The Gendered Knowledge of Poison in Seventeenth-Century France

Stephanie O'Hara

The Gendered Knowledge of Poison in Seventeenth-Century Paris

In 1679, Paris society was rocked by a scandal known as the Affaire des poisons, in which over four hundred people would be accused of poisoning. There exists a significant body of scholarship on the Affaire and on its precursor, the affair of the poisoner Mme de Brinvilliers, but little is known about other poison cases from that same time period. My current book project, from which this paper is drawn, aims to move beyond the Affaire and elucidate the broader cultural context for poison in seventeenth-century France. Although poison is stereotypically thought of as a woman’s weapon, given women’s greater involvement with the domestic sphere and cooking, and given that men had greater access to and training in weapons, how well does this stereotype hold water? This paper focuses on a selection of literary and non-literary seventeenth-century French texts (plays, pamphlets, medical treatises) in order to analyze how the knowledge of poison and pharmaceutical substances was gendered in these texts.