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 Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

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

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Childbirth Science Medicine Midwifery Published file. Updated metadata proofed finished graphic information beyond the url. updated author respStmt. Changed figure url. Created file. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
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.