دانلود کتاب Le voile de poppée: Les ambiguïtés de la pudeur dans le discours médical (1570–1620)

In his Remarques sur la langue française, published in 1647, Vaugelas celebrates the consecration of the term “pudeur” (modesty or decency) as the fortunate remedy for a gap in the French language. In a vision that would become widespread, the past is suspected of having misrecognized the value of pudeur. An entire critical tradition is resolutely enshrined in this “classical” representation of the sixteenth century, born of the seventeenth century's desire to distinguish itself from a period condemned by its moral and linguistic impurity. It is this representation that I would like to call into question. The pudeurs of the century that invented the word and the obscenity they warded off are ripe for rediscovery. In the first chapter, I therefore focussed on showing how the tension between hiding and showing—which is the constitutive paradox of modesty—informs a variety of representations, in a cultural context which codifies in a very specific way the rules of civility. In the second chapter, a detailed semantic analysis enabled me to establish the overlapping of the notions of “honte” (shame) and “pudeur” (modesty) in a Christian ideological framework, and to make out the traces of an older confusion reenacted by the philological humanism. This is the context in which the word “pudeur” was invented. Finally, the analysis of a corpus of medical texts by Ambroise Paré, Laurent Joubert and Jacques Ferrand, written in vernacular between 1570 and 1620, and all of them editorial scandals, enabled me to concentrate on the practices of censorship and on the difficulties of medical prose, when dealing with issues related to sexuality. Indeed, medical French, which infringes upon the monopoly of Latin as a scientific language, is in the process of inventing itself. In addition, French is accused of revealing the secrets of the body not only to specialists but to a broader audience, and particularly to women.

The conceptual, generical and rhetorical reversibility of modesty was the outcome of this research. The phenomenological ambiguity of the notion of “pudeur”, which conceals to better reveal and eroticize, reflects on writing and reading practices.