Pregnancy and Childbirth Pregnancy and Childbirth Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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This woodcut image by Jacob Rueff, in De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt, 1580) shows a laboring woman assisted by a midwife. By permission of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Preparations During Pregnancy

In the early modern era, women normally bore between six and ten children, but sometimes many more. Despite its frequency, pregnancy was seldom confirmed until the child quickened or began to move in utero. Throughout the era, women prepared for childbirth by preparing a lying-in chamber (a separate room that could be kept warm and dimly-lit during their labor). They also gathered childbed linens for the birth and for swaddling the newborn infant. It was common to ask help from friends, relatives, or neighbour women. These women were called gossips( a contraction of god-siblings’) and they helped to tend the new mother during delivery and the month of recovery common afterwards.

Childbirth

Once labor began, women were typically attended by a midwife and delivered the baby in a seated position using a birthing stool. Only the midwife, who did not have formal training but had a great deal of experience in assisting births, was allowed to examine the woman. The midwife cut the umbilical cord after delivery and swaddled the newborn babe. Only seldom did a male physician attend a woman giving birth. Fathers and husbands often waited just outside the birthing chamber for news. The father and the gossips, without the mother, attended the baptism of the newborn a few days after the birth.

The Curse of Eve

Midwife Jane Sharp’s observed in 1671 in her popular midwifery manual that To conceive with child is the earnest desire if not all yet of most women, nature having put into all a will to effect and produce their like. Some there are who hold conception to be a curse, because God laid it upon Eve for tasting the forbidden fruit, I will greatly multiply thy conception: but forsasmuch as encrease and multiply, was the blessing of God, it is not the conception but the sorrow to bring forth that was laid as a curse. (Sharp 76) This religiously informed attitude towards pregnancy and childbirth was common. Many women repeated similar sentiments in their letters and diaries, although they did lament the pain and suffering of becoming a mother, as well.

Christian scriptures gave women’s natural suffering during childbirth a spiritual framework. In the King James Version, both Genesis 3:16 (in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children) and 1 Timothy 2:15 (Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety) established the message of many early modern texts about childbearing: women suffered during childbirth as repayment for Eve’s sin and their only hope of redemption lay in motherhood combined with virtuous behavior.

Midwifery manuals, which began to be published regularly in English in the 1580s, comment extensively upon women’s behavior. Eucharius Roesselin’s The Birth of Man-Kinde indicates that difficult women may have difficult births, and those who are fearful, divers, waywarde, or such a one that will not be ruled, removing herself from one place to another, all such things causeth the labor to be more painful (Rosselin 100). A woman’s failure to be ruled, in terms of both attitude (if she’s divers or argumentative) and her desire to choose her own physical location (removing herself from one place to another) were thought to affect how easy her labour might be.

Childbirth in Shakespeare’s Plays

In The Winter’s Tale, the newly-delivered Hermione complains that she has been denied child-bed privilege by her jealous husband Leontes, as she is forced to appear in front of the court into th’ open air before/I have got the strength of limit soon after the delivery of her daughter (3.2.103-106). She expected to have but was denied her lying-in.

The grieving Pericles also laments his wife’s difficult and apparently fatal childbirth experience aboard a ship during a storm: A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;/No light, no fire: the unfriendly elements/Forgot thee utterly (3.1.56-57). Shakespeare compounds the pathos of her death by emphasizing her lack of the familiar traditions surrounding childbirth.

Key Print Sources Aughterson, Kate. Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, Constructions of Femininity in England. London: Routledge, 1995. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1999. Moncrief, Kathryn M., and McPherson, Kathryn R., eds. Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Rosselin, Eucharius. The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named The Womans Book. Ed. Elaine Hobby. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Key Online Sources Schwartz, Louis. 17th Century Childbirth: <q>Exquisite torment and infinite grace</q>. The Lancet. Volume 37,Number 9776. 30 April 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60590-4 Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book: Or, the whole art of midwifery discovered. Simon Miller, London, 1671. Ed. Elaine Hobby. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999 https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Midwives_Book/VizP6wtqtQIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22it%20is%20not%20the%20conception%20but%20the%20sorrow%20to%20bring%20forth%20that%20was%20laid%20as%20a%20curse%22&pg=PP1&printsec=frontcover Michel, Michelle. The Birth of mankind: a 16th Century Guide to Pregnancy and Labour. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 31 March 2019. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/birth-mankind-16th-century-guide-pregnancy-and-labour/ 1925,1231.23.