Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship by Jo Eldridge Carney Page B

ideology of sexual pleasure, and offers women an apparently egalitarian space within it.” Such theories of “equally mingled” seed have suggested parity in the formation of the child as well as in erotic pleasure. Indeed, one popular argument maintained that women would not conceive if they had not experienced pleasure or climax during intercourse. 59 Paster argues that this narrative of conceptual equality is “unduly optimistic” and she offers a counter-narrative in which many early modern theorists “emphasize a gendered assignment of responsibility—and thus potentially a gendered distribution of credit and blame, praise and shame—throughout the extended sequence of reproductive events.” 60 Paster’s view of the gendered system of “credit and blame” of reproduction illuminates the plight of fairytale and early modern queens who struggled to conceive and sustain a pregnancy and normal delivery. Particularly in the case of the monarchy, a king would take credit for siring a healthy heir, but reproductive failures were invariably blamed on the queen’s body.
    The mole was one familiar manifestation of a reproductive failure. Variously described as a stunted embryo, a tumorous mass, or a “misshapen piece of flesh without figure or order” 61 that either floated freely in the womb or was attached to the uterine wall until it was expelled or extracted, the mole was seen as the result of an incomplete or “unprofitable” mixture of the male and female seed. The primary reasons for this insufficient comingling were intercourse during menstruation or the presence of female seed that exceeded the male’s share in amount and quality. In his  Child-birth, or The Happy Deliverie of Women  (1612) Jacques Guillemeau, the son-in-law of Ambroise Paré, represented popular opinion that coition during menstruation could lead to defective offspring: “The true Mole is fleshy, being nothing else but an unprofitable masse, without shape or form...fleshy Moles [are] bred when the mans seede is weake, barren, imperfect...and for the most part choked through the abundance of the menstruous bloud, which is grosse and thicke.” 62 Any acknowledgement that the male’s contribution to successful conception was lacking—“weake, barren, imperfect”—is abruptly countered by the blame ascribed to the suffocating, overpowering activity of the female body.
    Jane Sharp also addresses “the Mole or Moon-Calf” and concurs that intercourse during a women’s menstrual cycle will result in a mole: “It proceeds from a fault in the forming faculty, when the mans seed in Copulation is weak or defective or too little, so that it is overcome by the much quantity of the woman’s blood.” 63 The language used to describe the behavior of the menstrual body—the man’s seed is “choked” or “overcome” by unruly female blood—suggests threat and imbalance. Sharp considers other causes that result in the production of moles, but it is primarily women’s carnal relations during their “terms...from whence Moles, and Monsters, distorted, imperfect, ill qualified Children are begotten.” 64
    An even greater threat from the female body—rampant sexual desire—could also produce moles or aberrant forms. This corroborates the more generalized monster-birth theories that blame pregnant women for excessive or inappropriate longings. Jacob Rueff’s influential treatise, published in German and Latin in 1554 and translated into English in 1637 as  The Expert Midwife,  recognizes that various conditions can produce moles, but the primary cause, Rueff claims,
    “especially in those women which are somewhat more  lascivious  than others...by  desire of the Matrix , doe stirre up copious seede of their owne, which augmented with the flowers, by the heat of the Matrix, is congealed together, and by the defect and want of mans seed, the proper worke-man and contriver of it, doth grow together into such a lump.” 65 (ital.