Gendered Theologies of Childbirth in Early Modern Germany and the Devotional Handbook for Pregnant Women by Aemilie Juliane, Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1683)

Abstract

While most devotional texts created by (male) theologians and pas tors for pregnant women to recite daily and during labor in early modern Lutheran Germany probably augmented women's fears about childbirth and perhaps even enhanced their physical suffering in the name of spiritual "improvement," the texts one woman supplied had a very different tone and likely a different effect. Aemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637-1706) replaced the female persona men manufactured with a woman's own voice, and in so doing, she replaced a latently misogynistic, patriarchal theology in the context of childbirth with a practical theology of maternal empathy. Close reading of Aemilie Juliane's texts in her devotional handbook for pregnant women and comparison with those authored by men illuminate the gendered nature of the orthodox theological approach to pregnancy and childbirth and make a quietly dissenting (female) voice better known to historians.

Pregnancy and Childbirth

“…The Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt's handbook for pregnant women (1683), for example, included prayers in which God to delivered pregnant women from 'fear, terror, anxiety, and suffering' rather than punishing them. 10 These negative emotions could even offer personal agency to mothers. Seventeenth-century providential thinking linked danger to deliverance and thus for women such as Alice Thornton, an English gentlewoman, the fear of pain was reconceptualised as a test of faith.…”