Abstract
After marriage and the subsequent initiation into womanhood, the assumption in early modern society was that an early birth was desirable to cement the relationship and secure the bloodline. As Laura Gowing has asserted, ‘Fertility mattered enormously to women’s roles and to marriage. Pregnancy marked another stage in the transition from single woman to matron, and the rituals of childbirth brought a woman into the circle of married women and mothers’.1 This chapter will argue that the blood lost after a birth signified the completion of this transition to womanhood in its most full sense. As part of its analysis of lochial and post-partum bleeding, this chapter will also offer a study of bleeding in pregnancy and labour. In the prevailing humoral system the management of a woman’s blood levels carried implications for the success of the pregnancy and the transition to motherhood. Further, post-partum bleeding was considered to be analogous to menstruation and so carried with it assumptions about the ways in which women ought to behave if bleeding was occurring. Antenatal bleeding was also associated with grave implications for the outcome of the pregnancy and the potential disruption this wrought for the transition to motherhood. So the chapter forms an overview of all occasions of bleeding involving pregnancy and birth. Similarly, many of the rituals then associated with childbirth were formed around the blood loss. So the ways in which birth was managed culturally will be examined here as part of the main thematic concern of analysing lochial bleeding.
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Notes
Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 114.
Iain M. Lonie, Hippocratic Treatises: ‘On Generation’, ‘On the Nature of the Child’ and ‘Diseases IV (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), p. 3.
Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 14.
M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 154.
François Mauriceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Childbed, trans, by Hugh Chamberlen (London: R. Clavel et al., 1672), p. 102.
Jacques Guillemeau, Childbirth; or, The Happie Deliverie of Women (London: A. Hatfield, 1612), pp. 221–2.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. by Elaine Hobby (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 180.
Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), p. 124.
Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 274.
Matthew Poole, Anno tations upon the Holy Bible (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1683), p. 600.
John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 159.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. by Isobel Grundy (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 167.
Ralph Houlbooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 18.
John Donne, ‘To His Mistress’, in The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed by Robin Robbins (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), I, 325–31
John Milton, ‘Sonnet XIX’ in The Complete Poems, ed. by John Leonard (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 86
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© 2013 Sara Read
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Read, S. (2013). The ‘Cleansing of the Flowers after the Birth’: Managing Pregnancy and Post-Partum Bleeding. In: Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47003-7
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