Abstract
Thomas Raynalde’s The Byrth of Mankynde (1540), the first printed midwifery manual in the English vernacular, features an illustration of two conjoined fetuses in the womb described as “a monster … such as of late was seen in the dominion of Werdenbergh.” This illustration inaugurates a trademark feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century midwifery manuals: sensational accounts of monstrous births. This project argues two key points relating to the inclusion of monstrous birth accounts in midwifery manuals. First, as printed midwifery manuals begin to attract a more diverse audience than midwives, monstrous birth accounts take up increasing space in these manuals. As the content of these manuals tips more toward monstrous subject matter, an increasingly negative association builds between reproductive processes and representations of monstrosity. Second, I consider how, rather than vilifying the “monstrous” nature of nonstandard bodies, such inclusions instead recast what should be accepted as normate bodies in the early modern period. The signification of monstrous childbirth in early modern midwifery manuals, then, works at cross-purposes, creating and reinforcing pejorative representations of monstrosity, while unintentionally offering a space to challenge the normate representation of childbirth in the early modern period.
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Notes
- 1.
Detailed background on the translation history of Byrth of Mankynde can be found Elaine Hobby’s edition, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book (1560) (Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), esp. xv–xiv and J.W. Ballantyne’s “The Byrth of Mankynde: Its Authors and Editions,” Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire 10 no. 4 (1906): 297–368.
- 2.
Thomas Raynalde, The Byrth of Mankynde, Otherwyse Named the Womans Booke (London: Printed by Richard Jugge, 1560), sig. Bviii(v).
- 3.
David M. Turner, “Introduction,” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, ed. David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2006), 4.
- 4.
Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes, ed. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1191. As a subcategory of deformity, Aristotle then offers categorizations of monstrosity, with the broad assumption that “even he who does not resemble his parents is already in a certain sense a monstrosity; for in these cases nature has in a way departed from the type” (1187). In this consideration of a departure from type, Aristotle’s Generation of Animals offers a prototype for the establishment of notions of the “norm” through the term natural. For a discussion on the establishment of the “norm” in the nineteenth century, see Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), 25. Elizabeth Bearden brings Davis’s reading back to a consideration of early modern notions of the natural in relation to the norm in “Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond,” PMLA 132 no. 1 (2017): 33–51.
- 5.
Kevin Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference: The Materiality of the Monstrous,” in Turner and Stagg, Social Histories, 25.
- 6.
Generation of Animals, 1187.
- 7.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 8.
- 8.
The Byrth of Mankynde is the first printed midwifery manual in the English vernacular. The work itself is a translation of De Partu Hominis, which was a translation of Roesslïns’ Rosengarten. Birth presentations are images of fetuses in the womb, often depicted singularly in a vessel designed to abstractly represent the uterus without connecting it in any way to the body of the mother (see Fig. 12.1). For information in the birth presentations in Byrth of Mankynde, see Elaine Hobby, “Introduction,” in The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book (1560), ed. Elaine Hobby (Farnham, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2009), esp. xxx–xxxii; J.W. Ballantyne, “The Byrth of Mankynde: Its Authors and Editions,” Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire 10:4 (1906): 297–368; L. Chousand, History and Bibliography of Anatomical Illustration, translated by Mortimer Frank (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1917); Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982).
- 9.
“The double-headed newborn” (Das Doppelköpfige Neugeborene) is Reimar Hartge’s translation of Rosengarten: Eucharius Roesslïn, Und ab geht die Flaschenpost …: ‘der swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosengarten’: Faksimile mit Transkription und Kommentaren zum 500-jährigen Erscheinungsjubiläum (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 2012), 138; De Partu Hominis, et Quae Circa Ipsum Accidunt (1536), 10.
- 10.
The Byrth of Mankynde, 1560, fol. liiii, emphasis mine.
- 11.
On the depiction of conjoined twins as monsters, see Stephen Pender, “No Monsters at the Resurrection: Inside Some Conjoined Twins” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 143–167.
- 12.
Karen Newman provides a succinct history of this manuscript tradition in Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 27–29. See also Elaine Hobby, “Introduction” to The Birth of Mankind, xxx–xxxii.
- 13.
For more on Sloan 2463, see the Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook, ed. and trans. Beryl Rowlands (London: Crook Helm, 1981).
- 14.
Beryl Rowland, “Introduction,” Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health, 48.
- 15.
For more information on ballads and broadsides, see Kevin Stagg, “Representing physical difference: the materiality of the monstrous” in Social Histories of Disability and Deformity, 19–38; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 177–78; Kathryn M. Brammall, “Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, no. 1 (Spring, 1996), 8; Laura Knoppers and Joan Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 152–54.
- 16.
Kathleen Long and John S. Garrison also discuss Paré in this volume.
- 17.
Jakob Rüff, De Conceptu et Generation Hominis (Zurich: C. Froschover, 1554), 42. Accessed October 21, Defining Gender, http://www.gender.amdigital.co.uk.libproxy.lib.unc.edu. Paré’s work on monsters and prodigies appears in English in 1634 in The Workes of that famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey (London: E.C, 1634). Rüff’s book appears in English in 1637 as The Expert Midwife (London: E. Griffin, 1637).
- 18.
Jacques Guillemeau, Child-Birth or, the Happy Deliverie of Women (London: Printed by A. Hatfield, 1612), 112.
- 19.
Guillemeau, sig. A1v.
- 20.
Ibid., 151, 161.
- 21.
Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World (London, 1673), 7; Pierre Boaistuau, Histoire Prodigieuses (Paris: Garbriel Buon, 1560), 39; E. Fenton, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature (London, 1569), 14.
- 22.
Paré’s work on monsters and prodigies appears in English in 1634 in The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 961.
- 23.
Ibid., 962–992.
- 24.
Ibid., 992–996. In Anthropometamorphosis, Bulwer writes that “the Midwife ought to reduce to the naturall state, and not to draw and force the bodies of Infants into fantastick states. Sennertus (therefore) where he writes of the diseases of Conformation, and those of Figures, among other Causes of the ill figures of the body, reckons this, that those faults which are contracted in the wombe or in the birth are not rightly amended by Midwives and Nurses as they ought” (London, 1653), sig. b1–b2.
- 25.
This is not to say that midwifery manuals were not targeted exclusively to an audience of midwives and physicians; as the increasing overlap in materials reflects, the ancillary audience for midwifery manuals may have impacted its content. For more information on the primary and secondary audiences for midwifery manuals, see Jennifer Wynne Hallwart, “‘I wyl wright of women prevy sekeness’: Imagining Female Literacy and Textual Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Midwifery Manuals,” Critical Survey 14, no. 1 (2002): 44–63.
- 26.
Extensive work on the etymology of the term monster has been done; for this study’s particular interests, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Lisa Verner, The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages (London, England, and New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender, and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 2010); Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mill, eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages (Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 2003); Asa Simon Mittman with Peter Dindle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Wes Williams, Monsters and their Meaning in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 27.
Geoffrey Johns, “A ‘Grievous Burthen’: Richard III and the Legacy of Monstrous Birth,” in Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, ed. Sujata Iyengar (New York: Routledge, 2015), 46.
- 28.
J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human, xxv.
- 29.
Like Raynalde’s translation of The Byrth of Mankynde, Rüff’s Expert Midwife is a translation of a Latin translation of a 1544 German text, Ein Schon Lustic Trustbuchle in Von Den Empfangnissen und Geburten der Men Schen (“Cheerful, Gay, and Comforting Little Book about the Conception and Birth of People”).
- 30.
Expert Midwife, title page.
- 31.
Ibid., table of contents.
- 32.
Ibid., sig.A4r–A5v.
- 33.
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 56.
- 34.
Andrew Curran, “Afterword,” in Knoppers and Landes, Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities, 234.
- 35.
Elizabeth Bearden offers a pointed critique of reading early modern disability through Foucault’s lectures on the abnormal. She writes, “while Foucault’s lectures, published as Abnormal, may seem relevant to this chapter, they are problematic in at least two respects. Though Foucault names monstrosity as a precursor to the norm and, indeed, to his category of the abnormal in the nineteenth century, he makes an arbitrary distinction between monstrosity and disability, on the basis of an incorrect reading of Justinian’s code. The code distinguishes between congenital deformity and accidental deformity, which are not the same as monstrosity and disability. His move takes disability off the table” (46, n. 4). Bearden’s critique of Foucault’s reading both showcases the challenges of careful parsing of terminology—which Foucault occasionally plays fast and loose—and also suggests the very problem of categorization itself and how, even in a critique of categorization, Foucault falls victim to his own analysis. That being said, I find the reading of the monstrous through the juridico-biological domain valuable as a means to show how the normate shifts during the early modern period. Kathleen Long’s chapter in this volume engages categories of natural and normal using a reading of Georges Canguilhem, and offers a valuable counter to readings of the monstrous through Foucault.
- 36.
Amanda Banks, Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 26.
- 37.
Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 61.
- 38.
Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), 299.
- 39.
Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (London: Peter Cole, 1651), 139.
- 40.
Ibid., 140–141.
- 41.
Aristotle’s Master-Piece (London and Westminster, W.B., 1694), title page, 43. In the seventeenth century, preposterous could mean “[c]ontrary to nature, reason, or common sense; monstrous; foolish, perverse” or inverted in position or order (“preposterous, adj.,” OED Online, June 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/150508?redirectedFrom=preposterous (accessed October 31, 2017).
- 42.
Amanda Carson Banks writes in Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine of the changing perception of childbirth when doctors presided over births instead of midwives. Doctors had “limited exposure” to less complicated births, where only a midwife would be present, and had been reading popular texts that “dealt almost exclusively with abnormalities, such as poor presentation, impacting, narrow pelvises, and the birth of ‘monsters,’ resulting in the cultivation of “an increasingly threatening picture of birth. This quickly led to a perception among doctors, and eventually among the population they tended, that birth was anything but normal” (26).
- 43.
Qtd. in Becoming Human, 176. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages,” in Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 55.
- 44.
Mitchell, 176.
- 45.
Stagg, “Representing Physical Difference,” 35.
- 46.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20.
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Geil, M.H. (2019). The Monstrous Womb of Early Modern Midwifery Manuals. In: Godden, R.H., Mittman, A.S. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_12
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