Being Well, Looking Ill: Childbirth and the Return to Health in seventeenth-century England

Abstract

SummaryFor a month after childbirth, the authors of medical and religious prescriptive literature instructed new mothers to keep to their beds. During this time they were expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. At the end of this month writers considered women ‘well’. Bleeding, in this definition, was commensurate with recovery. This article shows that although in prescriptive material, maternal health was measured according to this process of purging, for early modern middling and upper sort women and their families, the bodily effects of childbearing continued to impede their ability to return to normal household tasks and behaviours long after the ritual month of ‘lying-in’ had ended. Using life-writing, casebooks and vernacular medical literature, this article challenges prevailing notions of what it meant to recover in early modern England, arguing that women’s ‘childing’ or ‘childebed’ narratives only ended when they perceived their bodies to be unaffected by pregnancy and labour.

When a Woman Hates Her Husband: Love, Sex and Fruitful Marriages in Early Modern England

“…54 The restoration of health after childbirth could similarly be stymied by anguish. 55 Bad marriage could waste spouses' health to death. Mary Whitelocke warned her son that being 'unequally yoked' in marriage would make his life not only 'very uncomfortable' but very short because 'sickness will put an end to it'.…”

On “shapelings” and “childlings”: a linguistics approach to the emergence of new cultural borders between the unborn and the new-born child in EME (1500-1700)

“…from 1576 onwards, new terms and word senses for embryos seem to be divided into two stylistic registers: namely, the specialized and the familiar level, the latter being of particular interest in this study. An initial lexical innovation in the specialized field is carried out through borrowing from Latin or french, a predictable move, considering the marked increase experienced in the translation of midwifery and medical books from the late sixteenth-century onwards (Astbury 2017;Glover 2018;Carrillo Linares 2018). As described in the OED, this is the case of feture, embryo and geniture (a term close to conception in french, generally referred to the generation of an animal or plant).…”

“…This would explain the EME late need to lexicalize this experience, establishing a clear-cut stereotype of the ['child' as infant] as a child-in-arms, separate from older children and connected to the human unborn. A stronger awareness that life depended on care −as perceived in diaries, letters, narratives and midwifery books (Spivack 2007;Astbury 2017;Glover 2018)− would explain the strengthening of emotional ties, lexicalized in terms representing both viable embryos and infants as objects of increasing affection and concern.…”

The Routledge History Of Women In Early Modern Europe

“…38 Leah Astbury's work on the return to health for women following childbearing, and how it was understood by women themselves, is a recent exception. 39 Medical and midwifery books, and especially casebooks recording the management of deliveries, provide a vivid, and sometimes horrific, insight into the nature of birth and its potential long-term impact on a woman's life. Casebooks invariably record the more difficult births, which could be narrated in such a way as to demonstrate the particular skills and compassion of a practitioner in order to enhance the development of a reputation, and hence to build up a practice that would generate an assured income.…”