Welcome to Healthy Woman and Her Body in Writing.

This website is part of a larger research project into how the female body was written about in historical gynaecological texts from 1532 – 1785 in Western Europe. Compared to the male body, the female body has long been a source of anxiety and preoccupations in printed texts. It has been conceptualised as being more complex, more detailed and more prone to various affiliations and maladies in medical writings dating from early Classical traditions, and especially in the Early Modern era of Western Europe on which we focus.

This research has been divided into eight themes that we identify in the primary literature. We also researched the sources themselves as objects of medical history.

This site is the complement to our Masters’ thesis, “Healthy Woman and Her Body in Writing”, which was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master in Rare Book and Digital Humanities of the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in August, 2023. For access to this paper, you can find our details here.

---

By clicking on any of these sections, you can discover and interact with the textual content pertaining to each theme or discover the primary sources we consulted.