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Prix Chalumeau for Jérôme Laubner's dissertation

An allegory

Graduate of the Doctoral Program in Literary Studies receives Prize in Sexual Sciences.

We congratulate Jérôme Laubner on receiving the "Prix senior Maurice Chalumeau 2022" for his dissertation "Vénus malade, représentations de la vérole et des vérolés dans les discours littéraires et médicaux en France (1495–1633)." The prize is awarded annually by the Centre Maurice Chalumeau en sciences des sexualités in Geneva to a Swiss dissertation in the field of sexual research.

Jérôme wrote his thesis as a cotutelle at the University of Basel and the Sorbonne in Paris and defended it in June of this year. It deals with the representations of a then new venereal disease, the "great pox" (or "syphilis"), which became widespread from the end of the 15th century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines medical history, literary history, gender studies, sexuality studies, and emotion studies, this dissertation offers keys to understanding erotic relationships threatened by pathological transmission then and now, and illuminates the impact of a sexually transmitted disease on an Ancien Régime Christian society. The fascination and revulsion evoked by such a disfiguring disease suggest the extent to which writing about great pox is constantly in tension between the gift and destruction of forms, textual composition and somatic devastation. The paradox is that it ceaselessly constructs in readers the desire to see a heinous disease.

Image: Allegory of the Great Pox taken from the anonymous text "Le Triumphe de treshaulte et puissante Dame Verolle", Lyon, F. Juste, 1539 [BnF]