ABSTRACT
The medical treatises published in late sixteenth-century France and Switzerland offer a clear indication of the significant shift being prepared in the medical profession from reliance on classical sources to more empirical methods of inquiry; those treatises on sex, sexuality, and childbearing show that these shifts are significant for the early modern elaboration of sexual difference and of gender roles. Publishing in France was dominated by the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne, the prime censoring body in this period, which also dictated the teaching of medicine, as the faculty of medicine was subordinated to the faculty of theology. The Sorbonne vehemently, and sometimes violently, advocated Aristotelian and Thomistic thought over any other. But, by the end of the sixteenth century, the control the Sorbonne wielded was slipping: a number of influential surgeons such as Ambroise Paré and Jacques Duval published treatises that either subtly or openly called into question its conservative approaches. More progressive universities such as Basel and Montpellier supported faculty (Caspar Bauhin at Basel) and produced students (François Rabelais) who published innovative works on sex and sexuality. The following chapters, on medical treatises in Continental Europe, will trace this shift from scholastic and rigidly categorical discussions of sex to more skeptical and flexible presentations of sexual difference.
