregnancy required of unmarried or widowed women to avoid possible charges of infanticide, medical reports in assault cases where women claimed to have a pregnancy endangered by the attack, and cases of contested legitimacy, particularly for a six-month or eleventh-month pregnancy. Her analysis reveals that the cessation of menstruation was not considered certain proof of pregnancy. Some women could menstruate or bleed heavily through pregnancy, while others could be pregnant without ever having menstruated. The signs of pregnancy, the duration of an individual pregnancy, and the possible minimum and maximum lengths of gestation were all uncertain and contested. In her final chapter, on accounts of menstruating men and bleeding hermaphrodites, McClive suggests that male periodic bleeding, such as nosebleeds and bleeding hemorrhoids, was connected to “vicarious menstruation,” or regular periodic bleeding from a nonvaginal orifice, in early modern French humoral medicine. McClive challenges the widely held view that menstruation became seen as an exclusively female phenomenon by the late eighteenth century. Although McClive traces certain shifts in medical understandings of menstruation over the course of the early modern period, her account is one of continuity. Presumably more significant changes, including a more essentialist association between menstruation and the female body, emerged during the nineteenth century, and the link between ovulation and menstruation was established. Without further studies, it is unclear whether understandings of menstruation varied and shifted at different points across Europe and across the...

Reviewed by: Sin and Salvation in Early Modern France: Three Women's Stories by Marguerite d'Auge, Renée Burlamacchi Jane Couchman SIN AND SALVATION IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE: THREE WOMEN'S STORIES, by Marguerite d'Auge, Renée Burlamacchi, and Jeanne du Laurens. Edited by Colette H. Winn. Translated from French by Nicholas van Handel and Colette H. Winn. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series. Toronto: Iter Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017. 97 pp. $34.95 paper. Sin and Salvation in Early Modern France: Three Women's Stories, translated by Nicholas van Handel and Colette H. Winn, is a welcome addition to The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, offering vivid glimpses of the lives of three very different women of the merchant and professional classes in early modern France. While sin and salvation are indeed important themes, the texts are particularly valuable for the insights they offer into early modern families and the roles of women therein. Renée Burlamacchi's Memoirs Concerning Her Father's Family (1623) and Jeanne du Laurens's The Genealogy of the du Laurens (1631) are nicely matched accounts by proud daughters of their birth families. Burlamacchi's family were Protestants from Lucca, Italy, and her Memoirs Concerning Her Father's Family recount their journey, led by her father Michele, into exile in France and from one refuge to another (Paris, Montargis, Sedan) to escape persecution. They eventually arrived in Geneva, where they joined a community of Italian Protestant exiles. Jeanne du Laurens's family were Catholic, based in Arles, France. Laurens's story centers on the valiant and remarkably successful efforts of her widowed mother, Louise, to arrange for the proper education and placement of her many children, especially her sons. In both accounts, God plays a central role. For Burlamacchi, a Calvinist, hardships were signs that God was testing the elect, and triumphs revealed that God's grace was upholding them, even when using Catholics such as the Duke de Guise to ensure their safety. For the Catholic Laurens, faith in God was accompanied by the use of God-given talents to achieve success. Laurens and her mother were proud that four of her nine brothers became either priests or monks. Both Burlamacchi's and Laurens's works remained in manuscript, appropriately since they were intended as memorials and advice for their immediate families. Marguerite d'Auge's Pitiful and Macabre Regrets (1600) is the anomaly here. Like the other two, it focuses on a family but, in this case, a fatally dysfunctional one. Published as a broadsheet, Pitiful and Macabre Regrets claims to report the words of repentance spoken by d'Auge, a notorious adulteress who plotted with her lover to murder her husband and was condemned to death. The case was infamous, with court records and another account also available, and the broadsheet is clearly written to [End Page 197] sell to a public eager for a vivid account of violence and passion. It is not actually clear whose voice is recorded in the broadsheet; are the words really d'Auge's or are they attributed to her by an anonymous male author? Much of the rhetoric echoes attacks on women surrounding the querelle des femmes (the woman question). The image of d'Auge, as Winn points out, reflects contemporary depictions of the penitent harlot. The lady does indeed protest too much and in too much gory detail, urging other young women to eschew her example. Yet the language of Pitiful and Macabre Regrets does echo d'Auge's own plea as recorded in her trial account, a plea no doubt crafted to win the pity of her judges. All three texts are translated from recent editions of the originals.1 For d'Auge and Laurens, there exists only one original version. For Burlamacchi, the choice of a base text is more complicated. Two manuscripts written in Italian by the author survive, as well as three translations into French. Van Handel and Winn have chosen one of the French translations as their base text rather than one of the original Italian ones; the reasons for this choice and the...

In the Introduction to this edited collection, Derval Conroy compellingly charts the importance of early modern French writings in the conceptual history of gender equality. Overshadowed by later centuries, early modern France was passionately animated by debates over differing visions of gender roles and relations, producing a multilayered corpus that has hitherto been confined to ‘women’s history’. This collection seeks to reposition these debates within the wider history of early modern intellectual thought. The eleven essays present wide-ranging perspectives on the history of gender equality from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in early modern France and beyond as we move from France to England, China, and New France. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume is equally impressive with contributors attending to the political, philosophical, intellectual, literary, social, and historical stakes of the topic. The first three essays examine Cartesian positions on gender equality. Geneviève Fraisse traces Poulain de...

Reviewed by: The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France by Jeffrey N. Peters Roland Racevskis Peters, Jeffrey N. The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France. Northwestern UP, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8101-3697-7. Pp. xii + 260. In Plato's Timaeus, the concept of the chora shades toward spatiality while remaining irreducible to straightforward definition as space or thing. In an introductory chapter, Peters explores Derrida's reading of this platonic dialogue to evoke chora as "an ineffable principle of cosmology that gives shape not only to the universe itself but also to the stories that tell of the world and its becoming" (19). As this book argues, those stories changed significantly in seventeenth-century France, as did the relationship between humanity and the physical world, whether perceived or imagined. Early modern notions of place and space were in flux, and literary authors sketched the conceptual contours of new thinking about the ontology of becoming. Starting with an analysis of Boileau's Art poétique as a kind of geography, Peters traces the significance of what he calls "the chorological imagination" (20) through works by La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, d'Urfé, Scudéry, and Lafayette. A discussion of Molière's L'école des femmes in the light of Lucretian materialism interestingly underlines the particularizing force of a comedy that privileges the local over the universal. Lucretius's atomism points to gaps, infinitesimal spaces between particles. Like chora, gap space is both ineffable and originary, as in the stitching, connecting activity of La Fontaine's bees in"Les frelons et les mouches à miel."Corneille's L'illusion comique, an often underestimated play, contains key insights into poetic and theatrical invention as an irreducible spatial dynamics of becoming in Alcandre's magical grotto and the multiple geographical and conceptual places evoked therein. Racine's dramaturgy constructs the stage as an in-between space of becoming, rather than the claustrophobic enclosure to which it has often been reduced. As the book effects the [End Page 204] transition from poetry and theater to narrative prose, the "chorological" approach remains the same while the problematics of the readings reveal differences in spatial representation (and its alternatives). In L'Astrée, description and narration simultaneously create bucolic landscapes of enclosure and retreat while also expanding space indefinitely toward neoplatonic reflections that take on a cosmic dimension. In other words, the pastoral in d'Urfé takes shape at the intersection of cartography and cosmology. The reading of Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves that concludes the book's body chapters provides the most intriguing insight into how changes in narrative structure track changes in spatial conceptualizations in early modern France. Whereas the pastoral represents landscape while expanding the reflection on space into a cosmic epistemology, the new form of Lafayette's novel accedes to yet another level of abstraction and indeterminacy. Space becomes no longer represented, but rather hinted at, much in the same way that Plato's chora evokes space, and indeed its origination, without constituting it: "[N]arrative prose is supported by the pictorial force of description to formulate dramatic spectacles that evoke the world, that imply it, without directly representing it" (195). Peters's command of not only the early modern primary and theoretical literary sources but also their underpinnings in antiquity culminates in a wide-ranging and carefully documented scholarly study. Roland Racevskis University of Iowa Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Honour and retribution are just two of the key themes of this investigation into violent behaviour by individuals as well as social groups in Early Modern France. Stuart Carroll provides a detailed analysis of various contexts (family feuds; hereditary questions; adultery, seductions and rape; religious conflict; and the exercise of authority), in which aggression and bloodshed took place, from their inception to their escalation and resolution; he studies its mechanisms and judiciary treatment, and the degrees to which violence was accepted or deemed acceptable. Written in a lucid, punchy style, the study rests on a dazzling — at times bedazzling — array of archival sources and judicial pieces, in the main pardon letters, supplemented with extracts from journals, memoirs and occasionally literary sources. Chronologically, examples range from the late Middle Ages to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. The materials and discussions, however, are arranged around broad thematic rather than chronological lines. The first part, ‘the structure of vindicatory violence’, retraces the deep causes of many disputes, which frequently lay in questions of landownership and rights, as well as in matters of status and reputation. The second theme of the book centres on ‘violence and society’, and tackles questions of hostility and assault in terms of the justice and the law; mediation, arbitration and mercy; and gender and vindicatory violence. In the third part, ‘violence and the polity’, Carroll concentrates on the particularly acute use of aggression in the Wars of Religion, and on the deployment of violence in the centralization processes of the seventeenth century. Carroll's chosen theme places his publication in the wake of pioneering studies of early modern violence (e.g. by Natalie Zemon Davis and Denis Crouzet), while offering also a counterpane to historical enquiries into the rise of the period's gentlemanly and courtly culture, fronted most notably by Elias' The Civilizing Process. Yet in his emphasis on vengeance the author clearly — and successfully — steers an independent course. By its nature, the study will in the first place appeal to cultural and social historians. However, the life-world, conjured up by Carroll, of belligerence and antagonism, which was nonetheless heavily codified, will equally command the attention of literary scholars specializing in Early Modern France. Carroll's investigations provide useful background on any literary treatment of, for instance, the question of duelling (a central theme in Corneille's Le Cid) or on the use of violence against women. (Interestingly, violent acts committed by women surface only very occasionally in this book.) In the course of the narrative, Marguerite de Navarre, Brantôme, L'Estoile, Montaigne and Tallement des Réaux are all called to the witness stand, alongside evidence drawn from the tabulation of ‘deaths of gentlemen in vindicatory actions’ between 1550 and 1659, ‘pardons presented to the Parlement of Aix’ between 1571 and 1720 and the ‘settlements for murdered nobles’. Montaigne's family-in-law, the La Chassaigne, also make a fleeting appearance with an inheritance dispute marked by confessional differences within the family (pp. 294–95); it would have been useful, though, had Montaigne's brother-in-law, Geoffroy de La Chassaigne (p. 294), been identified (or cross-referenced) with the very sieur de Pressac, whose French translation of Seneca's Epistles is evoked on p. 12. A map of the French parlements and 16 well-chosen, if rather grainy, illustrations pleasantly punctuate the book's tidy lay-out. Readers turning to Carroll's Blood and Violence in Early Modern France will indeed find that they have laid their hands on a quality product.

pervasive thematic element seems to be how Sfar investigates the two sides of his Jewish family history in order to confront“persecution and the temptation of counterviolence ” within his work (224). A few minor mistakes are found in this book: the mentions of Galicia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire refer to the geopolitical situation in Europe before World War One, not World War Two (83). Overall, however, Sfar So Far is refreshingly free of typographical errors. Leroy’s interview of Sfar (in English) concludes this volume, which contains an appropriate number of illustrations , including several in color. Leroy has produced a consistently insightful work that is well-written and thoroughly documented, and that will be of interest to all scholars and readers of French bandes dessinées. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin McClive, Cathy. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France. Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. ISBN 978-0-7546-6603-5. Pp. 267. £70. Drawing from hundreds of medical, judicial, and theological documents from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, as well as personal correspondences by women to their families and medical practitioners, McClive examines the broad-ranging complexity of the phenomenon of menstruation in early modern France. She argues that the prevalent contemporary“myth of ‘menstrual misogyny’”incorrectly identifies early modern French attitudes toward menstruation as negative, as it also incorrectly posits menstruation as a direct signifier of womanhood that is related to procreation in a straightforward manner. Rather, McClive turns to post-structuralist and recent feminist analytical frameworks to interrogate or “trouble” reductionist binary dichotomies (sex/gender, female/male, natural/cultural, positive/negative) that lead to polarized analyses of menstruation. McClive then applies the microhistorical methodology of the “exceptional normal” to contextualize the “exceptional” bodies found in some early modern case studies within the “normalizing” framework of numerous theological, medical and legal documents. That is, she incorporates the study of medical, legal, and theological exceptional cases as a means to define and comprehend early modern understandings of menstrual norms. Through this broader analytical perspective, McClive concludes that the negative attitudes frequently cited in historical scholarship on early modern menstruation were not the norm; they were only one piece of an overly simplified picture. With chapters entitled, “Leviticus and the Problem of Sex during Genital Fluxes,”“Menstruation, Conception and the Timely Use of Marriage,”“Menstrual Regularity and Irregular Menstruation,”“Detecting and Proving Pregnancy,” “Menstrual Time and the Moons of Pregnancy,” and “Bleeding Hermaphrodites and Menstruating Men,”McClive explores the phenomenon of menstruation from a wide variety of biological, legal, and theological perspectives. Her well-researched and documented examination of conflicting early modern discussions 248 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 249 of menstruation, sex, procreation and pregnancy, and (rare) cases of menstruating men and bleeding hermaphrodites, demonstrates that early modern French attitudes were much more complex,nuanced,and frequently ambivalent than has been previously stated. The ramifications of McClive’s analysis of menstruation are far-reaching and implicate our analyses of a broad range of historical, political, cultural, and biological issues, such as definitions of embodiment, sex, and gender, as well as procreation, patriarchy, and patrilineage. McClive’s stated goal through this work is to expand historical discussions of early modern menstruation and to encourage comparative approaches to this important and currently “emotive” field of study. Her original and fascinating study will be of tremendous interest to students and scholars of early modern history, politics, theology, gender, and culture studies. Northern Arizona University Erika E. Hess Nord, Philip. France 1940: Defending the Republic. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-300-18987-2. Pp. 189. $27. The early chapters of World War Two were not very glorious for France, but one of the author’s stated goals is to make the case for a more sympathetic understanding of France’s devastating defeat. This is a refreshing perspective in the light of the nottoo -distant French-bashing of the Iraq war period and the use by some of“cheese-eating surrender monkeys”to refer to the French people. This book offers an overview of the events leading up to the Pétain regime: the diplomatic tribulations that preceded the war; the military defeat of May–June 1940; and the ensuing disintegration of...

The religious education of children represents a critical component of the Catholic Reformation that has often been overlooked by historians of early modern Europe. In Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France, Karen E. Carter examines rural schooling in in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--the period when community-supported primary education began--and brings to light a significant element of the early modern period.Carter scrutinizes Catholic religious education in rural parishes in through its two leading forms: the explosion of Catholic catechisms for children and their use in village schools. She concentrates on educational opportunities for rural peasants in three French dioceses: Auxerre (in Burgundy) and Chalons-sur-Marne and Reims (in Champagne). Carter argues that the study of catechism in village schools was an integral part of a comprehensive program, implemented by both clerical and lay leaders, for the religious, ethical, and moral education of children. Her research demonstrates that the clergy and a majority of the lay population believed in the efficacy of this program; for this reason, parish priests taught catechism in their parishes on a weekly basis, and small village communities established and paid for a surprisingly large number of local schools so that their sons and daughters could receive an education both in basic literacy skills and, through memorization of catechism, in Catholic faith and practice.Karen E. Carter's Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France is a well-written, informative, and original piece of scholarship that helps to fill a large gap in our understanding of French religious life in the latter part of the early modern period. Carter shows how church and Bourbon state interests in promoting a devoutly Catholic and obedient populace intersected in the religious education of its children. Using a rich body of sources, she provides a much more textured understanding of the everyday functioning of primary school education than has so far been undertaken.--Megan Armstrong, McMaster UniversityKaren Carter's book delivers a great deal more than its title promises. It rescues the history of French catechetical ambitions during the Catholic Reformation from serious neglect, and firmly anchors it in the practice of primary education within a regional context. Above all, she restores the agency of lay Catholics in an age of increased clericalisation by showing why they wanted schooling for their children and paid for it from their own pockets. This astute and economical combination of hitherto discrete subjects fills an important gap and offers historians new ways of approaching familiar questions. --Joseph Bergin, University of ManchesterThis book makes an excellent contribution to early modern history in general, and particularly to the fields of religious history and French history. The central argument that the teaching of catechism by parish priests and the broad instruction available at the petites ecoles found in most villages had a broad impact on the lives, particularly the religious lives, of townspeople and villagers, should interest historians, people in religious studies, and students of education. --Marc R. Forster, Connecticut College

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Book Review| March 01 2007 The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. By Neil Kenny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 484 pp. Nicholas Paige Nicholas Paige Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2007) 68 (1): 119–122. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2006-028 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nicholas Paige; The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 2007; 68 (1): 119–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2006-028 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Washington2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2006 The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. By Neil Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 484 p. Barbara M. Benedict Barbara M. Benedict Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2006) 58 (1): 80–83. https://doi.org/10.1215/-58-1-80 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara M. Benedict; The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. Comparative Literature 1 January 2006; 58 (1): 80–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-58-1-80 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France. Eds. Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin Get access Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France. Eds. Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), 2015. 316 pp. £70.00. ISBN 978–1–4724–5409–6 Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 53, Issue 1, January 2017, Page 116, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqw100 Published: 23 February 2017

Reviewed by: Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction Sybil M. Jack Read, Kirk D., Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2011; hardback; pp. xiii, 205; 14 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9780754666325. Like many literary scholars today, Kirk Read has added works of lesser or no special standing to the canonical literary works once deemed to have the literary merit worthy of study. These include the work of Catherine and Madeleine des Roches, Les Serees, and the satirical work Les Caquets de l’Accouchée which have hitherto mainly been the preserve of historians and discussed at their basic literal level of sense. Once mainly seen as a commentary on the phenomenon of the ‘ruelle’ and the literary and factional history of the Court, this written material is now the subject of abstruse literary analysis and the boundaries between historical and literary approaches have been broken down. This is particularly evident in studies like this one, addressed to aspects of women’s lives that were once regarded as private and to the long-running discussion of the involvement of men in the birthing process and their preoccupation with the unclean aspects and yet attractions of the body. Read uses the normal list of obstetric works as set out in bibliographies such as that of Valerie Worth-Stylianou, that are well known and already widely exploited and also the stories of births and birthing that literary sixteenth-century thinkers retained from the classical past. The materials available for France are rather more substantial than most countries and over the last two decades new scholarly editions of some of the more important sources have made studies such as this one easier. Even so, more weight is being placed on the work of Louise Bourgeois (Boursier) than it can perhaps bear. Read, however, limits himself to presenting her work as a literary oeuvre that provides him with some examples of the woman’s sense of modesty and reluctance to endure male sight or touch. He is not, in fact, directly concerned with the practice of childbirth in the period but with the idea of the body, control of the production of offspring, and unnatural events. He focuses his discussion of particular examples against the increasingly critical controversy over how the nature of childbirth was seen by the observer and the observed, the controlled and the controller, the speaker and the audience. He is especially interested in the appropriation of the female body – in fantasy or reality – by a male and vice-versa. The instability of gender identity is critical to his thought. The chapters in this book, each of which focuses on a specific aspect of the birthing body such as touching and telling, are only loosely linked to a [End Page 244] central argument; they approach it from different texts, different periods and aspects of birth such as hermaphrodites, the birth of monsters, and stories of male parturition. Read’s main preoccupation is the aim and ambition of men in their representation of relationships created by the processes of birth and the extent to which their ideal goal might be parthenogenesis. The argument that lack of control over childbearing creates insecurity in their sense of authority and perhaps identity meshes well with Lianne McTavish’s arguments, but if this is the conclusion Read was attempting to reach, it needs to be more tightly presented. He might perhaps examine more closely how far the overt purpose of a text like Les Serées, which acknowledges its purpose as bringing together ideas and authorities that were already known to a literary audience, can be shaped to elucidate gendered anxieties of the time. He reads his texts in search of various levels of symbolism, some of which are perhaps counter-intuitive or questionable. He would do well to engage with the long-running debate over when or whether symbolism that would not have been recognized by the authors may reasonably be extracted from a text. His authors would have recognized the standard fourfold medieval religious divisions that were employed in glossing...

Reviewed by: Signing the Body: Marks on the Skin in Early Modern France by Katherine Dauge-Roth Erika E. Hess Dauge-Roth, Katherine. Signing the Body: Marks on the Skin in Early Modern France. Routledge, 2020. ISBN 978-0-754-65772-9. Pp. xvi + 318. Dauge-Roth focuses on five types of bodily signs: devil's marks, divine stigmata, Amerindian tattoos on French colonists, pilgrim tattoos, and judicial brands. In each case, she draws from a wide variety of interdisciplinary sources from the mid-sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries to examine the history and specificity of each type of mark while also revealing the manner in which all participated in a larger, modern, cultural fascination with the material text––whether written on paper or skin. In her study of devil's marks, for example, Dauge-Roth discusses the history and importance of these marks in the witch trials that seized Europe from the late-fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. According to widespread belief during this period, Satan placed multiple marks upon the bodies of new initiates during the sabbat. Through texts written by medical examiners, demonologists, theologians, and judges, the reader learns that the devil's marks varied in size and shape but were generally hidden to avoid detection. They were often invisible to the naked eye, and when penetrated with a needle or probe, they did not bleed or elicit pain. Dauge-Roth cites Henry Boguet, a sixteenth-century witch trial judge from the Jura region, who states unequivocably: "There is not a witch who is not marked in some part of her body" (30). Yet, as Dauge-Roth demonstrates, the importance given to the devil's mark during this period is new. It "played no role in the witch persecutions of the later Middle Ages" (31). Rather, it aligns with changes to modern jurisprudence and the importance given to the material evidence of the mark as an "authoritative sign of proof, locatable and verifiable upon the witch's skin" (32). Turning to an analysis of divine stigmata, Dauge-Roth recounts the story of the seventeenth-century Ursuline prioress, Jeanne des Anges, who was exorcized along with several other demonically possessed nuns in her convent. Although Jeanne des Anges's exorcists were the first to write about the events, she went on to write her own memoir and also toured through France exhibiting her inscribed hand––ostensibly written through the divine intervention of an angel. As Dauge-Roth states of Jeanne des Anges: "She clearly understood writing—both on paper and on skin—as a potent medium for making a new identity for herself" (97). Other self-fashioned cutaneous marks that played important roles as "signifiers of identity" in the early modern period include the Amerindian tattoos that French colonists to New France acquired as they negotiated their "composite identities" (158), and the pilgrim tattoos that many European travelers sought as material souvenirs of their travels to the Holy Lands. Finally, Dauge-Roth discusses judicial brands used to mark and identify slaves and criminals, as well as other forms of marking to indicate possession or control, or for commercial or administrative purposes. This fascinating and frequently surprising work will be of great interest to students and scholars of European history and culture. [End Page 244] Erika E. Hess Northern Arizona University Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Reviewed by: The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477–1630 by Mack P. Holt Virginie Ems-Bléneau Holt, Mack P. The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477–1630. Cambridge UP, 2018. ISBN 978-1-108-47188-6. Pp. 352. The study of the intersectionality of material culture with politics and ideology has been a growing branch of the field of cultural history in the last thirty years. This book offers such a cultural history of Burgundy, from its incorporation into France to the rise to power of the Cardinal de Richelieu. Indeed this volume analyzes the dynamic relationships between politics, social class, city and provincial administration, religious experience, and the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of Dijon in the wake of the Reformation. While wine holds a significant place in this narrative, its role is not as [End Page 265] central as the title would suggest, and the scope more narrow (Burgundy rather than France). Despite the aforementioned shortcoming, Holt's analysis of wine in Burgundy does reveal interesting and little-known realities of early modern life. Holt observes that while one fourth of the households of Dijon were vignerons at the beginning of the sixteenth century, that number dropped dramatically after 1650, due to a combination of bad weather, over-cultivation, and economic uncertainties following the Wars of Religion. Not only did the number of vignerons decrease, so did their political power and influence. Vignerons' votes in mayoral elections had been recorded as early as the 1520s, which is significant because voting was considered an honorable and honor-deflecting act symbolizing the coming together of the entire population to select a favored candidate. Although never selected as mayors, vignerons were equals to the elite families in this process. Not only did the vignerons form relationships with the other classes through the process of voting, they also developed close ties with the Church by establishing foundations to fund masses for the dead and guarantee God's protection of the harvest. Because these foundations were often paid in wine rather than money, parishes became large wine brokers in the area. Another important way in which the vignerons of Burgundy wove ties with the Church was by rejecting the Reformation: Huguenots viewed masses for the dead and processions as "buffoonery" (137), they critiqued the idea that the Blood of Christ should be reserved to the priest during Mass (which had been tradition since the twelfth century), but worst of all, Protestants decried the use of wine in social settings, which was at the heart of Burgundy's lifestyle, and the source of income of so many (including rich merchants, innkeepers, wine press owners, aristocratic landlords, etc.). Vignerons were therefore strong supporters and allies of the Catholic League, and subsequently of Henri IV (after his conversion to Catholicism). By the 1620s, however, the vignerons had both diminished in numbers and influence: their voting rights were reduced by the imposition of a tax minimum ordered by Louis XIII, and most dramatically, they found themselves banished from Dijon after the Lanturelu uprisings of 1630. Holt chronicles the rise and fall of the winemakers of Burgundy, situating their fate in the realities of economic and power negotiations in which they slowly lost the ability to participate. Virginie Ems-Bléneau Georgia Southern University Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French