Éros médical. Le périple anatomique de René Bretonnayau (1583)

In the. Renaissance, it is only the biological use of the games of Venus which seemed to give the right to practice them or to discuss them in vernacular in medical treaties. But the enjoyment of the text, much like sexual pleasure, can be liberated from its function leading us to enjoy these medical treaties for themselves or for immodest purposes, and not for the information or knowledge they contain. We propose to examine a corpus of French medical texts from the 16th and early 17th centuries (Joubert, Cabrol, Ferrand, Duval) in this way. These texts mark a decisive step in the history of the emergence of a vernacular medical knowledge discussing such delicate subjects as gynecology and reproduction. This literature shows and exalts the complicity of knowledge and desire. It dresses up sexual possession as medical observation, expressing the ethereal image of the Plato's Symposium, in which love guides the soul towards science, on a much more Rabelaisian mode.