8 juin 2022
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Nadia Maria Filippini, « Corpo e maternità », Publications de l’École française de Rome, ID : 10.4000/books.efr.36332
Italian and French women historians have been the first in Europe to launch a research project about bodily maternity. This issue was deeply connected with the political thinking and claims of Feminism. It could not be otherwise, as maternity not only crosses women’s personal and social biography but also constitutes the cultural power that determines both the representation of femininity and its control. The symbolic value of this representation is crucial especially in the Catholic world. To take on the issue of the “fertile body”, of its pregnancy and delivery has brought to the dismantling of the disciplinary boundaries among anthropology, legal sociology and the history of medicine; it has created new categories and instruments and challenged the chronology borrowed from history. In this respect, the research on maternity has contributed to renovate both the contents and the methodology of traditional historiography. This paper aims to retrace the research itineraries of the last 20 years, by emphasizing the most innovative issues, the research paths, the European networks and the new questions on the floor.