While reading the collection of articles Femmes en fleurs, Femmes en corps, the mediaeval Roman de la Rose almost inevitably comes to mind. This allegorical poem describes a lover’s quest for the Rose, which not only symbolises the love of a lady but also the lady embodied – ‘en corps’ to quote the title of this book – who is the living object of his desire. In Jean de Meun’s continuation of the poem, the quest for sexual satisfaction is unmistakable. At the very end, Amor conquers the tower that houses the beautiful red Rose, Shame and Dread flee and the flower is plucked. None of the authors in Femmes en fleurs mention the poem, which was tremendously popular far into the Early Modern Period, but all its possible pre-modern connotations come up for discussion in this beautifully edited book.
The editors must have asked the individual authors to read each other’s work over and again in order to incorporate each other’s conclusions into their own argumentation. As a result, the general picture of an ongoing curtailment of the female body and its freedom of movement from the fifteenth century onwards could be refined and justifiably readjusted. It is of equal importance that Anglo-Saxon and French scholarship met in the joint project that produced this book – half of the authors are English/American and half are French. This resulted in fruitful new insights and pointed to new types of sources for research that may also be available for countries other than pre-modern France. Those who want to use this book should be proficient in French. It took me a while to realise that ‘l’histoiregenrée’ meant gender history, to mention one of the less difficult language intricacies. An English translation would therefore appear worthwhile, particularly because although all of the articles discuss female body issues, not to say women’s complaints, figuring within the present French borders, its conclusions bear a far wider purport.
The agents of this book are the various connotations of ‘Fleur’, such as menstruation (blood), virginity, rape, female bloom and beauty, the sexual act, conception, pregnancy, giving birth, barrenness and menopause, and each phase or event, including the physical details, is discussed together with its consequences and implications. This poses the question of whether the metaphorical reminiscences of ‘fleurs’ did not determine the content of the book too much. The answer would seem to be negative: I carried out a quick investigation and it turned out that in my own mother tongue, Dutch, the same implications of rose, bloom, flower etc were current. Twelve case studies are presented under the headings of, I. ‘Preserver sa fleur’ (keeping her bloom), II. ‘Fleurir’ (flowering) and III. ‘Perdresa fleur’ (losing her bloom), which combine a thorough study of many original sources with a sophisticated handling of gender concepts and an in-depth knowledge of past political, scientific and literary developments; for example, Laurence Moulinier-Brogi shows that uroscopy availed itself of detailed gender differences. Nicole Pellegrin surprisingly deals with the bleeding of nuns as a variation on stigmata. Helen King shows the ideas the learned physician Jacques Dubois and royal mistress Diane de Poitiers shared on getting pregnant, whereas Eugenie Pascal has combed through the letters of princesses and found out that they dreaded giving birth.
To which conclusions does reading this anthology lead? First, that things are less simple, more varied and even more ambivalent than historical authors during the second wave of the Feminist Movement and its aftermath advocated. If one listens carefully, the woman’s voice is more clearly audible, and independent agency is revealed, also in cases of unwanted childlessness and even in court cases on violation and paternity claims. Second, in the awareness that their topic goes to the heart of the physical matter in cases of involuntary penetration, menstruation and giving birth, the authors keep a careful distance from the predominant cultural constructivism. Third, the opinion of an American male author darts through the pages, although he is not that often explicitly mentioned: he is, of course, Thomas Laqueur. Femmes en fleurs furnishes several convincing emasculations of the Two-Sex Model, even though most articles in this book seem to have been written before the publication of Katherine Park’s corrective Secrets of Women.
