Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I'm your host, Heather Tesco. I hope you're having a wonderful

festive season and all the best wishes to everybody listening for a wonderful New Year as well.

So, this episode, I'm going to talk about childbirth in medieval and Renaissance England.

I recently watched the BBC series called Medieval Lives that Helen

Castor hosted. It's on YouTube if you haven't seen it. And I was really struck by the episode on

childbirth. And it seemed obvious that I should do an episode on that, given that I've been

pretty open about my own medieval issues with conception and carrying a

successful pregnancy in childbirth, both here and in my personal blog. So I'm going to focus this

episode on how women gave birth in medieval and Renaissance England, and especially the changes that

began to permeate into the birthing room with the Reformation.

So also one note, I'm going to be talking frankly about birth and pregnancy and sex.

So if you are uncomfortable about that, or if you haven't had the birds and the bees talk from your parents yet,

you really should not listen to this unless it's like with a parent. I know a lot of

schools have links to this podcast up on their websites, and I really don't want to be the one to tell

you about how babies are made. So go talk to a parent or another trusted adult, like a teacher

or a youth group leader, okay? All right. The official public announcement portion is now over.

So let's look at the medical knowledge and resources that women would have had as they got

pregnant and carried a baby to term and then went through the ordeal of labor and delivery.

First, it's important to recognize that the medical establishment

at the time viewed women as incomplete men, and all of the medical textbooks from the time

came from the position that women were men who weren't all the way formed yet. The vast

majority of medical knowledge that doctors had at the time came from ancient Roman and

...