Choix de vie, fécondités et procréation en question dans l’Occident chrétien, des origines au xviie siècle

Abstract

While the issues surrounding the different forms of procreation and the "right to the child" are still the subject of violent controversy, another debate today concerns the legitimacy, for both women and men, to envisage a life “childfree” or “childless”, which would nevertheless be fruitful on other levels. We see denounced, particularly, the secular constraints that would have weighed on couples, and, above all, on women, so that the process of reproduction ensured, cost what it may. In the West, the responsibility would fall on the Churches, which, addressing themselves, mainly to women, would have always conveyed the idea that they must give birth in order to be accomplished Christians. As gender studies begin to take hold of the subject, taking as its main field of investigation the most recent decades, it seems appropriate to re-examine the question also for earlier periods. Did the divine injunction to procreate, addressed to the first couple at the beginning of Genesis, retain all its force in the elaboration of the New Testament texts, and then of the later Christian tradition ? Didn’t the Christian churches invent other priorities ? After a brief reminder of the positioning of the founding texts on these subjects and the examination of their evolution during the first centuries of Christianity, we will observe how these questions are treated in the Catholic Church of the 17th century, just before the changes in mentality that will appear at the end of the “Ancien Régime”. We will try to alternate female voices and male discourses at the heart of a debate that, finally, questions above all the role of women in the economy of salvation.

Keywords

• Procreation
• Gender
• Women
• Vocations
• Life choices