Quand le silence se fait : bribes de paroles de femmes sur la sexualité au xviie siècle

Abstract

Historians interested in sexuality in the XVIIth century have often noted how difficult it is to find women's voices. Traces remain, however in the spiritual biographies and autobiographies of religious women and in the archives of the ecclesiastical courts. The intermingling of these voices with other discourses - those of men and women of the Church who noted them down, of judges who recorded them - offer little insight into the reality of sexual practices, given how hagiographic and judicial procedures, as well as censureship at times, serve to mute and obscure individual words. Nonetheless, attention to the silences in these tales reveals the importance of ignorance, innocence and dissimulation in women's experiences of sexuality from the fantasies and discoveries of childhood to the early years of marriage.