Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-century Childbirth:: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World

Howard, Sharon

doi:10.1093/shm/16.3.367

Cited by 16 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Thomas (in The Social History of Medicine ) analyses the career of a well‐connected midwife in Restoration York, arguing that although midwives might be collectively regarded as liminal figures, simultaneously integral to the female community and also representative of the male‐dominated parish, there were very considerable differences between those who ministered to the county elite and those whose duties lay with the middling and poorer sort. Howard is also concerned with childbirth, among the Yorkshire elite, reconstructing Alice Thornton's remarkable account of the pain of childbirth in the context of contemporary discourses of martyrdom. Female writing practices also attract the attention of Whyman, whose study of the correspondence between Esther Masham and John Locke is as sensitive to omissions as to inclusions.…”

Section: (Iii) 1500–1700  Steve Hindle  University Of Warwickmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

2005

The Economic History Review

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Section: (Iii) 1500–1700  Steve Hindle  University Of Warwickmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

2005

The Economic History Review

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“…Doing justice to the particularities of experiencing pain is part of the reason I have adopted a case study approach in this essay. In her reading of 17th-century Yorkshire woman, Alice Thornton’s memoirs, Sharon Howard has argued ‘that a fuller understanding of this remarkable source for 17th-century childbirth’ demands a ‘careful examination’ of its ‘narrative structures and consideration of their wider cultural context’—precisely what I suggest is needed for an understanding of how writings by and about Briget Cooke, Mary Franklin and Elianor Stockton contribute to our knowledge of 17th-century English women’s experiences of pain (Howard, p. 368) 12. The language of lived experience is also part of contemporary nursing discourse and patient care, which in some respects provides a complementary and illuminating parallel to the process of interpreting historical representations of human pain 13.…”

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confidence: 99%

“A kind of agonie in my thoughts”: writing puritan and non-conformist women’s pain in 17th-century England

Searle

2018

Med Humanities

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The relationship between pain as a physical and emotional experience and the concept of suffering as an essential aspect of sanctification for faithful believers was a paradoxical and pressing theological and phenomenological issue for puritan and non-conformist communities in 17th-century England. Pain allows the paradox of non-conformists’ valorisation and suppression of corporeality to be explored due to its simultaneous impact on the mind and body and its tendency to leak across boundaries separating an individual believer from other members of their family or faith community. The material world and the human body were celebrated as theatres for the display of God’s glory through the doctrines of creation and providence despite the fall. Pain as a concept and experience captures this tension as it was represented and communicated in a range of literary genres written by and about puritan and non-conformist women including manuscript letters, spiritual journals, biographies and commonplace books. For such women, targeted by state authorities for transgressing gender norms and the religion established by law, making sense of the pain they experienced was both a personal devotional duty and a political act. Three case studies comprise a microhistory of 17th-century English puritan and non-conformist women’s lived experience, interpretation and representation of pain, inscribed in a series of manuscripts designed to nurture the spiritual and political activism of their communities. This microhistory contributes to a better understanding of pain in early modern England through its excavation of the connections that such writers drew between the imperative to be visibly godly, their marginalised subject position as a proscribed religious minority and their interpretation of the pain they experienced as a result.

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“…In women's descriptions of pain in childbirth, the instruments responsible for the tearing or splitting have changed over time: for Alice Thornton writing in the seventeenth century it was the rack and she adopted the role of martyr; for modern mothers it is often metallic mechanical parts, particularly if the event is taking place in a hospital. 72 On just one occasion, in her final confession given in the Bridewell, Toft uses one of these specific metaphors, declaring, '(I was all n.…”

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confidence: 99%

What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body: Fig. 1.

Harvey

2015

Hist Workshop J

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In autumn 1726, Mary Toft began to deliver rabbits in Godalming, Surrey. The case became a sensation and was reported widely in newspapers, popular pamphlets, poems and caricatures. Toft was attended by at least six different doctors, some members of the Royal College of Physicians or attached to the Royal Court, but no doctor declared the affair a hoax until Toft herself confessed on 7 December 1726. This article focuses on Toft’s three surviving confessions in order to explore not the doctors or even wider representations of the affair but instead the person of Mary Toft herself. These rare sources give rare insight into one woman’s experiences of reproduction in the early eighteenth century. The essay engages with recent work on recovering women’s voices in the past, reconstructing Mary Toft’s words and her embodied and affective experience of the affair. These documents suggest a revision to our understanding of the hoax of 1726, one that situates the affair not in the context of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment or the assumption of men’s control over midwifery, but instead in the context of power dynamics amongst women in the practices of early-modern reproduction and birth.

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Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-century Childbirth:: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World

Cited by 16 publications

References 8 publications

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

“A kind of agonie in my thoughts”: writing puritan and non-conformist women’s pain in 17th-century England

What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body: Fig. 1.

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