Making Babies in the 17th Century

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

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4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

Making babies was a mysterious process for people in early modern England. Their ideas about conception, pregnancy and childbirth tell us much about their attitudes towards gender and power at that time.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, first released in September 2021, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Mary Fissell. She has been delving into a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayer books and popular medical manuals - to produce the first account of how women's reproductive bodies were understood in the 17th century.

This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In the 16th and 17th century, many of the facts that we take for granted about how babies
0:11.6	were made were open to debate. And it's curious period in that it's a crucial phase of change
0:19.2	in terms of understanding the reproductive body, and yet also a period in which there's
0:24.0	huge amounts of continuity in terms of what ordinary people believed. So to investigate ideas
0:30.9	about how conception occurred, what childbirth was, what remedies could be given to a woman in labor,
0:38.8	and to what extent men should be involved in any of this process. I spoke to Professor Mary Fisson.
0:54.3	Professor Fisson is based in the department of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University,
1:02.2	and the author of vernacular bodies, the politics of reproduction in early modern England,
1:08.4	published by Oxford University Press. So I started by talking to her about how, in the early 16th
1:15.1	century, people understood sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. Mary, it is such a pleasure to welcome
1:23.6	you onto not just the tutors, because this is a fascinating topic, and I really enjoyed reading
1:29.2	your book about this. Thanks, Yuzanna, and thanks for having me on, and some pleasure to be here.
1:34.0	So you start off by telling us that in 1540, a man called Thomas Raynold published the first
1:39.9	printed book in English about pregnancy and childbirth. So what was the understanding of a woman's
1:45.4	body of her reproductive system in the early 16th century? So the fundamentals were rooted in
1:50.8	humoral medicine, which dated from antiquity, and humoral medicine lasted for millennia because it
1:56.1	was a really flexible and easy to understand system. You could practice it as a physician very high
2:01.6	and very complicated, or as an ordinary person, you could understand your body as being in balance,
2:06.7	teetering too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, etc. And the humoral body has a strong account of why
2:13.1	women are women and men are men, women are basically cooler and wetter than men, because it's
2:20.5	their bodies that nurture new beings. And everybody knows that if you plant a seed in ground that's
2:26.4	too hot and dry to seed, we'll sure have a lot of it won't live. So women's bodies were made to be
	...

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