Abstract
This essay examines a challenge to common literary representations of female mental illness in the Early Modern period—the hysterical woman—in a collection of French short stories contemporary to Vesalius's De Fabrica: Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love (1542). Jeanne Flore's tales depict several mentally disturbed female protagonists, young women prone to paroxysms of madness and self-mutilation. This study maintains that while Tales and Trials of Love superficially participates in the literary tradition that grew out of those accepted social and medical beliefs, it also questions the long-accepted paradigm of female hysteria and points to a shift in the socio-medical climate. Jeanne Flore's fictional narratives suggest that mental illness no longer consists in the realignment of a uterine imbalance, but rather in the telling of personal stories, a precursor to psychoanalysis and narrative medicine.
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Endnotes
1 Ambroise Paré, Deux Livres de chirurgie, (Paris: Weschel, 1573), 225-27. This work has been fully digitized and is freely available through BiuSanté, http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histmed/medica/cote?35181. All translations from this work are my own.
2 Though I focus here on women's mental illness, other scholars do so with regard to men. For example, Mark Micale discusses male hysteria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1995, 161-68).
3 On the stifling of the Renaissance woman's voice, see Mary McKinley: "recent feminist scholars have described the experience of women in early modern Europe as one of enclosure. They portray women as being contained by patriarchal power structures in their homes, in their bodies, and in their speech. A woman's sexual freedom, like her vocal participation in public life, was controlled by the culturally sanctioned dominion that first her father, then her husband had over her" (1993, 146).
4 By frame narratives, I refer to collections of often disparate short stories joined together by the surrounding commentary of their narrators, as in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, and Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love.
5 Although Jeanne Flore now is believed to be a pseudonym, perhaps even for a man or group of men, the book is nonetheless presented as a female-authored text. Thus, I refer to Flore as the author and use feminine pronouns as appropriate. On the production and marketing of female-authored texts at the time, see Leah Chang's Into Print: the Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France (Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2009).
6 George Rousseau calls attention to the link between lovesickness and hysteria in the Middle Ages, conditions he labels as "cousins" and which were believed to affect both women and men (1993, 112).
7 See the Dictionnaire du moyen français (1330-1500), s.v. "besogne." http://www.atilf.fr/dmf.
8 The page numbers in Stallybrass's text refer to Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
9 On the marriage debate among Christian humanist writers, including Erasmus of Rotterdam, François Rabelais, Clément Marot, and Jeanne Flore, see Peebles's introduction to Tales and Trials of Love (34-37).
10 On literary communities in early modern Europe, see Julie Campbell, Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), in particular her "Introduction," (1-19).
11 Early modern bibliotheca, such as the sixteenth-century Bibliothèques of La Croix du Maine and Du Verdier, are enumerative lists surveying authors, genres, and publishing media. Both La Croix du Maine and Du Verdier refer to female-authored texts known by their contemporaries from miscellanies, personal manuscript copies, and intellectual gatherings. Unfortunately, many women writers and their works are now obscured from the historical record due to the ephemeral nature of how they often published (Flore 2014, 4-5).
12 On Louise Labé, see Deborah Lesko Baker's Louise Labé, Complete Poetry and Prose: a bilingual edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
13 The Decameron was enormously popular in Renaissance France, with the first French translation, known as Cent nouvelles (100 Novellas), by the cleric Laurent de Premierfait appearing in 1414. A new translation by Antoine Le Maçon and dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre (sister of the French king Francis I), was printed in 1545. See Renja Salminen's critical edition, Heptaméron (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 676. Marguerite de Navarre's similar collection of over seventy tales was first printed posthumously in 1558, but the project may have begun as early as 1540 (xli-xlii).
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Peebles, K.D. The Head, the Heart, and Hysteria in Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love (c. 1542). J Med Humanit 39, 73–91 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9482-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9482-0