Pregnancy and Giving Birth in Early Modern Europe
Lecturer: Sophie Mann
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the experiences most central to human lives, yet their meanings and management have varied widely across time and place. In this session, we will explore how the maternal body was understood in early modern Europe, paying close attention to the social and cultural settings in which pregnancy and birth occurred. We will also consider how much control or agency women had during these key stages of the life cycle.
Seminar/Essay Questions:
·What ideas and assumptions shaped early modern understandings of women’s bodies during pregnancy and childbirth?
·Did women exercise autonomy in matters of reproduction, or were their bodies subject to increasing surveillance and control?
·How can looking at pregnancy and childbirth help us understand how people thought about women’s bodies more generally in this period?
Required Reading:
- Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (2003). Chapters 4 and 5.
- Ulinka Rublack, “Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany”, Past and Present (1996).
- Please look over this short exchange between two historians who are debating whether women had more agency during pregnancy, birth and post-natal management:
- Laura Gowing’s review of Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (2003) and Bernard Capp’s response: https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Gender/gowing.html
Further Reading:
Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Harvard University Press, 1991).
Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (Routledge, 1993).
Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770 (1995).
Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England”, Past and Present (2000).
Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (2003).
Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (2004).
Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. chs. 3–4.
Sara Read, Birthing Bodies in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2015).
Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Boydell, 2014)
Cathy McClive, Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2015).
Lauren Kassell, “Medical Understandings of the Body c.1500-1750”, in Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, Des, The Routledge History of Sex and the Body 1500 to the Present (2016).
Tanya M. Cassidy and Abdool Karim Vakil, eds., Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2020).
Philippa Carter, “Childbirth, Madness and Bodies in History”, History Workshop Journal (2021).