In 1534 Pierre de Sainte Lucie published Jehan Du Pré‘s Le Palais des Nobles Dames in which the treatment of the theme of prodigious births and death in childbirth is of particular interest compared to that of his sixteenth century contemporaries. On the one hand, the author’s religious faith enables him to adopt a sympathetic attitude toward certain aspects of pregnancy such as unusual variations in gestation length. On the other hand, the same faith limits Du Pré‘s critical powers since it prevents him from distinguishing legend from reality. His conception of motherhood is confined to the biological level. Finally, the woodcuts represent midwives still playing a major role in obstetrics in contrast with their growing marginalization by surgeons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Dunn-Lardeau, B., (2025), "Prodigious Births and Death in Childbirth in Le Palais des Nobles Dames, (Lyons, 1534)", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Dunn-Lardeau, Brenda. "Prodigious Births and Death in Childbirth in Le Palais des Nobles Dames, (Lyons, 1534)." Renaissance and Reformation 33 (3): 2010. 43-62. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v33i3.11360. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.