ABSTRACT
The chapter aims to validate this crucial, life-saving mission by comparing Boursier's literary choices with those of Rabelais and with the classical influences that informed them both. Rabelais's first dramatization of labor and delivery stories is significant for what is to be gleaned about midwives and fathers at royal births. The birth of Gargantua is such a "staging" of misogyny. Cathy Hampton's work on what she calls the exemplarity of the case studies, or "body stories", is similarly concerned with gynecological politics and the importance of gender as evidenced in Boursier's work. The comic tension that is established by juxtaposing Rabelais's practical gynecological knowledge with the absurdity of this aural birth is further played out in the misogynistic trope of the incompetent midwives, established as we saw earlier in Pantagruel. The juxtaposition of texts interrogate participates in a recent burgeoning of scholarship over the last decade that has investigated the disputes between male and female medical practitioners of the period.
