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 Birthing Bodies
in Early Modern France

“This study, which explores a range of birthing bodies, female and male, and
analyzes striking associations of texts, will be of interest to all those—not just
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars—who work on the complexities of
sex boundaries and non-normative gender identities.”
—Wendy Perkins, University of Birmingham, UK

The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern
French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining
to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their
descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this
study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range
of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all
of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives
of birth in France.

Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations
depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and
hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women’s experiences to be
sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place
in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored
include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de
Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications
of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work
as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child.

Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace
biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing
body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore,
by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety
that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain
of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how
the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and
gender.
 Women and Gender in the
Early Modern World
Series Editors:
Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA
Abby Zanger

The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative
challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a
decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served as a forum
for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond
geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and
the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome
proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and
develop this continually evolving field of study.

Titles in the series

Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France
Rebecca M. Wilkin

Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800

The Cloister Disclosed
Barbara R. Woshinsky

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France

Print, Rhetoric, and Law
Lyndan Warner

Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature

Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles
David P. LaGuardia

Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe

Kathleen P. Long

Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France

Lianne McTavish
 Birthing Bodies
in Early Modern France
Stories of Gender and Reproduction

Kirk D. Read
Bates College, USA
© Kirk D. Read 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Kirk D. Read has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405
England USA

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Read, Kirk D.
Birthing bodies in early modern France : stories of gender
and reproduction. -- (Women and gender in the early modern
world)
1. French literature--16th century--History and
criticism. 2. French literature--17th century--History
and criticism. 3. Childbirth in literature. 4. Metaphor in
literature.
I. Title II. Series
840.9'354'09031-dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Read, Kirk D.
Birthing bodies in early modern France : stories of gender and reproduction / Kirk D. Read.
p. cm. -- (Women and gender in the early modern world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6632-5 -- ISBN 978-1-4094-2499-4 (eBook) 1. French literature--16th
century--History and criticism 2. Childbirth in literature. 3. French literature--17th century--
History and criticism 4. Gender identity in literature. I. Title.
PQ239.R43 2011
840.9’354--dc22
 2010043847
ISBN 978 0 7546 6632 5 (hbk)
ISBN 978 1 4094 2499 4 (ebk)

V
 A ma femme.
A mes filles.
For Camille, Hannah, and Alice
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Contents

List of Figures   ix
Acknowledgments   xi

Introduction: Of Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France   1

1 Spying at the Lying-In: Les Caquets de l’accouchée as Birthing Event 19

2 Staging the Competent Midwife: The Royal Birth Stories

of François Rabelais and Louise Boursier   57

3 Touching and Telling: Gendered Variations on a Gynecological

Theme   77

4 Assimilation with a Vengeance: Maternity without Women

in Male French Renaissance Lyric   97

5 Unstable Bodies: Birthing Monstrosities in Early Modern France  121

6 Strange Fellows in Bed: Exotic Men’s Postpartum Blues   157

Postpartum   185

Bibliography   191
Index   201
This page has been left blank intentionally
 List of Figures

I.1 Woman of multiple births, Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires

prodigieuses (1597–8) xiv
I.2 Woman of multiple births, Ambroise Paré, Les Oeuvres
d’Ambroise Paré (1633)   3
5.1 Man with the hair of a woman, Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires
prodigieuses (1567) 130
5.2 Man with the hair of a woman, Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires
prodigieuses (1597–8) 131
5.3 Frontispiece, Thomas Artus, L’Isle des hermaphrodites (1605) 132
5.4 Monster from whose belly emerged another man, Pierre Boaistuau,
Histoires prodigieuses (1597–8) 136
5.5 Man from whose belly emerged another man, Ambroise Paré,
Les Oeuvres d’Ambroise Paré (1633) 137
5.6 Frontispiece, Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses (1597–8) 139
5.7 The Hanging of Judas, Alsatian or southern German (c. 1520)   140
5.8 Eve emerging from the side of Adam, Bible moraliste
(thirteenth century) 141
5.9 Magdalena Ventura with Her Husband and Son,
Jusepe de Ribera (1651) 148
5.10 Mythological Portrait of Francis I, Niccolo Bellin da Modena
(1530–52) 150
6.1 Figure des Brisilians, Cest la deduction du sumptueux ordre,
plaisantz spectacles et magnifiques theatres dresses, et exhibes
par les citoiens de Rouen... (1551) 172
6.2 Detail, Figure des Brisilians, Cest la deduction du sumptueux ordre,
plaisantz spectacles et magnifiques theatres dresses, et exhibes
par les citoiens de Rouen... (1551) 182
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Acknowledgments

[T]outes les bourgeoises prirent congé d’elle, avec toutes sortes de reverence
et de courtoisie, et moy particulierement, qui sortis le dernier, et eus le
bonheur de voir l’enfant dont est question et du quel on attent le baptesme.
(Les Caquets de l’accouchée, 1622)

[All the women took their leave of her, with all manner of bows and curtsies,
and I in particular, who left last, and had the good fortune of seeing the
newborn in question, whose baptism we await.]

This moment from the seventh day of the Caquets de l’accouchée provides
an appropriate entrée into the thanks that are due to the many friends, family,
and colleagues who have played a role in the gestation, birth, and nurturing
of Birthing Bodies. The long-sequestered narrator, by turns witness to and
embodiment of his cousin’s own birthing body, implicates a community of
support and the excitement and anticipation of reproduction that is dear to
my heart. To the various midwives—readers, nurturers, listeners, editors,
enthusiasts—my undying gratitude.
Erika Gaffney’s unflagging support and prompt, professional response to
each and every query makes her a midwife on a par with her celebrated early
modern predecessor, Louise Boursier. Her skills were matched beautifully by
the prompt professionalism of her editing colleagues across the pond, most
notably David Shervington. The editorial acumen and generosity of Kerry
O’Brien (aka “Lady Ashgate”) bettered this project on every level, and her
sense of humor saved my soul. Katherine Dauge-Roth and Rose Pruiksma were
compassionate readers from the very beginning, and their confidence in my work
remains invaluable; our intellectual ties were formed in the ruelle of the Colby,
Bates, Bowdoin Early Modern Reading Group. Among these scholars I thank,
in particular, Cristina Malcolmson and Charlotte Daniels, whose reactions were
clarifying and transformative at important moments. Emily Kane’s intellectual
rigor and personal empathy remind me daily of the importance of abiding
friendship in and out of the academy.
The models for collegial midwifery abound in my academic life. From
my earliest, awe-struck apprenticeship in Renaissance literature with Nancy
Vickers to the mentors to whom she guided me—François Rigolot and Natalie
Davis—I have been most fortunate. At that same time, Anne Larsen provided
a model of edition and analysis of women’s texts to which I continue to aspire.
This generation of generous, intellectual collegiality to which I can only pretend
xii Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

has been embodied for me most graciously in Kathleen Perry Long, whose
capacious intellect, warm regard, and dedication to the field so impress me.
Given the rather long gestation of this work, I have had the occasion to see
and evaluate many departmental and institutional arrangements with divergent
levels of kindness and support. I am the luckiest of all: Dick Williamson was my
first Bates mentor and a model of enthusiasm for scholarship in the context of a
deeply committed teaching life. The longstanding and unflagging support of my
cherished colleague, Mary Rice-DeFosse, the invaluable combination of playful
and profound intelligence and sustaining friendship of Alexandre Dauge-Roth, and
the unbridled positive regard of Laura Balladur have feathered my Bates nest most
warmly. I treasure the collegial ruminations over couvade and maternal envy with
friends Kathy Low and Lisa Maurizio that often preceded sumptuous meals with
their loving families. To Jill Reich, Dean of Faculty, my great appreciation for her
enthusiasm for my career, in and out of French; the Faculty Development grants
through her office were of great assistance. I thank several librarian colleagues at
Bates as well—Tom Hayward, Laura Juraska, and Chris Schiff—who performed
great feats of research, retrieval, and translation on several important occasions.
Will Ash provided patient and timely assistance with images. And finally, a warm
thanks to Georgette Dumais, supportive on many levels, who saw and copied more
versions of this manuscript than she might care to admit.
Having dedicated much of my scholarly life to feminist readings of
women’s work with many women mentors, it has been my great good fortune
to be sustained by generous men as well, whose regard for my career and, more
importantly, my heart made life so much more joyful: to Bruce and Dad, my
supportive family of origin; to Stuart Malcolm, my brother of choice and friend
of all time; to Bill Blaine-Wallace, brother of the soul; to Howard Rosenfield,
confessor and beacon of hope, much love and thanks.
And last and most, my deepest gratitude to the women who most support and
define my happiness in life: Edith Frey Read, whose birthing body gave me life
and whose spirit, long delivered of its earthly cares, still guides my way; Hannah,
my Women and Gender Studies daughter who reintroduced me to Judith Butler
and others; Alice, student of bodies of all stripes (whose hushed exclamation at the
pulpit of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont—“Dad, is that a pregnant man?!”—will stay with
me forever); and always and forever Camille, the mother, wife, and soul mate who
gave me this family and constant, patient, and abiding love.
***
A version of Chapter 2 appeared with the same title in Esprit généreux, esprit
pantagruélicque: Essays by His Students in Honor of François Rigolot, ed. Reiner
Leushuis and Zahi Zalloua (Geneva: Droz, 2008), pp. 141–58, and is reprinted
with the kind permission of Droz. A version of Chapter 3 appeared with the same
title in Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture, ed. Kathleen P.
Long (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 259–77, and is reprinted with permission.
A version of Chapter 4 was published as “Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast:
 Acknowledgments xiii

Maternity without Women in Male French Lyric” in High Anxiety: Masculinity in

Crisis in Early Modern France, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Kirksville, MO: Truman
State University Press, 2002), pp. 71–92, and is reproduced here thanks to their
kind permission as well.
In addition, the following institutions provided generous support for this
book: the library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia which, along with
its Mütter Museum and its medical anomalies, provided numerous texts and
distractions; the Houghton Library of Harvard University; Rauner Rare Books
Library of Dartmouth College, whose friendly and helpful staff helped reunite
me with my alma mater in ways they may not have known; the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France; the British Library; and the New York Public Library,
whose generous indulgence saved one very overwhelming day’s visit from
disaster.
Figure I.1 Woman of multiple births, Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses
(1597–8). Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library [GR 825.
B63.1597. v. 2].
 Introduction
Of Birthing Bodies
in Early Modern France

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.

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.

[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.

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.]

Madeleine des Roches, a learned widow living in mid-sixteenth-century Poitiers,

published these stanzas as a lament over the ways in which women’s literary lives
were circumscribed by their birthing bodies and the patriarchal imperatives that
governed them. The ode from which the lines are taken is her first poem in her first
publication, following two dedicatory pieces (“Epistre aux Dames” and “Epistre
à ma fille”) and she is still in prefatory mode. Her voice in this work is at its
strongest and most begrudging in terms of the travails of women and labors of
various sorts. The ubiquitous and collective “nous” (and “noz”) denote a clearly
feminine constituency, communally condemned to the burdens of marriage and


Madeleine des Roches in From Mother and Daughter: Poems, Dialogues, and
Letters of Les Dames des Roches/Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, ed. and trans. Anne
R. Larsen (Chicago, 2006), p. 53. All references to and translations of this work are taken
from Larsen’s From Mother and Daughter, with page numbers inserted parenthetically
in the text unless otherwise noted. For Larsen’s three excellent Droz editions of the des
Roches works, see the bibliography.
 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

family that draw women away from the life of writing. Further along in the ode
she laments:

Je voudroy bien m’arester sur le livre,

Et au papier mes peines souspirer.
Mais quelque soing m’en vient tousjours tirer.

[I so long to spend time with my books

And, sighing, cast my sorrows onto paper.
But some distracting trouble always diverts me.] (55)

Distracted, diverted, Madeleine characterizes the mother’s lot as onerous.  Torn

between what is revealed later as great pride in her own daughter’s accomplishments
and bitterness over its cost, she condemns the society that has forced her into this
life: “Il me suffit aux hommes faire voir/ Combien leurs loix nous font de violence”
[It is enough if I can make men see/ How much their laws do violence to us] (55).
Madeleine’s language in these stanzas betrays a woman who is acted upon,
a woman to whom things happen, and who is not the agent of her own future.
“Our parents” [Noz parens] from time immemorial, have customs that determine
us, she says. Her syntax conveys this most eloquently in a repetitive, pronomial
structure that underscores this dynamic of objectification. These laws deprive us
[nous tollir], lock us up [nous tenir closes], and take from our hands our literary
livelihood as they relegate us to domestic cares alone [nous donner le fuzeau pour
la plume]. And from this scenario arises a life of misery, couched in a masterfully
passive rhetoric that further defines the choiceless, voiceless young woman, now
married, as the victim of her body and its social injunctions. Later, “comes a new
misery,” “born within us,” and “accompanied by continuous cares” that issue from
the mother’s womb. The birthing body is unglamorously and unsentimentally
rendered: for Madeleine, mère rhymes with misère.


I have chosen the not-uncontroversial option of naming the authors by their first
names in order to distinguish them, and I have chosen not to overburden my prose by
spelling out the entire name. One would seldom see Pierre de Ronsard or Joachim Du
Bellay referred to as “Pierre” or “Joachim,” for instance, but had they published with their
progeny in such fashion, the conundrum would obtain to them as well, I can only presume.
See Joan DeJean’s treatment of this question in the introduction to Tender Geographies:
Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York, 1991), pp. 41–4.

 I would refer the reader here to Figures I.1 and I.2 that I have chosen as illustrative
of Madeleine des Roches’s plight (and for the cover image for Birthing Bodies). This image
of the spectacularly pregnant woman was ubiquitous in the period, reappearing in multiple
versions and settings: posed here in the interior of the foyer of her home; lumbering
about the countryside (a context similar to that of other medical and magical anomolies
in, for example, Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses) and floating on the page, completely
decontextualized in Ambroise Paré’s complete works (see Figure I.2). The caption reads,
 Introduction 

Figure I.2 Woman of multiple births, Ambroise Paré, Les Oeuvres d’Ambroise
Paré (1633). Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library [R128.7 P2
1633].

All the more curious then, that the entirety of Madeleine’s writing was published
collaboratively with her very own daughter, Catherine. While Madeleine’s first ode
is a lament over the lot of women challenged by the misogynistic traditions that
converge to impede their literary lives, her publishing history and her daughter’s
example are a stunning reversal of that sorry fortune. Witness the conclusion to
Catherine’s dedicatory epistle to her mother within this very same volume and
how it responds to whatever she might see as the demands on her own body’s
birthing potential:

“Dorotheae multiplici sobole gravidae effigies” (Paré 1633). She appears by turns burdened,
resigned, and even whimsically insouciant.
 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

[A]ussi n’ay-je point … laissé de mettre en oeuvre la laine, la soye, et l’or quand
… vous me l’avez commandé. 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.

[Thus I have not stopped working with wool, silk, and gold thread when you have
asked me to. 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.] (87)

Catherine shows herself to be every bit her mother’s daughter: her prefatory epistle
and the literary agenda she espouses over the course of her publishing career betray a
woman responding to her mother’s example in both life and literature. Here, Catherine
recreates a feminized, literary universe in which her mother, who has just bemoaned
her ancestors’ ironically inflected “loüables coutumes,” is the voice of authority to
which she must appeal. Madeleine is betrayed as at least symbolically conventional,
remanding her daughter, it appears, to engage in the most traditional of occupations
for devoted daughters, that of spinning. Yet her obedience is in the service of a
personally more satisfying calling: Catherine has been busy with the spindle, but
the wool, silk, and gold that she has spun eloquently mark the progression from the
mundane, domestic material of a woman’s labor to the lustrous, literary pursuits that
she is about to present.
Taken as a call and response of sorts, Madeleine des Roches’s first ode and her
daughter’s epistle encapsulate several issues for literary women in language that is
by turns touching, militant, and savvy. Her maternal, literary union with Catherine,
with whom she publishes three volumes during her lifetime, is bittersweet indeed.
Catherine is at once a precious companion and a reminder of Madeleine’s wifely
and maternal duties that do not always coexist felicitously: it is telling, for example,
that the mother does not publish until such time as her daughter is old enough and
sufficiently educated to include her work alongside her. Catherine’s now famous
sonnet “A ma quenouille” [“To my distaff”], which embroiders on the theme of the
difficult prospect of holding both distaff and pen in the same hand, is part of this
first collection and responds perfectly to her mother’s heartfelt dilemma. The sonnet
begins much in the same vein as her epistle, assuring the distaff—synecdoche of her
patriarchal duty—that she is faithful to the proper work of her sex:

Quenouille mon souci, je vous promets et jure

De vous aimer tousjours, et jamais ne changer
Vostre honneur domestic pour un bien estranger
 Introduction 

[Distaff, my care, I promise you and swear

That I’ll love you forever, and never exchange
Your domestic honor for a good which is strange] (111)

Here, Catherine is swearing allegiance to the domestic gods of duty whom her
mother both represents and reviles, and then quickly makes a plea to this same
audience for leniency and latitude:

Mais quenoille m’amie, il ne faut pas pourtant

Que pour vous estimer, et pour vous aimer tant
Je delaisse du tout cest’ honneste coustume
D’escrire quelquefois …
Ayant dedans la main, le fuzeau, et la plume.

[But distaff, my love, it is not really necessary,

That in order to value you and love you so,
I abandon entirely that honorable custom
Of writing sometimes …
As I hold in my hand my spindle and my pen.] (111)

Catherine valorizes here another “coustume,” a non-ironic invocation of a custom

or tradition of women’s literary pursuit that can marry her not to men, carnal desire,
and the cares that issue from the womb, but rather to her mother, to the weaving of
golden thread (poetry) and the immortality of literary progeny. “Distaff, my love,”
indeed. As we will discover later in more depth, Catherine eschewed marriage and
the prospect of children of her own, despite a number of proposals. She embraced
the literary life fully on her own terms and expressed her plan in a poetics entirely
fitting for the daughter of a mother such as Madeleine, whose lament prepares
her epistle quite logically. Catherine’s writings are the ideal grandchildren for her
literarily minded mother whose ode, in light of her daughter’s witness, takes on the
character of a manifesto. These children of the spirit are all the more “bien nez”
for their proud, maternal lineage. Not for Catherine these “continuous cares” that
issue from the ingloriously rendered maternal womb.


 As Larsen points out, the “nepveux” is a clever play on words with Madeleine des
Roches’s birth name, Neveu, and also participates in a general usage of the term as referring
to lineage, often in prefatory rhetoric, for male poets of the time, including Ronsard and
Aubigné. Larsen, Oeuvres, p. 185, n. 11.

Madeleine’s “entrailles” is a particularly pejorative term that Larsen translates
fittingly through the use of “burden.” Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue Françoyse (1606)
lists references to intestines and viscera only; the Dictionnaire de l’Academie Française
(1694) provides the anatomical shades of “intestins” and “boyaux” along with the more
general sense of “tous les visceres, toutes les parties enfermées dans le corps des hommes &
des animaux.” The figurative sense of parental bonding is presented as “Cette mere entendant
 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

I begin this study of the early modern birthing body with Madeleine and
Catherine des Roches because they set the stage compellingly for both the subject
at hand and my own investigative trajectory through it. I will outline here and
pay homage to my own literary ancestors, as it were, who opened both texts and
contexts and helped bring into focus Birthing Bodies. Early work on the des Roches
by Anne Larsen and later Tilde Sankovitch, along with an early study by Georges
E. Diller two generations before them, is emblematic of the gynocritical mission
of rescuing and making sense of women writers of the past, ignored precisely
because of their gender. My introduction to this mother–daughter pair grew out
of this and other such pioneering work in feminist studies from the 1980s whose
reassessment (or, in this case, rediscovery) of early modern women revealed these
writers’ astute negotiations of masculine poetics as they inscribed their voices in
powerful, lasting, and imaginative ways. Madeleine and Catherine des Roches
were exemplary in this way: their themes, their heroines, and their personal literary
mother–daughter ménage contested the destiny of women relegated to biological
reproduction and recentered their literary universe around women’s prerogatives
and potentials. Like their near contemporary, Louise Labé, the Des Roches’s
publications and lively, literary household bore witness to “assimilation with a
difference”—to invoke the touchstone work on Renaissance women poets by Ann
R. Jones—treading the line between familial and societal duty and the call to a
learned life. The last two decades of the twentieth century fueled a rich industry
of editions, monographs, and anthologies aimed at fulfilling the dual missions of
resuscitating lost or forgotten women’s literary production and then putting this
writing into theoretical constructs with particular attention to gender difference.
Feminist literary and historical criticism of the early modern era established itself
with rapid and prolific force. The critical voices from this era, many of which
inform my work in Birthing Bodies, emerged in collections such as Writing and
Sexual Difference (1982), Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European
Past (1984), Rewriting the Renaissance (1986), Women in the Middle Ages and

crier son fils se sentit toutes les entrailles émeuës,” a characterization that alludes to “gut”
instincts in a way more crude than other possibilities such as “ventre” or “matrice.”

For my use of the term “gynocritical” I am beholden to the terminology coined by
Elaine Showalter during this period in “Toward a Feminist Poetics” in Elaine Showalter
(ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (New York,
1985), p. 128. Much of Larsen’s earliest work from this time has been incorporated
subsequently into her excellent editions of the des Roches’s oeuvre for Droz. Of note from
this earlier period, “Catherine des Roches’ ‘Epistre A Sa Mere’ (1579),” Allegorica, 7/2
(1984): pp. 58–64, and “Reading/Writing Gender in the Reniassance: The Case of Catherine
des Roches (1542–1587),” Symposium, 41/4 (1987–88): pp. 292–307. See also Tilde
Sankovitch, French Women Writers and the Book: Myths of Access and Desire (Syracuse,
1988), Chapter 2, and Georges E. Diller, Les Dames des Roches: Etude sur la vie littéraire
à Poitiers dans la deuxième moitié du XVIème siècle (Paris, 1936).

 Ann R. Jones, “Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and
Literary Influence,” Yale French Studies, 62 (1981): pp. 135–53.
 Introduction 

the Renaissance (1986), Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe

(1989), and Renaissance Women Writers (1994). Important monographs such as
those by Ann R. Jones (The Currency of Eros, 1990), Margaret King (Women of
the Renaissance, 1991), Margaret Ezell (Writing Women’s Literary History, 1993),
and Merry E. Wiesner (Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 1993)—to
name but a few from a large corpus—expanded this work while responding to a
concomitant renewed attention to the edition, presentation, and translation of early
modern women’s writing by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.
If Madeleine and Catherine des Roches were influential for what their prolific
literary output said of the opportunities and challenges for women negotiating a life
in letters, their work also contained the specific reference, the person, to be exact,
who was to redirect my focus on gender and writing in this period: Agnodice, the
legendary first woman gynecologist, retold by Catherine in Les Oeuvres of 1579.
As presented and contextualized in the third chapter of this book, Agnodice was
a powerful touchstone for the connections between women’s birthing bodies and
literary production. In brief, Agnodice laments the plight of her Athenian sisters
who find themselves fearful of the male doctors and compromise their health rather
than reveal themselves so immodestly to their sight and touch. Agnodice cuts her
hair, dons men’s apparel, and goes off to study medicine, later returning to give
succor to her suffering female compatriots. The myth is a marvelous metaphorical
device for exploring the fate of women fearing male scrutiny and governance over
their “corpus,” be it anatomical or literary. The story of Agnodice allows us to
investigate the confluence of the written and the writing body as informed by
another strain of scholarship that has grown up alongside the feminist explorations
of gender and literature, that of women as participants and patients in early modern
medicine.
Historical work on midwives and doctors and the claiming of control over
women’s bodies in labor provides a fertile ground on which to appreciate the
maneuvering of both women and men whose sources and discourses affect each
other in ways that are by turns felicitous, nefarious, and most often a combination
of both. Scholarly attention to the realm of early modern medicine and gender has
been robust. A very partial list includes Valérie Worth-Stylianou’s invaluable critical
biography of obstetrical treatises from 1536 to 1627, Les Traités d’Obstétrique
en Langue Française au Seuil de la Modernité (2007); several comprehensive
works by Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, whose more general Les Femmes dans la
Société Française de la Renaissance (1990) narrows its scope to the medical in
Un Corps, un Destin (1993); Jacques Gélis’s much-cited L’Arbre et le fruit (1984),
translated as History of Childbirth (1991), expansive in its reach and generalized


 Editions of women’s works by Droz in Geneva, for example, and the tremendous
service done to literary studies by the University of Chicago Press series, The Other Voice
in Early Modern Europe, continue to present bilingual editions of women’s work from this
era. For full citations of the monographs and anthologies, as well as other works referred to
in this introduction, see the bibliography.
 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

in a desire to incorporate multiple sources from across three centuries; editions of

the work of the midwife Louise Boursier by Françoise Olive (1992) and François
Rouget and Colette Winn (2000), as well as the biographical work by Wendy
Perkins, Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois
(1996); Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yaveh’s Maternal Measures (2000), which
includes a number of essays germane to the topic of birth and medical advice
and control; Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee’s edited volume Generation
and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History (2001), an
indispensible collection for work on body and birth with a good deal of attention
to the early modern era; the excellent study by Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects
in Shakespeare’s England (2003), which does much of what Birthing Bodies hopes
to accomplish in connecting early modern midwifery to literary concerns; and
finally Susan Broomhall’s Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (2004)
and Lianne McTavish’s Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern
France (2005), focusing on scientific and representational angles, respectively.
These studies betray an exciting, thorough, and abiding interest in recuperating
and rereading a wealth of sources from across literary genres as they pertain to
women’s experience of medicine. What may surprise the reader of Birthing Bodies
is the extent to which this book is concerned with men or non-females with regard
to birthing, either through their physical bodies or metaphorically through literary
appropriation. As my introductory example declares, it is women’s experience that
defined my stakes; over time, and given the revisions and recasting of questions
of gender in the early modern era, the field of investigation has become only more
expanded and instructive. And so to this albeit partial compendium of recent
scholarship that privileges issues of early modern reproduction with regard to
women’s experience, I would add the exciting work of the last several years by
scholars who extend discussions of sexed and gendered early modern writers into
other areas, namely Kathleen P. Long’s Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe
(2006) along with her edited volume High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early
Modern France (2002), from which Chapter 4 of this book is largely taken;
Todd Reeser’s Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (2006); David
LaGuardia’s Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature (2008);
and Gary Ferguson’s Queer (Re)readings in the French Renaissance (2008). Of
obvious interest, if somewhat devoid of historical insight (because that is not his
goal), is Roberto Zapperi’s trans-historical compendium of men in childbirth, The
Pregnant Man (1991). Sherry Velasco’s study of the trope of the pregnant man in
early modern Spain, Male Delivery (2006), compliments concerns that I explore in
the French context, while opening up to a much broader contemporary application.
Men as birthers, hermaphrodites, gender outliers, and women such as Catherine
des Roches who refuse wedlock and the maternal imperative: such is the stuff of
some of the most interesting terrain for conveying what is most salient and telling
about how people of this era lived, negotiated, and navigated in their sex and
gender through the domain of their bodies’ actual and/or metaphorical birthing
potential.
 Introduction 

The example of the des Roches’s mother–daughter virtual dialogue that I

have only begun to address here, and to which I will return, is emblematic of the
comparative approach that I will employ throughout these chapters. Mother and
daughter nourish each other’s writing, corresponding, responding, and expanding
their literary universe in ways that may profoundly enhance our understanding of
how writing and birthing bodies informed each other during this period. So too
will I put their writings, and a host of other voices, in dialogue with a diversity of
interlocutors—midwives, surgeons, and classical writers from their vast literary
repertoire, among others—who might help to make sense of the power of their
example. Finally, to their contemporaneous influences, I will add the voices of
recent scholars whose investigations of birthing, sex, and gender constitute a now
burgeoning field of inquiry to which this book hopes to add new ideas.
Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore defines her daunting mission in Un Corps, un
Destin as the discovery of a gendered, scientific discourse in which women’s lives
were regulated and held in the balance:

Plus attentif aux ouvrages spécialement consacrés à la médecine féminine, nous

analyserons le développement de cette pathologie différenciée qui traduit une
philosophie et induit une éthique. Mais, parce que le médecin est, de plus en
plus souvent, un praticien qui observe la femme dans les vicissitudes de sa vie
quotidienne, son témoignage mérite aussi d’être entendu: avec la gynécologie
et l’obstétrique s’esquissent la destinée des jeunes filles, les souffrances de la
femme mariée, le fardeau des mères.

[More attentive to works specifically devoted to women’s medicine, we shall

analyze the development of this differentiated pathology which conveys a certain
philosophy and imposes a certain ethic. But, because the doctor is, more and
more often, a practitioner who observes woman in the vicissitudes of her daily
life, his witness deserves to be heard as well: within gynecology and obstetrics
is outlined the destiny of young girls, the suffering of married women, and the
burden of mothers.]

Berriot-Salvadore speaks directly to the misère inscribed in Madeleine’s first ode

and adds to the conversation the voices of the practitioners whose role in both
treating and describing women’s experience of birth was of crucial importance to
their survival. The early modern male gynecologist outlines this destiny in ways that
evince “suffering” and “burden,” redolent of the conflicted issue of the “entrailles
de la mère.” Berriot-Salvadore’s goal, as well as mine, is to interrogate these
“differentiated pathologies,” to visit the birthing body as a site whose discourses
betray a complicated response to the primal potential of generation. Both doctors
and midwives, whom Berriot-Salvadore does not ignore, present the generative


 Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Un Corps,un Destin: La femme dans la médicine de la
Renaissance (Paris, 1993), p. 2 (my translation).
10 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

body and their role in its oversight in telling ways, mining the past for inspiration
and justification of their profession. Agnodice, for example, makes an appearance
in Jacques Guillemeau’s De l’Heureux accouchement des femmes (1609) as well
as in Mauquest de la Motte’s Traité complet des accouchemens naturels (1721),
several generations later; Phanerote, the midwife mother of Socrates is implicated
in Louise Boursier’s proud lineage. The stories they tell about their metier and the
women they service, when put into conversation with the more literary imaginings
of the early modern era, offer a view to both men’s and women’s generative
capacities that is at once sobering, liberating, and often unexpected. In this way,
I depart from Berriot-Salvadore’s dramatic, binary characterization—a body, a
destiny—and strive to complicate or nuance what rings too often like a solitary,
biological imperative. As I discover through the range of examples that I bring
into dialogue, there are views to the birthing body that suggest a far from unitary
birthing body and, indeed, a number of destinies.10 A principal goal of Birthing
Bodies is to reveal the ways in which the sharing and comparing of stories as told
across gender, genre, and political agenda might nuance our understanding of the
range of possible options for men and women of this era.
Methodologically, my approach is to investigate my sources, whatever their
literary genre, as stories, tales of birthing, from conception to breastfeeding, with
particular attention to the ways in which the corporeal realities of the birthing
body find expression in writing according to an author’s interests. Birthing stories,
if one can be permitted some cross-cultural and trans-historical leeway, are most
often dramatic, vividly rendered, crucial narratives that one tells to the world;
as such, they also make for powerful metaphor. A number of mitigating factors
may converge to heighten or inflect the drama of the birthing and lying-in: infant
mortality; preferential gender treatment and aspirations; paternity (not to mention
noble or royal lineage); virility, sterility, and fertility; the medicalization of the
birthing process; and the anatomical (sometimes mortal) trauma that attends
to early modern birth. Caroline Bicks underscores the power of birthing and
storytelling well. In her essay “Midwiving Virility in Early Modern England,” she
delves into the vexed territory of women, gossip, and childbirth to reveal the drama
that attends to female control over discourse, intercourse, and birthing bodies:

Although there was a technical distinction between a midwife and a gossip—the

latter being a friend or neighbor, but sometimes the child’s deliverer as well—
medical and literary texts often conflated these two figures and what they did
together within the all-female birthroom. The gendered semantic shift of the
term “gossip” and the conflation of gossips and midwives were part of a larger
anxiety about the tales women scripted in this space … Whether or not they

10
 In a similar vein, Sara F. Matthews Grieco’s Ange ou Diablesse: La Représentation
de la Femme au XVIe Siècle (Paris, 1991) announces the binary Zeitgeist that, in my
estimation, corrals texts and readings into reductive categories, all the more confusing and
inadequate for explaining queer, hermaphroditic, or non-heteronormative examples.
 Introduction 11

knew more than the husband or the state, birth attendants witnessed and testified
to what few men could lay claim to having seen or known.11

Similar to Bicks’s preoccupations, Birthing Bodies explores the convergence of

the medical and the literary, as well as the anxiety over both women’s bodies and
women’s discourse. I add to this the examples of men and hermaphrodites who
inhabit this realm and recuperate women’s reproductivity for their own purposes.
These tales, scripted by and about a variety of subjects in childbed and put into
dialogue—whether spun into alexandrines, carved into court documents and
defenses, earnestly set forth in epistles as testimony or instruction, or parodied
as “gossip” or in farcical gargantuan tales—reveal greater truths than any one
isolated case. As Ann R. Jones investigated the “currency of Eros” across cultures,
pairing women writers from throughout Europe, so do I ask here through some of
the same processes of comparative reading: What is the currency of the birthing
body in the early modern period? What are its vicissitudes? How is it scripted
according to gender? What are its destinies? What is its meaning and value in the
birthing of human life and of literature? What are its pathologies and agendas,
its ethical and philosophical assumptions, in birthing and lying-in? What are its
versions, its forms, its fictions and “facts,” and what are the truths that are born
from them?12
It becomes evident over the course of these chapters that the gendered universe
is neither binary nor entirely predictable. It is my hope that the voices I engage with
these narratives complicate rather than reify sex and gender boundaries. Lianne
McTavish’s astute observations of the gendered gaze with regard to birthing bodies
of this period are particularly instructive:

When scholars insist that women were increasingly exposed to an aggressive

male gaze during the early modern period, they ignore the exhibition of male
medical practitioners … This scholarship threatens to erase women from the
picture by implying they were voiceless, passive objects lacking the power
to resist. Obstetrical treatises written by both male and female authors depict,
however, pregnant women who refuse to be seen. They also portray female
midwives who intervene to mediate and even prevent male looking … These
sources suggest that women’s ability to look back, scrutinizing the bodies of
male practitioners, should not be underestimated.13

11
 Caroline Bicks, “Midwiving Virility in Early Modern England,” in Naomi J. Miller
and Naomi Yavneh (eds), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern
Period (Aldershot, 2000), p. 50.
12
 Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–
1620 (Bloomington, 1990).
13
 Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France
(Aldershot, 2005), p. 72.
12 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

Many of the early modern writers and stories we will investigate serve to nuance—
looking back, talking back to—the sometimes flatfooted or overly invested
readings of both feminist and misogynistic agendas. McTavish’s work is salutary
in this way, as are the revised readings of Galenic and Aristotelian anatomy by a
number of scholars, most famously in Thomas Laqueur’s much debated view of
the one-sexed body and in the responses it has generated, notably by Katherine
Park and Robert Nye, and more recently in Gary Ferguson’s Queer (Re)readings.14
Ferguson’s work on homosexuality in the French Renaissance presents an erudite,
generous, and apt approach when reading a variety of “queer” texts, many of which
are taken up in Birthing Bodies, as the birthing subjects slip in and out of sexes and
genders, though some evince more recognizable elements of homosexuality than
others. Like Ferguson, I use examples that often privilege “textual moments that
appear queer to the modern reader, that is, representations of various kinds that seem
strange or sexually ambiguous, or that challenge contemporary heteronormative
ideas and preconceptions.” Ferguson continues (and I would join him in this
enterprise), “Since such passages can often provoke in the modern reader a
reaction of perplexity or embarrassment, giving them due attention, allowing their
disturbing potential to unfold rather than seeking to explain it away, is already
to foster a primary objective of queer theory” (Ferguson 51). Also common to
my way into these challenging texts is the project of historical contextualization
that considers the unusual instances of cross-gendering in the birthing process as
unsettling, revealing, and liberating in terms of encrusted views of a binary sexual
universe. As Ferguson proclaims, “The object of this second strategy of queer
historical reading is clearly not to normalize the past, but rather to discover how it
might be different from the present precisely in the ways it configured norms and
marginalities differently” (51). Another touchstone in this regard that will have
particular currency in my first chapter is the important essay on male menstruation
during the early modern period by Gianna Pomata, her work serving as a radical
revisioning of what medicine of the period had to say about health and norms in
undeniably gynocentric terms. Reading early modern medicine with an eye to the
body’s surprising fluidity, and against the more popular grain of bodies destined
solely to starkly predictable misery based on humors, proves liberating to both the
scientific and literary potential of these authors and texts. As David LaGuardia
cautions, “the most monolithic masculinity has always been structured in terms of
its constant instability and undoing in the face of unquantifiable others that were
beyond men’s control.”15 Like LaGuardia, I value readings that dismantle received
ideas about gendered bodies in early modern texts and mine them for the human

14
 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, MA, 1990); Katherine Park and Robert A. Nye, “Destiny is Anatomy,” in The
New Republic, 18 (February 1991): pp. 53–7; Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)readings in the
French Renaissance (Aldershot, 2008).
15
 David P. LaGuardia, Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature
(Aldershot, 2008), p. 13.
 Introduction 13

truths that reside precisely in that which is unstable and unquantifiable. Such an
approach eschews too rigid a characterization of the gendered early modern world,
and invites a more capacious view to the participation of all gendered beings in
their multiple, negotiated, and improvised identities.

***

In Chapter 1, “Spying at the Lying-In,” I investigate the hybrid literary phenomenon,

Les Caquets de l’accouchée, published in eight installments over the year 1622. A
complicated mix of parody, manifesto, particular history, and social commentary,
Les Caquets, penned anonymously and by at least two separate authors, uses the
birthing body as its framing device. The literary conceit is that of a melancholic
gentleman seeking to recover from illness. He is advised to find for himself a
recently delivered mother and to hide himself in the ruelle of the lying-in chamber.
There, he is to record the gossip of the female visitors that will certainly regale him
and return him to his “pristine santé.” My close reading situates this text within the
tradition of what might be called the “gossip genre,” namely, medieval works such
as the Les Quinze joies de mariage and the Les Evangiles des quenouilles, wherein
men play a similarly beleaguered outlier to their wives’ gynocentric côterie at
and around the time of birth. In several of the caquets, the scribe fancies himself
well steeped in the gynecological wisdom of his day, and I explore some of the
contemporaneous references to which he may be alluding: his rather pedagogical
aside on his own text as afterbirth [arrière-faix] prompts a reading of Les Caquets
in this way and informs my thesis regarding the text as a nascent critique of salon
culture, a view to the famous ruelles of the seventeenth century and their role in
the production and critique of literary pursuits. If Les Caquets de l’accouchée
has been rightly held up as participating in the age-old misogynistic tradition of
the antifeminist side of the querelle des femmes, it warrants a reading as well that
valorizes a certain view to women’s productive and reproductive capacities, if
at times unwittingly. I employ the work on the idea of male menstruation during
the early modern period as a way of suggesting that texts such as these may well
evince a more positive and inclusive view to women’s creativity and procreativity
than has been previously suggested—most notably by Domna Stanton in her work
on Les Caquets as a “placental text.”
Chapter 1 ends with a connection to one of the standard-bearers of women’s
reproductive health and a central figure in this book, the midwife Louise Boursier,
whose livelihood was severely curtailed over the very question of afterbirth and
a tragic lying-in. Chapter 2, “Staging the Competent Midwife,” pairs a close
reading of Rabelais’s famous births of both Pantagruel and Gargantua with
Boursier’s dramatically rendered retellings of the births of Marie de Médicis, most
specifically her first son, the future monarch Louis XIII. This chapter indulges
most consciously perhaps, the phenomenon of birthing as an occasion for good
storytelling: François Rabelais, as both chronicler and savant trained in medicine,
and the midwife Boursier, who published a number of accounts and manuals—
14 Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France

most notably Instruction à ma fille to the daughter whom she hoped to see follow
in her profession—tell entertaining accounts of dramatic births with literary savvy,
great humor, and, most importantly, medical authority. While their accounts do
not respond to each other literally, the literary and medical connections that are
suggested deepen our sense of the valence of the birthing body at the royal level,
be it the fantastical, gargantuan kingdoms of Rabelais, or the very real grandiosity
of the French queen’s elaborately staged and much scrutinized birthing chamber.
Chapter 3, “Touching and Telling,” explores the professions of midwife and
surgeon in greater depth through the literary imaginings of Catherine des Roches,
quoted in the epigraph to this introduction. The mythological personage of
Agnodice, the first woman gynecologist—who disguises herself as a man to be
trained in medicine and return to the aid of her Athenian sisters—is the central
character here. Using Louise Boursier again as the example of the flesh-and-blood
equivalent of Agnodice, I compare versions of this story by Jacques Guillemeau—
father to the royal surgeon who would ultimately judge and condemn Boursier—and
Catherine des Roches. I subsequently compare them to the original tale as recorded
by Hyginus (Fabulae, Gaius Julius Hyginus, c. 64 bce–17 ce). Guillemeau’s text
comes from his popular medical manual, De l’Heureux accouchement des femmes
(1609), and Catherine des Roches’s “Agnodice” is found in her first publication, Les
Oeuvres of 1579. The parallels between the ancient tale and the contemporaneous
accounts are revealing with regard to the medicalization of the birthing process
and the gendered control of women’s health. Catherine des Roches rewrites this
myth in a way that underscores the compromised lot of women described in the
writings and example of Louise Boursier and prepared as well in des Roches’s
own literary discussions of gender, text, and (re)productivity that I have already
partially explicated. My conclusion engages the turgid and anxious prose of an
anonymous English translator of Guillemeau’s text (Child-birth or, The Happy
Deliverie of Women [1612]), whose trepidation before the blank page and the
perceived shamefulness of women’s birthing bodies invites comparisons with the
early pioneering work by American feminists such as Susan Gubar and, especially,
the radical manifesto of Mary Daly, aptly named Gyn/Ecology.
Chapter 4, “Assimilation with a Vengeance,” turns to France’s most historically
venerated Renaissance literary elite, the Pléiade poets, to explore gendered, lyric
permutations of the theme of nurturance, specifically breastfeeding as a metaphor
for mentorship between Jean Dorat and his poetic disciples. If preceding chapters
privilege the wisdom of surgeons and midwives and their writings on women’s
reproductive capacities, this section engages conceptualizations of the early
modern body more generally. The much discussed work of Thomas Laqueur on
the one-sexed body (to which I return in subsequent chapters) informs my reading
of this curious trope on the postpartum birthing body that carries some of the
resonances of the previous treatment of Les Caquets de l’accouchée, wherein men
appropriate women’s generative capacities (here explored through the metaphor
of mother’s milk as conveyance of language and art—la langue maternelle) as
the woman all but disappears. The soaring, self-promoting mission of Ronsard
 Introduction 15

and his contemporaries differs greatly from the parodic strains of the 1622 text,
yet the investment in the procreative body remains consistent and perhaps more
powerful when seen within a more capacious view of male and female bodies in
flux. Just as Gianna Pomata’s suggestion of the menstruating body as a healthy and
purgative norm will help us reread the masculine appropriations in the imaginary
afterbirth of Les Caquets, so does the view to early modern conceptions of anatomy
complicate our reading of Ronsard and his contemporaries: as they subsume the
female generative body into their poetic agenda, so do they valorize its potential
for all writers, male and female, Catherine des Roches being, again, a prime
example. She, too, eschews the messiness of the birthing body and recuperates the
womb as a metaphor that allows a way out of, as Berriot-Salvadore suggests, Un
Corps, un Destin.
The body in flux is at the center of Chapter 5, “Unstable Bodies,” which turns
to birthing as a potentially monstrous activity. This chapter furthers my exploration
of the metaphorical usages of the birthing and nurturing body as played out in
preceding chapters (namely “Spying at the Lying-In” and “Assimilation with
a Vengeance”) by taking up the confounding examples of what appeared to be
men or male-identified subjects transgressing gender and sex assignments to
actually give birth. The story that sets the scene here is Thomas Artus’s L’Isle des
hermaphrodites of 1605, a fantastical, dystopian text that serves as a thinly veiled
critique of the corrupted court of Henri III. Here, hermaphodism fuels a critique of
effemininity and sexual perversion as markers of political corruption. The author
leads us onto a storm-tossed ship bound for a floating island of great instability,
where the locals’ comportment mirrors and extends this slippery, frightening, and
inscrutable indeterminacy. I read this parodical text alongside contemporaneous
works that take up medical anomalies, such as Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires
prodigieuses—a hugely popular text from the previous century reprinted in multiple
editions thereafter—as well as the more medically (and juridically) inspired Des
Hermaphrodits, by the surgeon Jacques Duval. Hermaphrodite scholar Kathleen
Long’s important work on these texts greatly informs my investigation of this
medical and literary phenomenon and prompts us to push further into a view to
sexual ambiguity or transgression as perhaps the richest and most salient domain
for expanding the discussion of birthing bodies as linked to social and political
destiny. For what the stories of monstrous births of this period reveal about anxiety
and indeterminacy, I also turn to the work of Judith Butler, whose discussion
of gender illegibility, inscrutability, and regulation in Undoing Gender (2004)
presents both the afterlife for these early modern conundrums and a theoretical
construct for their reading more generally. This chapter delves not only into the
ambient discourse on what appears to be masculinized birthing, but also into
imagery, treating a number of visual representations in circulation during the early
modern era that work in several directions, both reifying traditionally accepted
biological norms and, at times, offering a more generous interpretation of the
human body and its generative possibilities. The bisexual portrait of Francis I, for
example, and Jusepe de Ribera’s curious portrait of the bearded wife, Magdalena
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 586 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book viii. Milton's sonnet on
the sufferings of the Waldenses in Piedmont. Further persecutions
and cruelties. The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heaven.
Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow O'er all th' Italian fields, where
still doth sway The tripled tyrant ; that from these may grow A
hundred fold, who having learned thy way Early may fly the
Babylonian wo. § 28. — The interposition of the powerful Protector
of England was not to be resisted. The persecutions of the
Waldenses were abated, and the protestant Christians of Piedmont
enjoyed for a few years a season of comparative repose, till the
persecutions arising from the revocation of the edict of Nantes in
France, when the popish duke of Savoy, imitating king Louis of
France, commenced another most cruel and bloody persecution of
the Waldenses, hardly exceeded in severity by any of the preceding.
To relate the particulars of it would be only to repeat the horrors of
massacres, burning, outrage, and rapine, by which the feelings of
the reader must already have been sufficiently harrowed. This cruel
persecution was brought to a close through the friendly interposition
of the Swiss Cantons, in September, 1086. Multitudes of the
Waldenses had long been confined in loathsome prisons in
Piedmont. The Swiss Cantons sent deputies to demand their release,
and the privilege of quitting the dominions of their popish
persecutor. In the month of October, the duke of Savoy's
proclamation was issued for their release and banishment. It was
now the approach of winter, the ground was covered with snow and
ice ; the victims of cruelty were almost universally emaciated
through poverty and disease, and very unfit for the projected
journey. The proclamation was made at the castle of Mondovi, for
example : and at five o'clock the same evening they were to begin a
march of four or five leagues ! Before the morning more than a
hundred and fifty of them sunk under the burden of their maladies
and fatigues, and died. The same thing happened to the prisoners at
Fossan. A company of them halted one night at the foot of Mount
Cenis ; when they were about to march the next morning, they
pointed the officer who conducted them to a terrible tempest upon
the top of the mountain, beseeching him to allow them to stay till it
had passed away. The inhuman papist, deaf to the voice of pity,
insisted on their marching ; the consequence of which was, that
eighty-six of their number died, and were buried in that horrible
tempest of snow. Some merchants that afterwards crossed the
mountains, saw the bodies of these miserable people extended on
the snow, the mothers clasping their children in their arms ! Such
are the tender mercies of Rome. nally written as a " History of the
Waldenses," and afterward enlarged, and republished under the title
of a "History of the Church."
 587 CHAPTER V. PERSECUTIONS IN FRANCE. MASSACRE
OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW, AND REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF
NANTES. § 29. — We have already seen, in the massacres of the
Waldenses of Beziers, Mencrbe, Lavaur, and other places, that the
emissaries of papal vengeance did not always wait for the slow
process of inquisitorial examination and torture, to wreak their
vengeance upon the detested heretics ; and it would be easy to fill a
volume with the horrid details of wholesale massacres of hundreds
and thousands of heretics at the time, by which the faithful servants
of the popes have merited and obtained from these self-styled
successors of St. Peter, plenary indulgences, which should admit
them, with their hands all recking with blood, to the abodes of the
blessed. Omitting all mention of the horrid massacres of Orange and
Vassy, in France ;* the butcheries of the bigoted duke of Alva, in the
Netherlands, performed under the sanction of the husband of bloody
Mary, Philip of Spain ;f or the massacres in Ireland and other popish
countries, we can describe but one which stands preeminent among
these scenes of blood, viz. the massacre of St. Bartholomew, at
Paris, on the 24th of August, 1572. The massacre of St.
Bartholomew was a plan laid by the infamous Catharine de Medici,
queen dowager of France, in concert with her weak and bigoted son,
Charles IX., for the extirpation of the French protcstants, who were
called by the name of Huguenots. Under the pretext of a marriage
between Henry, the protestant king of Navarre, and Margaret, the
sister of Charles, the Huguenots, with their most celebrated and
favorite leader, admiral Coligny, had been attracted to Paris. Coligny
had been affectionately warned by many of his friends against
trusting himself at Paris, but such were the assurances of friendship
on the part of king Charles, that he was thrown off his guard, and
was drawn within the toils that popish malignity and craft had laid
for him. On the 22d of August, an attempt was made to assassinate
the Admiral by a shot fired at him in the street, by which he was
wounded in the arm. This act was doubtless perpetrated at the
instigation of the infamous queen mother, if not of her son, though
that wicked woman pretended deep commiseration, and upon a visit
to the Admiral remarked, that she "did not believe now the King
could sleep safely in his palace." And yet both the mother and son,
were * For a description of these see Lorimer's Protestant church of
France, and Smedley's Reformed Religion in France. f For an account
of the cruelties of the duke of Alva in the Netherlands, who boasted
that in six weeks he had caused 18.000 persons to be put to death
for the crime of Protestantism, see Watson's History of Philip II.,
book x.
 588 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book via. Murder of Coligny.
Frightful slaughter at the massacre of Bartholomew. at that very
moment, and had for weeks past been deliberately concocting a plan
for the slaughter not only of Coligny, but of all his protestant friends,
whom they had now caught in their toils at Paris ; and in all this, no
doubt, their popish bigotry taught thsm they were doing God service
! § 30. — At length the fatal hour had arrived. All things were ready.
The tocsin, at midnight, tolled the signal of destruction. The troops
were sent forth, by royal command, to perform their work of death.
The assassins rushed into Coligny's hotel, killing several protestant
Swiss soldiers as they passed. " Save yourselves, my friends," cried
the generous-minded chief. "I have long been prepared for death."
They obeyed his commands, and escaped through the tiling of the
roof; and in a moment after, the daggers of the popish assassins
were buried in the heart of the noble chief of the protestants, and
his body ignominiously thrown from the window, to be exposed to
the rude insults of the bigoted populace.* Among those who
escaped through the tiling was a protestant clergyman, M. Merlin,
the chaplain of the Admiral. His escape was attended with a
remarkable providential circumstance. He hid himself in a hay-loft,
where he was sustained for three days by an egg each day, which a
hen laid, for his support, f After the death of Coligny, the slaughter
soon extended itself to every quarter of the city, and when the
glorious sun looked forth that morning, it was upon an awful
spectacle. The dead and the dying mingled together in
undistinguished heaps. The pavements besmeared with a path of
gore, along which the bodies of the murdered protestants had been
dragged to be cast into the waters of the Seine, already dyed with
the blood of the slain. The executioners rushing through the streets,
bespattered with blood and brains, brandishing their murderous
weapons, and in merriment, mimicking the psalin-singing of the
protestants ! The frantic Huguenots, bewildered with fright, running
hither and thither to seek a place of safety, but in vain. Some ran
towards the house of Coligny, but only to fall by the hands of the
same murderers ; others, remembering the solemn promises of the
King, and hoping that he was not privy to the massacre, ran toward
the palace of the Louvre, but only to meet a more certain and
speedy death ; for, even Charles himself fired upon the fugitives
from the window of the palace, shouting with the fiend-like fury of a
devil or an inquisitor, "Kill them! kill them!" The Louvre itself was a
frightful scene of slaughter. The protestants who had remained
there, in the train of the king of Navarre, were called out one by
one, J and put to death in cold * See Smedley's History of the
Reformed Religion in France, vol. ii., chap. 11. t Quick's Synodicon,
i., 125. Smedley, ii., 10. I Ad uno, ad uno. (Davila, torn, i., p. 295.) "
They were compelled to go out one after another by a little door,
before which they found a great number of satellites armed with
halberds, who assassinated the Navarrese as they came out."
(German Narrative cited by Mr. Sharon Turner, Reign of Elizabeth, p.
319.)
 ohap. v.] POPERY DRUNK WITH BLOOD OF SAINTS. 589
Multitudes of the slain in Paris and other cities of France. blood,
under the very eyes of the king. Even the protcstant king of Navarre
himself had been ushered into the presence of Charles through long
lines of soldiers thirsting for his blood, and commanded with oaths
to renounce the protestant faith, and was then, together with the
prince of Conde, thrust into pr son, and informed that unless they
embraced the Roman Catholic faith in three days, they would be
executed for treason. In the meanwhile the work of slaughter went
forward, and during seven days, at the lowest computation,* 5000
protestants were murdered in the city of Paris alone. § 31. — The
whole city was one great butchery and flowed with human blood.
The court was heaped with the slain, on which the King and Queen
gazed, not with horror, but with delight. Her majesty unblushingly
feasted her eyes on the spectacle of thousands of men, exposed
naked, and lying wounded and frightful in the pale livery of death.f
The king went to see the body of admiral Coligny, which was
dragged by the populace through the streets ; and remarked, in
unfeeling witticism, that the " smell of a dead enemy was
agreeable." The tragedy was not confined to Paris, but extended, in
general, through the French nation. Special messengers were, on
the preceding day, dispatched in all directions, ordering a general
massacre of the Huguenots. The carnage, in consequence, was
made through nearly all the provinces, and especially in Meaux,
Troyes, Orleans, Nevers, Lyons, Thoulouse, Bordeaux, and Rouen.
Twentyfive or thirty thousand, according to Mezeray, perished in
different places. Many were thrown into the rivers, which, floating
the corpses on the weaves, carried horror and infection to all the
country, which they watered with their streams. The populace,
tutored by the priesthood, accounted themselves, in shedding
heretical blood, " the agents of Divine justice," and engaged " in
doing God service."J The King, accompanied with the Queen and
princes of the blood, and all the French court, went to the
Parliament, and acknowledged that all these sanguinary transactions
were done by his authority. "The Parliament publicly eulogized the
King's wisdom," which had effected the effusion of so much heretical
blood. His Majesty also went to mass, and returned solemn thanks
to God for the glorious victory obtained over heresy. He ordered
medals to be coined to perpetuate its memory. A medal accord*
That of Mezeray. Bossuet says 6000, and Davila 10,000 victims in
Paris. f Tout le quartier ruisseloit de sang. La cour etoit pleine de
corps morts, que le Roi et la Reine regardoient, non seulement sans
horreur, mais avec plaisir. Tout les rues de la ville n'etoient plus que
boucheries. (Bossuet, 4, 537.) On exposa leurs corps tout nuds a la
porte du Louvre, la Reine mere etant a une fenestre, qui repaisoit
ses yeux de cet horrible spectacle. (Mezeray, 5. Davila, v. Thuan., ii..
8.) Frequentes e gynceceo foemina?, nequaquam crudeli spectaculo
eas absterrente, curiosis oculis nudorum corpora inverecunde
intuebantur. (Thuan., 3, 131.) \ Les Catholiques se regarderent
comme les executeurs de la justice de Dieu. (Daniel, 8, 738. Thuan.,
3. 149.)
 590 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book vm. Joy of the Pope
and Cardinals at the massacre. Medal struck in honor of the event
inglv was struck for the purpose with this inscription, PIETY EXCITED
JUSTICE.* § 32. — The King sent a special messenger to the Pope
to announce to him the joyful intelligence of the extirpation of the
protestants, and to tell him that " the Seine flowed on more
majestically after receiving the dead bodies of the heretics." Nothing
could exceed the joy with which the news was received at Rome.
The Pope and cardinals went in procession to the church of St. Louis
to return solemn thanks to God (oh, horrible impiety !) for the
extirpation of the heretics. Te Deum was sung, and the firing of
cannon announced the welcome news to the neighborhood around.
The Pope's legate in France felicitated his most Christian majesty in
the Pontiff's name, " and praised the exploit, so long meditated and
so happily executed, for the good of religion." The massacre, says
Mezeray, '■ was extolled before the King as the triumph of the
church."t The Pope was not satisfied with a temporary expression of
his joy. He caused a more enduring memorial to be struck in the
form of triumphant medals in commemoration and honor of the
event. These medals represented on one side an angel carrying a
sword in one hand, and a crucifix in the other, employed in the
slaughter of a group of heretics, with the words hugonotorum
strages (slaughter of the Huguenots), 1572 ; on the other side, the
name and title of the reigning Pope. A new issue of this celebrated
medal in honor of the Bartholomew massacre has recently been
struck from the papal mint at Rome, and sold for the profit of the
papal government. (For fac-simile, see Engraving.) Such was the joy
of the cardinal of Lorraine (whom we have already seen closing the
council of Trent with anathemas against heretics), upon receiving
the news at Rome, that he presented the messenger with one
thousand pieces of gold, and, unable to restrain the extravagance of
his delight, exclaimed aloud that "he believed the King's heart must
have been filled with a sudden inspiration from God when he gave
orders for the slaughter of the heretics.''^ Another Cardinal,
Santorio, afterwards pope Clement VIII., in his autobiography,
designates the massacre as " the celebrated day of St. Bartholomew,
most cheering to the Catholics"^ Thus is it by * Pietas excitavit
justitiam. II fit frapper un medaille a l'occasion de la Saint
Barthelemi. (Daniel, 8, 786.) Apres avoir oui solemnellement la
messe pour remercier Dieu de la belle victoire obtenue sur l'heresie,
et commande de fabriquer des medailles pour en conserver la
memoire. (Mezeray, 5, 160, cited by Edgar. 240.) f La haine de 1'
heresie les fit recevoir agreablement a Rome. On se rejouit aussi en
Espagne. (Bossuet, 4, 544.) La Cour de Rome et le Conseil d'
Espagne eurent une joye indicible de la Saint Bartelemy. Le Pape alia
en procession a Teglise de Saint Louis, rendre graces a Dieu d'un si
heureux succes, et l'on fit le panegyrique de cette action sous le
nom de Triomphe de 1' Eglise. (Mezeray. 5, 162. Sully, 1,21. Edgar,
241.) t De Thou, lib. liii., ch. 4. Smedley, ii., 36. 5 He speaks of the "
giusto sdegno del re Carlos IX. di gloriosa memoria, in quel celebre
giorno di S. Bartolomeo lietissimo a' cattolici ;" that is, " the just
wrath of king Charles IX., of glorious memory, on the celebrated day
of St.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 8.89%
accurate

,/v • mile of Papal Medal in honor of Lin Btlasea f Si.

Bartholomew's. ^J^K m Massacre of St. Bartholomew's, in Paris, in
I.'
 chap, v.] POPERY DRUNK WITH THE BLOOD OF SAINTS.
593 Revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685. Cruel effects of this
decree. the joy of the Pope and cardinals at the massacre, by the
medal struck in its commemoration and honor, and by their solemn
thanksgivings for the happy events, without alluding to the proofs
(by no means inconsiderable) of a previous correspondence between
the Pope and the King, that this horrible slaughter is fixed as another
dark and damning spot upon the blood-stained escutcheon of Rome.
§ 33. — After the massacre of Bartholomew, the protestants of
France continued to be the subjects of cruel and bitter persecution
from the papists, and yet in the midst of all, the blood of the martyrs
was the seed of the church, and the cause of God and of truth
continued steadily to advance. At length, in the year 1598, twenty-
six years after the massacre, an edict granting the protestants liberty
of worship, with certain restrictions, was passed, through the favor
of king Henry IV. This was called the edict of Nantes, and though far
from removing all disabilities on account of religion, was received by
the protestants with joy and gratitude. It continued in force till 1685,
though for the last few years of that period many of its provisions
had been violated with impunity, and the protestants exposed to a
series of cruel insults and annoyances from their popish neighbors.
In the year 1685, king Louis XIV. of France, a bigoted papist, at the
persuasions of La Chaise, his Jesuit confessor, publicly revoked that
protecting edict, and thus let loose the floodgates of popish cruelty
upon the defenceless protestants. By the edict of revocation, all
former edicts protecting the protestants were fully repealed ; they
were forbidden to assemble for religious worship : all their ministers
were banished the kingdom within fifteen days under penalty of
being sent to the galleys ;* all their children born in future were
ordered to be brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, and the
parents required to send them to the popish churches under a
penalty of five hundred livres ; and what rendered the law yet more
cruel, all other protestants, except the banished ministers, were
forbidden to depart out of' the kingdom, under penalty of the galleys
for men, and of confiscation of money and goods for the women. §
34. — In the cruelties that followed the revocation of the edict of
Nantes, the policy of Rome appeared to be changed. She had tried,
in innumerable instances, the effect of persecution unto death, and
the results of Bartholomew had shown that it was not effectual in
eradicating the heresy. ,Now, her plan was by torture, Bartholomew,
most cheering to catholics." (Cited by Rarike in his History of the
Popes, book vi., p. 228.) * Sent to the galleys. — This was a
punishment somewhat similar to sending felons to the hulks or
convict ships, such as those at Woolwich, England ; except that the
rigor of the former was much greater. The galley-slave was chained
to his oar, compelled to labor without intermission, in company with
the vilest felons and blasphemers, and continually exposed to the
lash of the cruel and (in the case of heretics especially) often
vindictive taskmaster, upon his naked back. To this horrid and
degrading punishment, some of the most distinguished and learned
of the French protestant clergy were doomed during this
persecution.
 594 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book vm. Wearing out the
saints of the Musi High. Dragoonading. Cruel treatment of the
protestants. annoyance, and inflictions of various kinds suggested by
a brutal ingenu tv, " to wear out the saints o£ the Most High." One
of the most common means was what was called dragoonading; that
is quartering brutal dragoons upon the defenceless people, who had
1, cense to employ any means in their power to compel the poor
persecuted protestants to embrace the popish failh. '• There was no
wickedness," says M. Quick in his Synodicon, " though ever so
horrid, which they did not put in practice, that they might enforce
them to change their religion. Amidst a thousand hideous cries and
blasphemies, they hung up men and women by the hair or feet upon
the roofs of the chambers, or hooks of chimneys, and smoked them
with wisps of wet hay till they were no longer able to bear it ; and
when they had taken them down, if they would not sign an
abjuration of their pretended heresies, they then trussed them up
again immediately. Some they threw into great fires, kindled on
purpose, and would not take them out till they were half roasted.
They tied ropes under their arms, and plunged them again and
again into deep wells, from whence they would not draw them till
they had promised to change their religion. They bound them as
criminals are when they are put to the rack, and in that posture,
putting a funnel into their mouths, they poured wrine down their
throats till its fumes had deprived them of their reason, and they
had in that condition made them consent to become Catholics. Some
they stripped stark naked, and after they had offered them a
thousand indignities, they stuck them with pins from head to foot ;
they cut them with penknives, tore them by the noses with red-hot
pincers, and dragged them about the rooms till they promised to
become Roman Catholics, or till the doleful cries of these poor
tormented creatures, calling upon God for mercy, constrained them
to let them go. They beat them with staves, and dragged them all
bruised to the popish churches, where their enforced presence is
reputed for an abjuration. They kept them waking seven or eight
days together, relieving one another by turns, that they might not
get a wink of sleep or rest. In case they began to nod, they threw
buckets of water in their faces, or holding kettles over their heads,
they beat on them with such a continual noise, that those poor
wretches lost their senses. If they found any sick, who kept their
beds, men or women, be it of fevers or other diseases, they were so
cruel as to beat up an alarm with twelve drums about their beds for
a whole week together, without intermission, till they had promised
to change. In some places they tied fathers and husbands to the
bedposts, and ravished their wives and daughters before their eyes.
And in other places rapes were publicly and generally permitted for
many hours together. From others they plucked off the nails of their
hands and toes, which must needs have caused an intolerable pain."
§ 35. — The galleys formed another mode of oppression. There, :i
vast body of protestants, some of them, such as Marolles and Le
Febvre, of the highest station and talent, were confined — wretch 
 chap, v.] POPERY DRUNK WITH THE BLOOD OF SAINTS.
595 Popery tolerates wickedness, but not heresy. Pious expressions
of the persecuted Le 1 ebvre edly fed on disgusting fare — and
wrought in chains for many years. The prisoners often died under
their sufferings. When they did not acquit themselves to the mind of
their taskmasters, or d.sregarded any of their persecuting
enactments, they were subjected to the lash. Fifty or sixty lashes
were considered a punishment severe enough for the criminals of
France — men who were notorious for every species of profligacy;
but nothing less than one hundred to one hundred and fifty would
suffice for the meek and holy saints of God. They were considered a
thousand times worse than the worst criminals. It is a striking
feature of the persecutions of Popery that the more holy and Christ-
like her victims, the more dreadfully severe have been the character
of their sufferings ; her war has not been against wickedness, but
heresy, and she could readily tolerate the grossest immorality, so
long as she had no reason to complain of the rejection of her creed.
This is consistent with her true character. Popery is antiChrist, and it
is natural to suppose that the nearer men come to the character of
Christ, the fiercer will be her hatred, and the more bitter her
persecution. Hence the quenchless enmity of Rome for such holy
men as Wickliff and Huss and Jerome, Rogers and Latimer and
Ridley, Le Febvre and Marolles and Mauru. We shall present an
extract or two from the letters of the three last named victims of the
revocation of the edict of Nantes, while suffering under the cruel
inflictions of the papal anti-Christ, to sustain this assertion. § 36. —
Says Le Febvre, when writing from a noisome dungeon, " Nothing
can exceed the cruelty of the treatment I receive. The weaker I
become,- the more they endeavor to aggravate the miseries of the
prison. For several weeks no one has been allowed to enter my
dungeon ; and if one spot could be found where the air was more
infected than another, I was placed there. Yet the love of the truth
prevails in my soul ; for God, who knows my heart, and the purity of
my motives, supports me by his grace. He fights against. me, but he
also fights for me. My weapons are tears and prayers. .... The place
is very dark and damp. The air is noisome, and has a bad smell.
Everything rots and becomes mouldy. The wells and cisterns are
above me. I have never seen a fire here, except the flame of the
candle You will feel for me in this misery," said he to a dear relative,
to whom he was describing his sad condition : " but think of the
eternal weight of glory which will follow. Death is nothing. Christ has
vanquished the foe for me : and when the fit time shall arrive, the
Lord will give me strength to tear off the mask which that last
enemy wears in great afflictions." .... Far be it from me to murmur. I
pray without ceasing, that he would show pity, not only to those who
suffer, but also to those who are the cause of our sufferings. He who
commanded us to love our enemies, produces in our hearts the love
he has com35
 596 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book vm. Marolles and
Pierre Mauru. Heavenly-minded piety in a dungeon and in a galley-
ship. manded. The world has long regarded us as tottering walls ;
but they do not see the Almighty hand by which we are upheld." §
37. — Says Marolles, a minister of eminent piety, and extensive
scientific attainments, in a letter to his wife, after being removed
from a galley to a dungeon, " When I was taken out of the galley
and brought hither, I found the change very agreeable at first. My
ears were no longer offended with the horrid and blasphemous
sounds with which those places continually echo. I had liberty to
sing the praises of God at all times, and could prostrate myself
before him as often as I pleased. Besides, I was released from that
uneasy chain, which was far more troublesome to me than the one
of thirty pounds weight which you saw me wear." He then goes on
to speak of a temptation into which he was permitted to fall — a
distrust of God lest he should lose his reason, and a fear that he was
advancing to a state of insanity — " At length," says he, " after many
prayers, sighs, and tears, the God of my deliverance heard my
petitions, commanded a perfect calm, and dissipated all those
illusions which had so troubled my soul. After the Lord has delivered
me out of so sore a trial, never have any doubt, my dear wife, that
he will deliver me out of all others. Do not, therefore, disquiet
yourself any more about me. Hope always in the goodness of God,
and your hope shall not be in vain. I ought not, in my opinion, to
pass by unnoticed a considerable circumstance which tends to the
glory of God. The duration of so great a temptation was, in my
opinion, the proper time for the Old Serpent to endeavor to cast me
into rebellion and infidelity ; but God always kept him in so profound
a silence, that he never once offered to infest me with any of his
pernicious counsels ; and I never felt the least inclination to revolt.
Ever since those sorrowful days. God has continually filed my heart
with joy. 1 possess my soul in patience. He makes the days of my
affliction speedily pass away. I have no sooner begun them than I
find myself at the end. With the bread and water of affliction he
affords me continually most delicious repasts." This was his last
letter. He resigned his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father on
the 17th June, 1692. § 38. — The next example of suffering piety,
from whom I shall quote, was of one who wrote from amidst the
slavery and suffering and horrors of the galleys. Says Pierre Mauru,
after referring to the cruel stripes he was forced to bear, from twenty
to forty at a time, and these repeated frequently for several days in
succession. " But I must tell you, that though these stripes are
painful, the joy of suffering for Christ gives ease to every wound ;
and when, after we have suffered for him, the consolations of Christ
abound in us by the Holy Spirit, the Comforter : they are a heavenly
balm, which heals all our sorrows, and even imparts such perfect
health to our souls, that we can despise every other thing. In short.
when we belong to God, nothing can pluck us out of his hand If my
body was tortured during the day, my soul rejoiced exceedingly in
God my Saviour, both day and night. At this period
 CHAP, v.] POPERY DRUNK WITH THE BLOOD OF SAINTS.
597 Cruel scourging of Pierre Mauru 011 board the galleys. The faith
and the patience of the saints especially, my soul was fed with
hidden manna, and I tasted of that joy which the world knows not
of; and daily, with the holy apostles, my heart leaped with joy that I
was counted worthy to suffer for my Saviour's sake, who poured
such consolations into my soul that I was filled with holy transport,
and, as it were, carried out of myself. .... But this season of quiet
was of short duration ; for soon afterwards the galley was furnished
with oars to exercise the new-comers ; and then these inexorable
haters of our blessed religion took the opportunity to beat me as
often as they pleased, telling me it was in my power to avoid these
torments. But when they held this language, my Saviour revealed to
my soul the agonies he suffered to purchase my salvation, and that
it became me thus to suffer with him. After this, we were ordered to
sea, when the excessive toil of rowing, and the blows I received,
often brought me to the brink of the grave. Whenever the chaplain
saw me sinking with fatigue, he beset me with temptations ; but my
soul was bound for the heavenly shore, and he gained nothing from
my answers In every voyage there were many persons whose
greatest amusement was to see me incessantly beaten, but
particularly the captain's steward, who called it painting Calvin's
back, and insultingly asked if Calvin gave me strength to work after
being so finely bruised ; and when he wished the beating to be
repeated, he would ask if Calvin was not to have his portion again.
When he saw me sinking from day to day under cruelties and
fatigue, his happiness was complete. The officers, who were anxious
to please him, had recourse to this inhuman sport for his
entertainment, during which he was constantly convulsed with
laughter. When he saw me raise my eyes to heaven, he said, ' God
does not hear Calvinists when they pray. They must endure their
tortures till they die, or change their religion.' .... In short, my very
dear brother, there was not a single day, when we were at sea, and
toiling at the oar, but I was brought into a dying state. The poor
wretched creatures who were near me did everything in their power
to help me, and to make me take a little nourishment. But in the
depth of distress, which nature could hardly endure, my God left me
not without support. In a short time all will be over, and I shall
forget all my sorrows in the joy of being ever with the Lord. Indeed,
whenever I was left in peace a little while, and was able to meditate
on the words of eternal life, I was perfectly happy ; and when I
looked at my wounded body, I said, here are the glorious marks
which St. Paul rejoiced to bear in his body. After every voyage I fell
sick ; and then, being free from hard labor and the fear of blows, I
could meditate in quiet, and render thanks to God for sustaining me
by his goodness, and strengthening me by his good Spirit." Here is
the faith and the patience of the saints. Is it possible to conceive of
suffering borne in a holier cause or in a more Christ-like spirit? § 39.
— It would be an endless task to recount all the inventions of popish
ingenuity to harass and to wear out these saints of the
 598 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book vm. Fiendish cruelty to
u mother and babe. The Pope's thanks to Louis for thus persecuting
the heretics. Most High. One which could not have been conceived
anywhere else but in the bottomless pit and in the heart of a fiend,
deserves to be mentioned. On January 23d, 1085, a woman had her
sucking child snatched from her breasts, and put into the next room,
which was only parted by a few boards from her's. These devils
incarnate would not let the poor mother come to her child, unless
she would renounce her religion and become a Roman Catholic. Her
child cries and she cries ; her bowels yearn upon the poor miserable
infant ; but the fear of God, and of losing her soul, keep her from
apostasy. However she suffers a double martyrdom, one in her own
person, the other in that of her sweet babe, who dies in her hearing
with crying and famine before its poor mother. The heart sickens at
the contemplation of such enormities. Human language cannot
describe the sufferings of these oppressed victims of popish cruelty.
It is only the Spirit of God who can mark the terrible lineaments, and
he does so when he speaks of " wearing out the saints of the Most
High," and of anti-Christ being " drunk with the blood of the saints,"
and of their blood crying from under the altar, " O Lord, holy and
true, how long dost thou not judge and avenge our blood upon them
that dwell on the earth ?" and when he speaks of similar worthies as
persons " who were stoned, were sawn asunder, were tempted,
were slain with the sword : they wandered about in sheep-skins and
goat-skins ; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world
was not worthy) : they wrandered in deserts and in mountains, and
in dens and caves of the earth."* § 40. — Let the reader carefully
consider the above affecting and authentic instances of suffering for
Christ's sake, and then let him read the following language of pope
Innocent XL, in praise of the popish bigot, by whose orders they
were inflicted. This Pontiff wrote a special letter to king Louis,
expressly thanking him in the warmest and most plowing terms for
the service he had rendered the church in this persecuting edict
against the heretics of France. The Pope requests him to consider
this letter a special testimony to his merits, and concludes it in the
following words : — " The Catholic Church shall most assuredly
record in her sacred annals a ivork of such devotion toward her, and
celebrate your name with never-dying fraises ; but, above all, you
may most assuredly promise to yourself an ample retribution from
the divine goodness for this most excellent undertaking, and may
rest assured that we shall never cease to pour forth our most
earnest prayers to that Divine goodness for this intent and purpose."
Thus evident is it net only that the acknowledged head of the
apostate church of Rome approved of the horrid barbarities inflicted
upon the French protestants, but that he regarded their perpetrator
as conferring a special favor upon that church, thus entitling himself
to her lasting gratitude and her warmest thanks. * Lorimer's
Protestant Church of France, chap, iv.
 BOOK IX. POPERY IN ITS DOTAGE I ROM THE B
EVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES, A. D. 1685, TO THE
PRESENT TIME, A. D. 1845. CHAPTER I. THE JESUITS. THEIR
MISSIONS. THEIR SUPPRESSION, REVIVAL, AND PRESENT
POSITION. § 1. — The eighteenth century was chiefly distinguished
by events connected with the history and proceedings of that crafty
and dangerous order, the Jesuits ; their missionary efforts to extend
the dominion of the papacy in China and other oriental countries,
and the disputes which arose relative to their practice of
amalgamating heathen with Christian rites ; their protracted and
fierce contests with the rival sect of the Jansenists ; their
banishment from the various kingdoms of Europe, and the final
suppression of the order by pope Clement XIV. in 1773. Before
describing the controversy which arose in this century relative to the
missionary operations of the Jesuits in China, it may be necessary
briefly to refer to the origin of those missions. The missionary efforts
of the Jesuits commenced immediately after the establishment of
that order: in 1541. Francis Xavier, who appears to have been a man
of fervent piety, free from the trickery and worldly policy that
afterwards distinguished his order, and who by his zeal and success
obtained the name of " the apostle of Indians," sailed for India,
where he was successful in converting thousands to the Romish
faith. In 1549, he visited Japan, where he laid the foundations of a
branch of the Romish church, which in after years is said to have
consisted of two or three hundred thousand members. From Japan,
with a zeal and self-devotion worthy of a purer faith, Xavier sailed
for China, but died when in sight of that populous empire, in 1552.
Subsequently to his death, Matthew Ricci penetrated into China,
recommended himself to the favor of the nobility and Emperor by his
skill in mathematics, and succeeded in planting the Romish faith in
Pekin, the capital, where he died in
 6Q0 HISTORY OF ROMANISM. [book ix. Policy of the Jesuit
missionaries. " All things to all men." Their shameful conformity to
heathenism. 1610. Other Jesuit missionaries, in process of time,
extended the spiritual dominion of the Pope and their order into
Malabar, Abyssinia, and other countries, and especially into South
America, where they succeeded in reducing whole nations of Indians
to their swav. In 1622, was established at Rome, by pope Gregory
XV., the Congregation for propagating the faith (l)e Propaganda
Fide), a body of cardinals, priests, &c, whose special duty it is to
devise means for propagating the Romish faith throughout the world
; and in 1627, the College De Propaganda Fide, in which young men
of all nations are educated as Romish missionaries ; and in 1663, the
kindred institution in France, called " the Congregation of the priests
of foreign missions." From these institutions hundreds of Jesuits
were sent forth to reduce the nations of the world to the obedience
of the Pope. § 2. — In accomplishing this object the Jesuits early
adopted the principle that the end sanctifies the means, and
scrupled at no measures to entrap the people to the nominal
profession of Christianity. In the words of an eloquent living writer, "
The motto and device in one of their earlier histories was well
illustrated in their conduct. That device was a mirror, and the
superscription was ' Omnia omnibus,' All things to all men. But what
in Paul was Christian courtesy, leaning on inflexible principle ; and
what in Loyola himself was probably wisdom, but slightly tinged with
unwarrantable policy, became, in some of his disciples, the laxest
casuistry, chameleon-like, shifting its hues to every varying shade of
interest or fashion. " The gospel is to be presented with no needless
offence given to the prejudices and habits of the heathen, but the
gospel itself is never to be mutilated or disguised ; nor is the
ministry ever to stoop to compliances in themselves sinful. The
Jesuit mistook or forgot this. From a very early period, the order
were famed for the art with which they studied to accommodate
themselves and their religion to the tastes of the nation they would
evangelize. Ricci, on entering China, found the bonzes, the priests of
the nation ; and to secure respect, himself and his associates
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