I am at the beginning of a personal research taking place within a Sinergia project of FNS (Swiss National Research Foundation), “Lactation in history: a cross-cultural research on suckling practices, representations of breastfeeding and politics of maternity in a European context”[1].

This project aims to investigate lactation as a complex historical and bio-cultural reality, engendering social and symbolic constructions. It explores how suckling developed and evolved in discourses, representations and practices, from Antiquity to the present day. The research team is organized in four subgroups, set out according to chronology and disciplinary fields and led by a team of specialists from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, literature, history, medical history, history of religion and art history.

Beyond this strong diachronic frame, each subproject concentrates on a specific theme relevant to the future collaborative work and will generate inputs to be discussed and integrated into the general design. I am a part of the subproject, “Nutrition, education and health: maternal milk between cultural norms and social practices (1500-1900)”, which includes medical historians, cultural and social historians and art historians. This group covers the early modern period and focuses on maternal milk conceived as a vehicle of both physical and moral health; as a variable affecting collective and individual identities; as a cultural image used to characterize learning or transmission or as a representation of symbolic or spiritual filiation.

II. Research interests

Since I joined this project only a few months ago, I am still at the beginning of my reflection, so my subject is in a very preliminary state of research. My personal interests are focused on the feminine body and the religious and moral constructions of it in both public and domestic spaces during Renaissance and Reformation.

I would like to see how specific relations, and thus specific representations of the feminine body are built through the instruction of girls, brides and housewives, and how, in this impulse, a symbolical pattern of a “maternal body” in the moral and social rules for women can be studied.

My work is a continuation of  my master’s dissertation, entitled “Éducation des filles et modèles de comportement pour les femmes au XVIème siècle: Eustorg de Beaulieu et Marie Dentière, deux visions réformées sur la question féminine”, in which I studied the impact of the confessional conflict on attitudes towards women’s education. From this point of view I considered behavioural models which were offered to women both by some women and by men involved in religious “propaganda” during the age of the Reformation – I especially studied Marie Dentière, who preached in Geneva before the arrival of Calvin, and Eustorg de Beaulieu, a French poet, musician, and reformed pastor for a while in Switzerland, who wrote a treatise for girls mainly focusing on the spiritual discipline of the body, called L’Espinglier des filles.

Strategies of publishing are moreover important in the matter of pedagogical writings and moral handbooks. My PhD thesis will take a wider angle on a perspective that was approached in my master’s dissertation and will continue my first analysis.

III. Methodological perspectives

My eventual intention is to look at the interaction between representation and practices, but for the first part of my future research, my emphasis concerns the literary context. I am focusing on printings from the end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth century and want to see which kinds of behavioural models are suggested or proposed to girls and women. In doing so, I also ask how authors construct and represent the feminine body as a “social body” and attempt to reorient its images and ideas of maternal functions in a society undergoing strong transformations: from the Renaissance onwards, the question of women takes shape through debates in the fields of literature, medicine and philosophy. Moreover, the beginnings of the Reformation and the religious conflict had a strong impact on these questions and influenced the positions taken by some authors. Besides, the question of defining marriage became important on a theological level.

In the historiographical perspective, the history of women’s education has been a concern since the 1950s. In the context of Renaissance studies the court was proposed as a cultural model. The first impressive study on women’s behaviour was the pioneer book Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, whose author, Ruth Kelso, looked at women’s models of the court and asked how the establishment of the courtesan took place[2].

In French research, studies on the literary representations of women and female rules were developed from the 1980s onwards, thanks to Women’s studies. In 1990, Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore analysed Renaissance discourses for the different conditions of women’s lives[3]. Almost at the same time, Sarah Matthews Grieco researched contemporary representations of women and the question of female virtues and vices, analysing the emblem literature and iconographical representations in print[4].

Other studies can also be mentioned, such as that of Pamela Benson and notably Constance Jordan[5]. Moreover, Gabriella Zarri laid a stone in the field of behavioural analysis by writing about spiritual rules for girls in Italy and about the impact of the Tridentine reform on the spiritual models and norms for women’s life[6]. More recently, printing in the Flemish and Spanish contexts in the end of the sixteenth century was studied in a collective volume on editorial practices in the Netherlands[7]. In the field of Reformation studies, Cornelia Niekus Moore analysed reading material for German girls[8]. Many important studies evaluated the impact of the Reformation on women’s life in England and Germany[9]. Yet a proper analysis of behavioural and religious models for women in the French-speaking territories (France and Switzerland) in the Reformation and in the confessional conflicts is considered a desideratum. My goal is to focus on the confessional reorientation of the humanists’ approach to behavioural models for women, and to ask how the Protestant authors represent maternal function and duties. Moreover, I also want to look at the same themes as presented in the Catholics’ literary production for women in the years of the religious troubles.

For the moment, I inventoried texts from approximately 1488 to 1589. The first date represents the publication of the first prints addressed to wives, as, for instance, Le doctrinal des femmes mariees (ca 1488)[10]. Some years later, in 1497, the first book written by a woman, Christine de Pizan[11], is published in Paris. 1589 is the date of Catherine de Médicis’ death. According to the studies of Fanny Cosandey and Denis Crouzet, the experience of this queen represents the first coherent and significant establishment of a political function of maternity, with some very important implications both for court practices and for debates regarding the royal authority and the state[12].

Regarding the corpus, my priority is on for prints in French vernacular language and French translations. I am interested in normative discourses and in representations of society more than in the intellectual debates, even though the latter have their importance in the construction of theories about women, gender relations, natural law and human generation. As I would like to find out what was addressed to women, who typically didn’t learn Latin, French treaties and books seem more relevant. But in any case, the French court is an interesting place to study discourses about the social function of maternity in the spaces of confessional confrontation and representations of the maternal body in political and ecclesiastical debates influencing the French-speaking areas.

I plan to pay most attention to rules addressed to girls, mothers and widows, though I will also include other texts offering a comparative perspective, such as political treatises, chronicles and historical works, literary collections of women’s lives, or medical literature, such as treatises on paediatrics.

IV. Political and religious construction of the maternal body

A widely shared point of normative literature is that a woman needs to be a mother, both as a spiritual or biological “reality”, to be entirely considered a woman. If she does not live a religious life, virginity is thus only a “preparatory” step towards maternity. In other words, good virginity is really a preparation for the maternal body; a good mother was necessarily previously a virgin. However, given that I am interested in physical rather than spiritual maternity, I am not going to dwell on consecrated virginity of nuns. Studies on consecrated virginity and debates criticizing monastic vows will rather be a point of departure for me, widening the approach beyond the appeal to lay women, who were the object of the confrontation between the set models of Catholic and Protestant printed literature.

The normative literature for women is generally inspired by a hierarchical vision of gender relations. Therefore, sixteenth-century portraits of “femininity” draw upon a rich and long tradition of debates about the nature of women – among them the “Quarrel of the women”, an important literary and philosophical controversy. This debate, which goes back to the late Middle Ages (the interventions of Christine de Pizan have an essential and founding role), became a literary commonplace, but also gained new popularity in the sixteenth century. At the time, authors increasingly tried to define the best models of feminine behaviour, and occasionally sought to impose them.

Where the definition of the maternal body and of maternal duties is concerned, we can not only analyse the reorientation of tradition in terms of tools and literary genres, but also the use of ancient authors, namely sources that are used in the tradition of spiritual instruction. At this point, I cannot present an overview, but I can give an example from the books of Eustorg de Beaulieu, the Protestant author that I studied in my master’s dissertation.

Eustorg de Beaulieu[13] (Beaulieu, France, 1495/1505? – Basel, 1552) has been little studied so far[14]. He served several functions – those of organist, priest and poet, musician and reformed minister are commonly accepted. But a role so far forgotten – or not even considered – by most researchers interested in him is that of pedagogue, which he exercised towards the end of his life, and of an author of moral – or even spiritual – pedagogy. This appears in his treaty L’Espinglier des filles, published for the first time in 1548 (second in 1550 in Basel and third posthumous in 1565 in Lyon, with some modifications and a different title: La doctrine et instruction des filles chrestiennes, desirans vivre selon la parole de Dieu, Par Hector de Beaulieu. Avec la repentance de l’homme pecheur)[15]. He had already positioned himself as a teacher in another print published two years before the first edition of his treaty, namely the 1546 Chrestienne Resjouyssance.

After his conversion to the Reform, in 1536/37, Beaulieu used several strategies of popular religious propaganda, such as the use of vernacular language and the adaptation of different genres. For instance, he transformed older poems and profane songs into religious or polemical songs, using the popular melodies for new content. This “conversion” of popular and profane texts into religious ones, could in a way be compared to the conversion of the author himself to the Reformation.

L’Espinglier des filles is thus at the crossroads of several perspectives of reorientation influenced by the Reformation: a poetic and literary one, a humanist one, and even a reorientation of sources – references to ancient authors that can be found in humanist instruction books are replaced by biblical examples. In fact, to legitimate his discourse, Eustorg de Beaulieu employed only biblical sources, which gave his treaty an aspect of a spiritual guide for “good Christian” (i.e. Protestant) girls, namely a guide that could help them to find the right behavioural models in the Bible. It is thus a text based on different models, reoriented to fit with the goals of the author, guiding a young woman into a good spiritual life, and instructing her on how to conduct and how to use the parts of her body.

The choice Eustorg de Beaulieu made for the form of his treaty is interesting and quite original in that it directly links instruction to the entire feminine body. The concept of discipline is already implied in the title, since L’Espinglier means the pin used by women to close a shawl to cover their chest. The control and the rules of the body are inextricably connected to the religious instruction given to girls.

V. Conclusion

Altogether, I plan to look at the stakes in the construction of representations of the maternal body. How do the texts propose to act? How is a mother supposed to prepare her own daughter to be a mother in turn? How do authors attempt to prepare young women to be mothers? How can we say that the body itself is maternal? How should it be presented?

I would like to verify if and how the orientation of the authors is influenced by the religious debates. Some of them, as Eustorg de Beaulieu, use humanism and/or ancient traditions to establish their theological orientation. Another interesting point is the impact of this reorientation on public life: we know the importance of the appeal to women as part of confessional confrontation, and of women’s participation in the religious troubles in France, but what are the modes of appeal to mothers at times of the Reformation, and in the Church context?

Literary transformations are thus an important part of my reflexion. Eustorg de Beaulieu is the example that I can present at the current state, but I would like to approach the other sources in the same way.

CC-BY-NC-ND The political and religious construction of the “maternal body” in the Renaissance and the impact of the Reformation: norms, rules and literary models in the French-vernacular books for women, 1488-1589. by Jade Sercomanens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.