Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England 9780300142884

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Common Bodies

Common Bodies Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England

Laura Gowing

Yale University Press New Haven and London

Copyright © 2003 by Laura Gowing All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk Set in Minion by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gowing, Laura. Common bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth century England/by Laura Gowing. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-300-20795-8 1. Women—England—Social conditions—17th century. 2. Women—England— Sexual behavior—History—17th century. 3. Sexual ethics—England—History— 17th century. 4. Motherhood—England—History—17th century. 5. Body, Human—Social aspects. I. Title. HQ1599.E5G69 2003 305.42/0942/09032—dc2i A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2003012939

Contents

List of

figures

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

Introduction

1 2 3 4 5 6

vi vii ix

1

Uncertain knowledge The politics of touch Consent and desire c The child in me': perceiving pregnancy Childbed conflicts Precarious parenthood

17 52 82 m 149 177

Conclusion

204

Notes

210

Select bibliography

238

Index

249

Figures

1. Aristotle's Masterpiece (1690), front page. By permission of the British Library. 18 2. Foetuses, from Eucharius Roesslin, The Birth ofMan-kinde (1626), p. 108. By permission of the British Library. 124 3. From James Guillemeau, Childbirth, Or the Happy Deliverie of Women (1612), p. 160. By permission of the British Library. 124 4. From Francois Mauriceau, The Diseases of the Women with Child and in Child-bed (1683). By permission of the British Library. 125 5. From Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (1671), after p. 150. By permission of the British Library. 126 6. From The true discripcion of a Childe with Ruffes (1566). By permission of the British Library. 128 7. From A certaine Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman (1640). By permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 132

Acknowledgemen ts

The research for this book was supported by two Small Research Grants from the AHRB, funds from Royal Holloway, University of London, and leave from the University of Hertfordshire. A sabbatical fellowship at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, in 1999 enabled me to start writing the manuscript; I would like to thank the Center s staff and trustees for the unique working environment they provide, and my fellow fellows for their companionship, in particular Paula McDowell, Jorie Woods and the lunchtime walkers. I am also grateful to the staff of all the local archives I have used. Early versions of some of the work were presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, the Maryland Attending to Early Modern Women conferences, the North American Conference on British Studies, and seminars in Cambridge, London and Princeton: I thank all the participants who commented, and Mary Fissell and Helen Weinstein for their inspiring collaboration on panels about bodies. Colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Essex, and most recently at King's College London have given interest and support over several years, and I have learned much from Tim Hitchcock, Cathy Crawford, Alison Rowlands and John Walter. Several generations of students have asked telling questions and suggested wild ideas of how bodies work. Richard Adair and Karen Newman gave expert help on specific points. The conversation, suggestions and enthusiasm of friends and colleagues have kept me going: thanks, in particular, to Judith Bennett, Amy Erickson, Cynthia Herrup, Kate Hodgkin, Mark Jenner, Peter Lake, Nicole Pohl, Diane Purkiss, Ulinka Rublack, Alex Shepard, Garthine Walker, Sarah Waters, Helen Weinstein, Sue Wiseman and Andy Wood. For reading some, or all, of the final draft and making the process of rewriting possible and pleasurable, I'm very grateful to Mark Jenner, Garthine Walker, Lyndal Roper, the Yale readers and the Dalston queer reading group, especially Clare Hemmings. At Yale, Robert Baldock and Diana Yeh have been immensely helpful and encouraging. My thanks to Trish Crawford, who has shared references,

Acknowledgemen ts

discussed ideas and enlivened many library days; Lyndal Roper, whose thoughts on the final draft reminded me once again how much I owe to her wisdom, generosity and eye for the loose ends; Rachel Weil, for her encouragement and critical comments; and Mary Fissell, who has read every chapter, shared her own work, and been a great friend and kind critic throughout. And thanks to Nina Wakeford, who has done so much to help me finish it.

Abbreviations

BIHR BL Bodleian CKS CLRO DRO DUL ERO GL HRO LA LMA LRO LROP NRO NUL NYCRO Pepys Ballads PRO SARS SRO WRO WYASL WYASW

Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone Corporation of London Record Office Devon Record Office, Exeter Durham University Library, Special Collections Essex Record Office, Chelmsford Guildhall Library, London Hereford Record Office Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln London Metropolitan Archives (formerly GLRO) Lichfield Record Office Lancashire Record Office, Preston Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Nottingham University Library, Manuscripts Department North Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton W. G. Day (ed.)> The Pepys Ballads (Cambridge, 1987) Public Record Office Somerset Archives and Record Service, Taunton Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford Worcester Record Office, County Hall West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield

Quotations from original sources have been modernised throughout, and the year has been taken to begin on 1 January.

Introduction

In Chidley, Devon, in 1611, John Pulford and Robert Lyle started fighting in a room in an alehouse. A witness described the scene: after divers speeches they had amongst them, Pulford said that Lyle was his whore, and thereupon he took Lyle by the waist and threw him upon the bed, and laying upon him face to face jerked him very grievously; that Lyle complained, praying him to give over for he was not able to endure it. Pulford replied saying, she is my whore, and will do it: and after a while leaving the bed came to the table and there took out Lyle's privities, and rolled them upon the table saying, look what a fine thing (and filthy words) my whore hath. They argued a while and John Pulford took hold of Robert Lyle again. He threw him back on the bed, saying 'she was his whore and he would to her again, and then 'rolled his privities' again on the table, saying 'she is my whore and I will use her' and 'shall I not use mine own as I list'. Three or four times, 'in very beastly sort', he took Lyle about the neck 'and kissed him as if he had been a woman. Robert Lyle begged him to stop, saying 'he would not his friends should know it for forty pounds'; at last, John Pulford stopped, and called for drink, 'saying his whore should give him a pot of ale for using her'. Robert Lyle paid for the ale, though he had to borrow the money.1 What did it mean, to treat a man 'as if he had been a woman'? For these two men and their audience, these indignities effeminised Robert Lyle's body. They made him not so much a sodomite, as a whore. And being a whore made him powerless to resist, or to protect his own body: he was thrown on the bed, his privities 'rolled' on the table, kissed like a woman, and finally forced to pay for the ale to compensate his assailant for 'using her'. In this humiliating assault, the assumptions of vulnerability, property and possession that governed the female body are laid bare. Not only whores, but wives and servants could be called by men 'mine own' and used as they wished. The power of a man over

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his whore was so familiar that it could be reproduced even between men. The recent historiography of the body has taught us much about literate discourses about sexual difference and gender; but confrontations like this give us a different starting point, one that takes us into alehouses, onto the street, and into the intimate social and physical worlds of early modern women and men. There, gender and power were embodied in touch, sex and violence.

i The gendered body of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is almost unrecognisable to modern eyes. In the rawest physical terms, the experience of lifelong labour, famine, disease, childbirth and menopause left permanent, visible marks.2 The body's boundaries were imagined differently. Mental and physical subjectivity were entwined and emotional experiences made themselves manifest through the body. The flows of the body, Ulinka Rublack argues, were interwoven with those of the emotions: witches, closed to mercy and reconciliation, could not weep.3 The very nature of sexual difference took different form. Humours or fluids both determined sex and characterised temperament, so that women's wetter, colder bodies made them more melancholy, and men's hotter, drier ones made them more prone to anger. In this model, the female body was essentially the reverse of the male, the vagina being like a reversed penis and the womb like the scrotum. Heat forced men's parts outwards, cold caused women to keep theirs inside: as one late-seventeenthcentury midwives' guide put it, 'Galen says a man is different from a woman in nothing else except in the having his genital members without his body'.4 The test, for this author as for others, was hermaphroditism: the existence of bodies of uncertain sex demonstrated the potential for females to become male and males to become female.5 From these complementary bodies, male and female seed mingled together to create a child. The medical literature of the seventeenth century - anatomical diagrams, questions and answers about sex and reproduction, advice on pregnancy reproduced an ancient model of sexual difference. With little regard to recent discoveries or logical inconsistencies, the Renaissance model preserved what Thomas Laqueur describes as a 'one-sex body' where male and female were matters of degree, not absolute difference.6 Not until the eighteenth century, Laqueur argues, did a modern concept of sexual difference take shape, in which male and female bodies were fundamentally different in skeleton and physiology. Driven partly by the political imperatives that excluded women from citizenship, new theories defined women as governed by their ovaries, asexual, and intellectually and physically weak. If this transition seems to fit neatly with the shifts in gender roles in the eighteenth century, it also raises substantial

Introduction

3

problems; there is, it has been argued, a good deal more continuity in representations of the female body than Laqueur's overarching narrative allows.7 Still, though, post-Enlightenment medical discourses offer a new security of sexual roles, fixing them to social gender. In Renaissance culture we seem to be left with a world of flexible sex and no secure corporeal basis for gender roles.8 In the process of this story, the distinction between biological sex and social gender - once so central to feminist projects and gender studies - breaks down. Renaissance descriptions of what makes sex, and even more so the images that accompany them, make it abundantly clear that sex, like gender, is a cultural construction. In Judith Butlers words, sex is 'not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is'; it is what makes a body culturally intelligible.9 Recent work on medicine and science has made powerfully evident the degree to which the most 'natural' of facts are culturally constructed and politically driven. Londa Schiebinger and Ludmilla Jordanova's work on eighteenth-century scientific discourse has shown how 'natural facts' - the category of mammals, or the skeletons of women - carry loaded gender messages. Emily Martin s analysis of modern medical texts shows the same process at work, with the body depicted as a factory in which the production of sperm is remarkably efficient, but where menstruation and ovulation are characterised in terms of degeneration and waste.10 For us, this rendering of bodies as ideologically loaded narratives requires disentangling and deconstruction. But for early modern readers and listeners, that process, the work of representation, may have been more transparent. Highly attentive to the constructions of the body, cultural historians have sometimes neglected the ways those representations were accomplished. Laqueur's reading of medical images requires us to take them as a reliable guide to perceived truth. Yet Renaissance medical texts construct knowledge through narrative and rhetoric, and they openly acknowledge the power of story, myth and metaphor in making sense of the body. At the cheaper end of the market, midwives' books and vernacular medical guides presented their explanations through argument and dispute. 'If any ask the reason why a woman is sooner barren than a man', discourses the most widely reprinted popular medical book of the late seventeenth century, 'I answer, the cause is the natural heat, which is more predominant in the latter . . .' Half a page later, the chapter ends 'And so I conclude my assertion.'11 As the popular and professional medical writers of the seventeenth century recycled ancient ideas of how the body worked, they also repeatedly discussed the controversies and incoherences of their models. Could a hermaphrodite really exist? Do men or women contribute more to conception? In popular medical books the certainty of one paragraph was invariably undone by a counter-argument in the next, or a contradiction over the page. Partly this comes from their composite nature,

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cobbled together from ancient, medieval and sixteenth-century texts and augmented with folklore and travel stories.12 In texts with so many authors, the T who asks and answers is everybody. But it also represents a sense of uncertainty and debate which characterised vernacular guides to the body's mysteries. Metaphors, elaborate jokes, and stories were often the best way to make sense of the secrets of nature. To read early modern medical books, especially popular ones, as modern scientific texts which convey only one truth is to undercut the context which gives them meaning. The more bodies were explained, the more uncertain their inner truths appeared; and women's bodies were the most secretive of all. Examining the body's construction in printed texts and images takes us much further in grasping how deeply gender shapes understandings of corporeality, but it is essentially a study of discourse, not embodiment. Literate discourse did not necessarily represent the way most early modern people thought about their bodies, and unpicking the cultural construction of sexual difference still leaves us with questions about the materiality of the body.13 What did pregnancy feel like? What did it mean to be possessed? How did women and men understand desire, conception, or fertility? For that, we need other sources and other questions. I do not mean, here, to propose a history that gets at 'real' bodies, without discourse; rather, I want to suggest some ways to pursue the relationship between the body's cultural construction and its corporeal experience, and to root the two in the social world of seventeenthcentury England. Knowing that the body is a product of culture does not tell us much about how it felt. Lyndal Roper, has asked whether there might not still be some bodily processes that feel the same across cultures, like giving birth, and she has used psychoanalytic interpretations of maternity to consider how those essential meanings might illuminate witchcraft trials.14 This book follows a different route, taking the body's experiences as the products of popular ideas, social pressures, religious convictions and economic conditions. Hearing pregnancy described as cheese-making gave a familiar texture to the body's transformations; the conviction that labour was in God's hands framed the experience of giving birth. Being a dependent servant made young women's bodies vulnerable to assault and abuse, and the economic significance of marriage shaped a wife's sense of her body. The interweaving of mental and physical that characterised early modern bodies meant both the psychic world and the material conditions of life bore sharply on corporeal experience. On the surface the idea of sex as a matter of degree seems to hold surprisingly radical possibilities. Loosed from the bounds of rigid sexual difference, might women and men not be freed from the bonds of gender? Certainly medieval and early modern people knew of bodies that resisted the binary categorization of male and female: there were many stories of hermaphrodites

Introduction

5

and involuntary transsexuals, like that of the woman who got too hot chasing her pigs, and found herself developing a man's organs.15 When, in London in 1680, Arabella Hunt professed to discover that her husband of six months was a woman named Amy Pulter, the best explanation she could offer was that Amy was 'of a double gender'. (Amy, insisting that she was a complete woman, with which midwives concurred, said the whole thing was a joke.)16 But early modern people also lived with gender roles that were persistently hierarchical and apparently rigid, and those roles were founded on an understanding of sexual difference that came from many other sources than medical discourse. Everything from the width of women's hips to the pain they suffered in childbirth was divinely ordained. The subordination of women to men was fundamental to social, spiritual and familial structures. The idea that sexual difference functioned on a scale destabilised none of this. Like medical texts, popular talk and texts about the body expressed widespread disagreement, sometimes cacophony. Bodies were a matter for debate, in the alehouse as in the anatomy theatre. The subjects of this book include a woman who tells her lover she is sure she will conceive because she knows she is 'fruitful'; a man who tells his lover that he knows she is not pregnant, even if doctors tell her she is; a woman who says she can tell whether a woman is a virgin by looking at her face; a woman who thinks she will never conceive, because she is a twin; and a man who is warned not to eat cheese, for fear of shortening his 'ware'. Some of these ideas occur in the popular literature and medical discourse of the time. Many were probably also part of a folk tradition which we can only begin to recapture. But uncertainty was also part of that culture. Stories and claims about the body are, in some way, always attempts to make sense of the mysterious. So popular culture and everyday encounters also featured many stories in which the body can tell no ultimate truth, in which chastity, pregnancy and paternity are unknowable. We are apt, these days, to think of uncertainty as liberating: for early modern women it was often the opposite. The unpredictable body demanded regulation, intervention and surveillance, and those practices, performed by both men and women, officials and neighbours, did much to effect the subordination and vulnerability of female bodies. Early modern bodies were subject to the corporeal power of both family and state: they were publicly disciplined and punished. Sexual crimes were matters for church and state. In this context, the social control of female bodies seems blunt and brutal, and a world away from modern bodies. Recent scholarship on female embodiment takes as its subject a body that can internalise, resist, perform and transform gender, through practices as diverse as plastic surgery, dieting or drag.17 These critical tools are not easily transported to the early modern era. The body addressed by contemporary criticism is driven by a reflexivity and self-consciousness that seems wholly modern, the product of a

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post-Enlightenment subjectivity. Michel Foucault's genealogies of power, surveillance and resistance take as their subject a 'docile body' which is similarly self-aware and self-regulating.18 Seventeenth-century bodies existed in a different conceptual world, where subjectivity was a more collective affair, a matter of belonging and embeddedness.19 After all, there were almost no mirrors in ordinary houses, and to study your reflection could suggest vanity, and a sinful preoccupation with earthly things. In such a world, the operation of power on the female body might seem straightforward and brutal: women could be searched for pregnancy and virginity, ducked or made to wear the 'scold's bridle' as a punishment for unruly speech, and whipped for fornication, and the law did little to protect them from rape, assault and domestic violence. But the subordination of women was also sustained by subtler bodily experiences. Alongside the overt forms of force and violence that sustained the hierarchies of order was a more intimate and quotidian network of power. The social control of sex, pregnancy and reproduction was effected by neighbours and family as well as magistrates, and by women as well as men. The practices of touch between women have been much less studied than those of men, and sometimes they have been idealised: birthrooms as havens of female support, midwives as heroines. But if we are to understand the flexibility and heterogeneity that kept early modern patriarchy powerful, it becomes imperative to take seriously the parts women played in maintaining it as well as resisting it. Women's authority in neighbourhood and household made itself felt, very often, through touch. Women pushed and nudged each other, shared beds, touched each other's breasts, or felt bellies. Physical intimacies and confrontations made solid the distinctions of status and age that divided women. For a subtler sense of how bodies were disciplined, we might also look at how women were supposed to carry themselves. In one seventeenth-century joke, a girl is reproved for her immodest demeanour: A Girl about ten years old, had got a trick of confidently staring in mens faces when they were talking; for which her mother reproved her, saying; Daughter, our Sex enjoins us Modesty, and you ought to be bashful, and look downward when you are in mens company, and not to stand gazing and gaping as if you were looking babies in their eyes: to which the pert girl replied, This lecture forsooth, should have been read in the former ignorant Ages, but every age grows wiser and wiser; that maids of every age know better: Men indeed, may look down on the primitive dust, from whence they were taken, but Man being our original, I will stare in their faces, say what you can to the contrary.20 The premises of this jest come from the rhetorical ploys of Renaissance gender debates, in which the creation story in Genesis gave writers grounds to argue,

Introduction

7

on the one hand, that men were superior to women, because Eve was made from Adam's rib; on the other, that women were superior, because Eve was not created of dirt, as Adam was.21 Here, though, that rhetorical argument is applied to the specific social contexts of real bodies, and to the rules of modesty girls learn. Only pert girls look with confidence; only babies can be looked in the eye. Foucault's docile body, with its internalised rules, is perhaps not so modern, after all.22 The history of disciplinary regulation has taken little account of gender; Norbert Elias's narrative of the civilisation of the body takes the male body as universal, as does much of the courtesy literature which prescribed refinements of hygiene, manners and gesture.23 Women's bodies were subject to quite different disciplinary campaigns.24 The project of enclosing and controlling the female body was central to gender ideologies from at least the middle ages. Medieval and early modern humour dwells insistently on the natural grotesqueness of the female body and its resistance to control; the inculcation of female modesty was presented as a battle against the innate unruliness of women's bodies. The girl who refused to lower her eyes provides one hint of the kinds of bodily comportment that were supposed to, but did not always, define femininity.

ii The gender hierarchy of early modern England was sustained by the order of the household; but the sources of this book are often more concerned with the household's margins, with impostors, intruders and transgressors. Households were understood as the centrepiece of order, and sermons, proverbs, ballads and conduct literature laid out the roles of husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants. The male head of household stood at the centre of a complex web of duty, responsibility and obedience, and his power was upheld by law. Young people could be forced to go into service, to ensure they lived under the rule of a responsible master; married women's legal status was severely restricted; within limits, men were entitled to beat their wives.25 Adultery had always been a grounds for marital separation, but for ten years, under the Puritan government of the 1650s, it was made a capital offence.26 The ultimate transgression of male authority, husband murder, was defined - like the murder of a master by a servant - as petty treason.27 These were the outside limits. The precepts of household patriarchy could not always bind real households. Everyday gender relations necessarily involved compromises, conflicts and negotiations. Women in most households, as advice literature recognised, played a multitude of roles, often

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working alongside their husbands, or running the household in their absence. Nor could all men fulfil the roles allotted to them. Jokes and marital advice often betray as much anxiety about mens ability to command as they do about women's readiness to obey. Demographic and social conditions undermined the rigidity of ideal households. The population growth of the sixteenth century slowed and stopped in the seventeenth, as ages at marriage increased and fewer children were born to married couples. From the early years of the seventeenth century, the numbers of unmarried women were increasing. In 1626, of the generation of women aged around sixty, only 4 per cent had not married. Of those who were around thirty-five in the same year, 14.7 per cent were still single in their forties; and of the girls who were about ten that year, as many as 24 per cent would not marry. Marriage rates increased slightly in the mid-century, but at the end of the seventeenth century the proportion of never-married women still stood at around 10 per cent.28 This picture is most simply explained as a response to the steady fall in real wages and the increased cost of living from the late sixteenth century: there was, as Keith Wrightson has put it, 'a brutal deterioration in the opportunity to marry and form households'.29 The exact causal relationship remains unclear; it was often only several years after significant economic difficulties that marriage rates fell. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have argued for a wider interpretation of the data, taking into account the possibility that women might choose not to marry, and the increasing evidence for single women's economic opportunities, particularly in towns and industrialising areas, bears that out.30 Widowhood also left many women single, so that at any one time, married women might have been a minority of adult women. In one tax assessment in Southampton in the 1690s, two-thirds of the adult population was unmarried.31 Men remarried faster than women, and women lived longer, so that there was always likely to be a greater proportion of unmarried women in the population. Illegitimacy levels, though, remained surprisingly low, between 2 and 5 per cent, though in the economically vulnerable pastoral areas of the north and west rates were around twice that of the more secure arable economies of the south and east.32 The process of plebeian courtship and marriage was always subject to economic conditions: always prolonged, in times of economic difficulty courtships went on longer, or were disrupted, and pregnancies that normally would have led to marriage became illegitimate births.33 The persistently low levels of illegitimacy, combined with a high level of bridal pregnancy, suggest careful sexual practices and intensive social pressures to marry before the birth.34 The context of households was also changing. The population was moving. In 1600 8 per cent of the population of England and Wales were living in cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants; by 1670 that proportion had risen to 13.5 per cent and by 1700 to 17 per cent. Many of those urban dwellers were young

Introduction

9

migrants, orphaned or distant from their families of birth. More were female than male, leaving a number of towns and cities with higher ratios of women to men. Rural communities were left with a surplus of men and a more aged population.35 Over the seventeenth century, many urban areas became more crowded; London in particular saw a rapidly increasing density of population, as houses were subdivided, extended and rebuilt. Urban communities were mobile and flexible; marriages ended earlier, because of higher mortality rates, and neighbours knew each other for shorter periods of time. The possibilities of urban anonymity raised fears about immorality, illegitimacy and prostitution. Larger numbers of single women, often mobile between households, could pose a threat to social, sexual and economic order. Households, then, were flexible, and their membership changed often. They were hard to establish and easily undermined by economic pressures. In circumstances like these, becoming a wife or a husband could not be the only measure of adulthood. Faced with the economic obstacles of marriage, single women made other lives for themselves, and men established alternative models of masculinity that did not depend on being a husband, father and master.36 All this requires that historians expand their attention from the household, which has been so often described as the core of early modern society and treated as the crucible of gender relations. Gender roles have very often been reduced to marital roles; patriarchy has largely been understood in its early modern definition as a familial structure, rather than an overarching social structure.37 The subordination and agency of women in the household has been extensively studied, and more recent work has discussed the domestic context of masculinity.38 But women and men were more than wives and husbands, and gender relations did not only happen in the household. While the subordination of women to men was often understood in terms of that of a wife to a husband, or a child to a father, there were deeper power structures at work. They were less explicitly stated; driven by the concern of the post-Reformation church and the Tudor and Stuart state for the ordered household, seventeenth-century advice and discussion of gender roles focuses almost entirely on the relationship of husband and wife. Until the 1640s, the wider power relations between men and women were only occasionally discussed in print, and the debates in the late-sixteenth- and earlyseventeenth-century 'querelle des femmes' rehearsed ancient arguments and examples as if the whole question was one of rhetoric.39 The participation of women in the radical sects of the 1640s and 1650s raised, and swiftly closed again, the question of women's place in the public sphere. By the end of the seventeenth century, with the exception of the first feminist texts, the enshrinement of women in the household seemed to have been even more powerfully restated.

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But what kept women legally, economically and socially subordinate was a much less clearly articulated set of beliefs and behaviours, the wider structures of patriarchal power within which women and men made sense of the world. When one Somerset man threatened his aunt to 'cut off her coats from her breech and set her an end upon her head', he drew on a language of domination which gave even apparently less powerful men the means to abuse women.40 When women called each other whore or scold, or drove pregnant single women out of their parishes, they exercised a physical power and a moral authority over other women. The relationship between wives and husbands was political, social, economic and spiritual, and it was often treated as a microcosm of all gender relations. But to understand the complexities of early modern households and communities requires us to look further and deeper: at relations between women and between men; at the power of mistresses over servants, and servants over mistresses; at the place of single women and widows; at the dynamics of age; and at the divisions between the married and the single.

hi Historical sources for bodily experiences are scarce. In the seventeenth century, many men and most women were, by our definitions, illiterate. Even at the end of the period less than half of all men and around a quarter of all women could sign their names.41 Below the elites, few men and women left records in their own hands. But England also had a vivid and accessible print culture. Many of those who could not write could read, and even the poor and illiterate came into contact with sermons, ballads, stories and jokes that still survive.42 In a society of intense litigation and regulation of conduct, common voices also left many traces in the formal records of church and state. It is still hard to recover women's knowledge and interpretations of the body. Only in exceptional, usually negative, circumstances were women likely to be recorded talking about their own bodies, about sex, pregnancy or childbirth. All the force of conduct literature, ideologies of shame and social ritual seemed to insist that the female body was private and secret.43 It was, as it has often been, positively virtuous for respectable women to be unable to speak explicitly about the body and its processes. Even in court, some insisted they were too modest to speak about what they had heard, seen or suspected. But we should be wary of eliding early modern understandings of the constraints on talking of the body with more Victorian notions of feminine modesty. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a Norfolk gentleman, Sir Nicholas Le Strange, kept a jest book, in which he wrote down the jokes he

Introduction

21

had heard and who had told them. Many are from his female relatives, and there is no sign that the women's jokes are less bawdy than the men's. A joke that plays on the double meaning of cony (rabbit, or vagina) is attributed to his wife; several tales about country girls having bastards come from his mother; and a long, detailed story about a fool who begs his lusty neighbour to get his wife pregnant, and watches every detail of the act, comes from his aunt.44 The restrictions on body talk that obtained in early modern England were not simply about chaste speech. They related, for example, more to issues of authority and knowledge than they did to being modest and shamefast. Gender made a difference, but so did age, and marital status: access to knowledge was supposed to be tightly limited. For the young and the single, not being able to talk about sexuality or the body could stand as evidence of chastity and virtue. For married women, ways of talking about the body were surely much less limited, but they left few records. The conventional narratives of firstperson writing leave little room for reflections on the body; the spiritual reflections which were the basis of early diaries, by their very nature, enabled women to leave the body behind. Although many women's and men's letters discuss health, few were explicit about sex or reproduction. The coded references to menstrual periods in the letters of Anne, Princess of Denmark (later queen) to her intimate friend Sarah Churchill are some of the few such references that survive; the dynastic significance of her reproductive cycle gave political weight to her confidences about 'Lady Charlotte's' failure to visit.45 For modern women, telling stories about their bodies can be a way of asserting control over them and making physical processes make sense.46 For early modern women, the same was unlikely to be true. Instead the autonomy or control that modern women might seek over (for example) pregnancy and childbirth, early modern women sought to resign themselves: to the authority of family and husbands, and the will of God. Thus Ann Lee, waiting for her lying-in, writes to her sister in law: sweet sister thy counsel I shall follow for I am alooking out a nurse in obedience to Mr Lee desire; and I wish I could think so slightly of that same to go through with it as thou dost but I hope when the time is come God will be as merciful in delivering me out of it as he has been to others . . . I should think myself very happy if I could tell you I might enjoy thy sweet company at that time, but it is not my good fortune to have it, so I must be contented.. .47 Ann Lee's preparations for childbirth brings a series of abdications of control over both bodily experience and its social context: finding a nurse in accordance with her husband's desire, turning her apprehensions over to God's

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mercy, and abandoning her hopes for her sister's company to the rules of 'good fortune'. Stories of pregnancy and childbirth were best modelled not on autonomy and control, but on resignation and abandonment. Nevertheless, women did talk about the body: on the street, in the birthingroom, in marketplaces, at home, and to magistrates and clerks. Bodies were central to many of the confrontations which animated early modern life, and early modern England was a highly litigious society, with a sharp concern for the regulation of sex and morals. Accordingly, some of our best sources for the history of bodies are the records of the law. Legal records provide exceptionally rich material for social and economic historians. Pre-trial statements like depositions and examinations often record as much about the minutiae of daily life as the events in dispute. The disputes on which quarter sessions and church courts spent most of their time were not extraordinary, exceptional dramas, but the stuff of everyday life: family conflicts, courtship, work, petty theft, neighbourhood quarrels. The stories of illicit sex and illegitimacy that provide one source for this book concerned relatively rare events, but ordinary people. The context of poverty and indigence in which illegitimacy was prosecuted was a real risk for a large part of the population. The sexual lives of the poor and single mattered, too, to the whole parish community: every contributor to poor relief was concerned with sexual behaviour that might threaten to leave the parish responsible for an illegitimate child and a single mother. The disciplinary regulation of sex and morals through the courts took place as part of a Europe-wide project to reform popular manners; in the century after the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, sexual behaviour was widely understood as a public concern. The focusing of such prosecutions on women echoed a long-established identification of unchaste women with disorder. And the understanding that households were microcosms of the state made domestic affairs a proving-ground for order in the community.48 The sources for this book come from legal jurisdictions across England. Many come from the church courts, which dealt with moral offences, including sexual slander, fornication, adultery and marriage disputes. Their powers were limited to imposing penance and fines, but in many places they played a powerful role in pursuing sexual offenders; the archives of the Somerset consistory court provide a particularly detailed record of a court pursuing fornicators, slanderers and people who talked or acted bawdily.49 Slander and marriage separation cases were brought as litigation between parties, but illicit sex was prosecuted as a disciplinary offence, with a court official as prosecutor; cases often began when clergy or lay people reported their concerns to the court in the bishop's regular visitations. The church courts were suspended in 1642, when the Civil War brought the disestablishment of the Church of England. They resumed in 1660, and although they never again saw

Introduction

13

pre-war levels of business, they underwent periodic revivals and continued to be part of the legal landscape. The 1690s, when campaigns for the reformation of manners were instigated in many towns, saw particularly intense prosecutions in some places. Other cases come from the quarter sessions, which dealt with the lesser ranks of criminal offences. From the late sixteenth century they were empowered to deal with illegitimacy, as part of the reform of the poor laws; during the Commonwealth, while the church courts were suspended, they took up some aspects of the regulation of moral affairs as well. As part of their responsibility for illegitimacy, the quarter sessions pursued the fathers of illegitimate children, and heard petitions from parishes, single mothers and putative fathers. Under the poor law legislation, they could make arrangements for the support of illegitimate children and punish their parents by whipping and imprisonment in the local house of correction. Mothers were, usually, more likely to face punishment than fathers. Briefer cases of illicit sex come from London's house of correction, the Bridewell, which had its own court, where those picked up for vagrancy, prostitution or fornication were summarily questioned, whipped and imprisoned. Its very remit was testimony to the readiness with which poverty, sexual disorder and criminality were conflated. Finally, cases of infanticide and rape come from the assizes, which dealt with felonies. Both were capital offences.50 These different jurisdictions were familiar to early modern people. The law was embedded in popular culture, and it was heavily used by both men and women. Craig Muldrew has estimated that one in five people was involved in some kind of legal action every year.51 Ordinary women and men knew what to sue, where to prosecute, and what to say: single mothers, for example, consistently told magistrates that they had only had sex once, with one man. This familiarity with legal concepts and rules meant that the words we hear in court were less estranged from popular culture than we might expect. It means, too, that legal testimonies do much more than record the margins of early modern society. Lawsuits and disciplinary prosecutions gave people a way to negoiate community and family relations. They were the source of news, popular pamphlets, songs and ballads; they recorded the stuff of daily life. The documents these courts produced vary from the briefest summary to pages of testimony. Many are hedged around with legal formula, shaped by convention and fortified with repetition. But they are arguably our best access to the worlds of ordinary women and men: servants, labourers, traders, farmers, housewives, midwives. Legal testimonies also excelled in recording speech: not just what the witness or accused said, but what they said other people had said. In some cases - such as slander - the exact words spoken were vital; in all, what was said mattered. Spoken words were the stuff of contracts of business or marriage, reputations and credit. Midwives testified to the oaths women swore in labour; witnesses

H

Common

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to fornication reported loving whispers and bawdy chatter. Legal records can hardly be said to be authentic, unmediated texts. Like all texts, they reflect many voices. If this makes them hard to read, it also gives us perhaps our best hope of hearing some of the different languages and discourses that constituted early modern culture. By the time people told their stories to magistrates or church court officials, they had almost certainly told them before. Memories changed, and each telling would be subtly reshaped. The legal process itself was bound to inform the texts the courts produced. In the church courts, witnesses were presented with a list of statements made by the plaintiff, which formed the basis of their answers: often the essence of the story was already there, and the written record of the depositions simply reiterated it, sometimes verbatim. Quarter sessions cases record few explicit questions, but the informations and examinations taken down by magistrates are often tantalisingly brief summaries of what must have been much longer exchanges. What legal records contain, then, is the imperfect transcript of an exchange laden with imbalances of power, secrets, hidden agendas and meanings we can only partly recover. The layers of legal records were structured, most of all, around competing stories. The fictions of legal narration, the memories and retellings that eventually ended up in court, were shaped to fit the circumstances of the courtroom, but they were part of a much broader narrative culture. Early modern people were used to hearing stories about sex and reproduction, and they made sense of how bodies worked from what they heard on the street, at lyings-in, in jokes and gossip. Tales of infanticide, illegitimate birth or rape draw on a storehouse of common plots that structure experience and memory into stories that magistrates might understand. They featured stock characters like wayward soldiers, strangers passing by to light their pipes, cruel mistresses and demanding masters, and they had details, climaxes and, often, resolutions. This narrativity makes them complex and rewarding sources. Rather than stripping away the fictions of narrative, historians are learning to study them.52 Even the shortest of legal testimonies allow us to see the making of memories and stories, conflicts of representation and description, at work. When women witnessed to infanticide, they described their own role in the drama: how they suspected a neighbour by reason of her big belly, or her suspicious behaviour; how they confronted her, and questioned her; what she said in return, and how she looked. Each story is slightly different because each witness is at the heart of her own story. Most of the subjects of this book and the authors of such narratives are anonymous. Many of their stories are short, because they appear only once or twice in the official record, and leave only a few sentences of testimony. Their ages, families and economic circumstances, which would add much to their stories, are often unrecorded and impossible to reconstruct; so is their local

Introduction

15

social context, which might provide a rich and complex picture of disputes, alliances and reputations, like those which have been traced in recent 'micro-histories' of individual cases.53 Given these limits, how is it possible to reconstruct the social worlds and material contexts of gendered bodies? Undoubtedly, the social contexts of particular bodies were highly locally specific. They were framed around individual economic and domestic situations, and interpreted in the light of cultural conditions that could differ considerably from one county to another, between rural and urban areas, and between the literate and those on the margins of literate culture. Some of these differences will become apparent. But the social context in which gendered bodies were lived was also a national one, whose broad outlines transcended many of the differences of age, region, local conditions and even social status. Despite local variations, the social position of servants, the understanding of rape, the response to illicit sex, and the rituals of giving birth were broadly recognisable from Yorkshire to Somerset, and from isolated rural households to dense urban streets. Behind the cacophony of popular beliefs and practices, some overarching convictions made sense of gendered bodies. To look at early modern social relations, families and communities through the prism of gender is to question convictions of difference and hierarchy that, until very recently, have been determinedly seen as natural. In 1979 Keith Wrightson and David Levine's enormously influential study of the village of Terling portrayed a 'local social system' in which educational opportunity, economic success, religious identity and administrative participation were all determined by social rank: the distinction of gender was so basic that it seems to have been barely worth describing.54 The women's history and gender history of the last fifteen years has made such an approach hard (though still not impossible) to sustain. The social history of the gendered body marks another shift in understanding how early modern societies worked. In a commonwealth of families, women's chastity was critical to social order, and reputation was volatile and hotly defended. The relationships between mistresses, masters and servants were underscored by sexual, social and economic stresses. Age, marital status and social position had tangible effects on the body, making single women's bodies particularly sexually vulnerable, and pregnant women especially open. Illegitimacy threatened not just families, but parishes. Household politics, economic concerns, moral panics and cultural tensions combined to put women's bodies in the middle of social relations. The 'common bodies' of the title are those of the common people - the poor, the servants and labourers of rural and urban society. But 'common' also had particular meanings for women: it meant they were sexually available. In 1656 one Somerset single woman described to a magistrate how a local butcher had had sex with her in her father's house, and 'ever since that time kept her common'.55 Others were described as 'as common to him as ditchwater', or 'so

16

Common

bodies

common that any lad might turn her over'.56 Unchastity made a woman's body free to one man but the property of none, and left it unguarded. Other women - lawful wives, virtuous single women - are protected and possessed; owned by one man, their bodies are private property. Except that they were not. The female body was a public affair, the target of official regulation, informal surveillance, and regular, intimate touch by women and men. In some way, all female bodies were common, and all of them risked being called common. This tension between secrecy and openness, between tangibility and opacity, made for irreconcilable tensions both in how women's bodies were imagined, and how they were lived.

ONE

Uncertain knowledge

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the body's workings were expounded in English and in print for the first time. For centuries anatomy had been the province of surgeons and physicians, trained to read and write in Latin; with the growing interest in dissection and anatomical study, the market for cheap print and the scientific innovations of the late seventeenth century came a series of vernacular books that sought to explain nature's secrets to the lay population. A whole genre of medical texts, from cheap palmsized books to costly folio treatises, was dedicated to expounding the greatest mystery of all: 'generation', or reproduction. Simultaneously erotic and instructive, they cited ancient authorities, popular mythology and current arguments, illustrating them with images of dissected bodies, female organs and foetuses. The years of the civil wars and commonwealth, when print censorship was suspended and radicals argued against medical elitism, saw a rapid increase in the publication of self-help guides, cheap medical handbooks and 'midwives' books' which explained the processes of conception, pregnancy and delivery to every reader. Every Woman Her Own Midwife, promised a volume of 1675.1 At the end of the century, the work known as Aristotle's Masterpiece presented readers with a mass of popular ideas and learned opinion on the facts of life; it was reprinted frequently in various editions for the next two hundred years.2 Little of what the books said was new: the basic models of the body remained those of the ancient and medieval world, derived from Aristotle and the Greek physician Galen. The medical discoveries of the seventeenth century did not immediately filter through into popular print, or alter prevailing ideas of the gendered body. But popular medical books offered to those who could read or listen to them a new means of interpreting the body and its ailments through text and diagrams.3 Thomas Laqueur has described the dominant model of sexual difference of this period in stunning detail.4 The medieval and early modern body, he argues, was organised on the ancient principle that men and women were

j\ISro~TLE's

MASTER-PIECE: OR, THE S E C R E T S of G E N E R A T I O N Difplay'd in all the Parts thereof.

CONTAINING I. The Signs of Barrcnneft. i . T h e way of getting a Bay or G i r l . 3. O f the Iikenefc of Children to Parents. 4. O* the Infufioti of the Soul into the Infant. j.OfMontfruousBirths, and the realons thereof. Of the benefit bi Marriage to both Sexes. 7. The Prejudice of unequal Matches. 8. ThedifcoveryofiitUiftictcricy, 9- Thecaufe. and cure ofohe Green-fickftete. 10. A D^courfe of Virginity. 1 1 . How a M t f w ife ought to be qualified. 12. Ducaions a?id Caution's to Midwivcs13. Of t ie Organs. of G-:nW-ttn irr Women. 14. The Fabrick the Womb. 1 f . T h e Ufe and Action of the Genitals, i Signs ot Conception, and whether of a Male or Female. 17 T o difcover . falfe e xceptions. 1 ? . Inftru&ions for Wo«icn with Child. 19. For preventing Mifcarriage. z O. For V Vomen in Child bed. 2 1 . O r ordering New-born infants., and many other very ufeful Particulars. T o which is added, A tford of Advice to both Sexes in the At\ of Copularion! And the Pictures of feveral Mouihuous Births.

Very Ntttjfury JJ"S J far < "" all — tJMidmves, - T^urfes, and ToiutgAflurried Wmttt. JL. V 11 L' K! tl if

Effigks #f a Mud all Hairy, and tbe Infant that was blis\ bjf the Im&miw of jtbeir Parents.

Aristotle s Masterpiece

L 0 N D 0 tfi Printed by F. t . for f . Hoxvy

in

the Year

cum ofaCljfltje tditl) Ruffes bo;n to tfje parity of^fttjelumt inflje C D t t f e o f A u m p to tfte peete of one

and tfefactp*tt

6. From The true discripcion of a Childe with Ruffes, a broadsheet of 1566.

sins were imprinted on the foetus they carried. John Oliver's Present for Teeming Women proposed this meditation: T find that the child in my womb brings many weaknesses and aches upon me; but oh how sad and deplorable are those deeper sicknesses and maladies, which I have brought upon it? Its body . . . partakes unavoidably of my natural pollution . . ,'57 The spiritual unity of mother and child, which caused children to be born in sin, was paralleled in the medical advice to mothers. The causes of monstrous births were understood in the light of the fragile boundaries between pregnant women, their surroundings, their own natures and the foetuses they carried. The female imagination, argued Lemnius, was so powerful that women should 'see nothing that may move their mind to think absurdly'.58 While most medical advice urged women to gratify whatever peculiar tastes they had in pregnancy, they classified those tastes as healthy and safe, or unhealthy and dangerous (like earth or lead), and warned that unwholesome longings, if they were frustrated, could cause abortion or make 'foul impressions' on the child.59 Monstrous births were also a mirror of social relations.60 A number of tales echo the witchcraft stories of the late sixteenth century, where those who spurn beggars' requests for support are bewitched; here, a woman's uncharitableness makes itself felt, either on her foetus, or on that of the woman she refuses. In the story of the 'hog-faced gentlewoman' the child was said to have been bewitched in the womb by an old woman: refused alms by the mother, she

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went away muttering 'As the mother is Hoggish, so swinish shall be the child she goeth withall.'61 Another continental story told of three monsters born to a poor gentlewoman in Flanders, whose richer sister refused her 'womanly charity' when she was pregnant. Grief and rage brought on the poor woman's labour and she was delivered of three 'ill-proportioned children', including a daughter whose flesh mimicked bonelaces and farthingales and who lived only to cry out 'let me not live here in this world of pride, of lust, of murther, and all wickedness'.62 The mother died after giving birth and her 'unnatural sister' was swallowed by an earthquake. One of the stories most frequently told was that of the woman who gave birth to 365 children. Based on the thirteenth-century Margaret, Countess of Hennenberg, it was retold in collections of horrors and ballads in the seventeenth century. In the ballad A Lamenting Lady, preserved by Samuel Pepys, the countess appears as a barren noblewoman, tormented by the sight of a beggar and her twins. Her 'tender body pure and fair/and of a princely frame', fed on 'sweet delicious meats' and 'purest wine' was unable to achieve the 'joys' so readily given to the poor with their 'homely bodies'. The noblewoman turns away the beggar and her children at the door, calling her a strumpet and accusing her of defiling her marriage bed to get such 'pretty babes' (twins being popularly thought to be the result of sex with more than one man). As her babies suck her breasts and cry to see their mother so cruelly treated, the beggarwoman swears revenge: As I am both true and just unto my marriage bed So let God's wondrous works be shown on thee when I am dead. In time, the noblewoman feels the full force of her curse. 'On my body's pampered pride', she laments, 'A fearful judgement shows'. Her womb grows distempered, her cheeks blacken, and she swells to a monstrous size. She sees a vision of the beggarwoman and her two children: At which affright my big swelled womb delivered forth in fear As many children at one time as days were in the year.63 Luckily, they all die, and are buried in one grave, where a monument is erected as a warning against despising the poor. The ballad's moral dwells on the similarities between the bodies of rich and poor women, fed, nurtured and dressed so differently, but all equally fertile and none better qualified than another for the mercy of God's gifts. But its more specific message is a direct commentary on the dangers of jealousy combined with the lack of charity, a fear that was

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widespread enough for it to be seen as motivating some witchcraft accusations. The beggarwoman dies, at least in part because of the noblewoman's refusal to offer food or money to ease her weak, post-childbirth state; the same refusal opens the noblewoman's own body, previously so neat and contained, to God's revenge. Nicholas Culpeper's advice to pregnant women made pointed reference to the vulnerabilities that united them: 'Let rich people know . . . that for their poor neighbours with child that lack necessaries, or what (happily) they have a mind to, they being able to relieve them, the not doing of it, shall by the great God of Heaven and Earth be required another day at their hands . . . rich women are but women, look to your selves, blood hath learn'd the trick to cry for vengeance ever since Abels days.'64 It was a message that stressed both the difference that rank, food and dress made to the reproductive body, and the openness that all maternal bodies shared. The popular literature of monstrous births was at its peak in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; when Mary Toft, the 'rabbit woman of Godalming', delivered her false rabbits in the early eighteenth century, the veracity of her story was hotly disputed, and by the 1750s the idea that a woman's impressions could be passed onto her child had been refuted, at least in medical literature.65 But it remained a powerful idea through the late seventeenth century and probably longer. Samuel Pepys's servant, James Paris DuPlessis, wrote and illustrated a whole volume of 'prodigy' stories, presenting it to Hans Sloane in 1730. Two of them take place in his own family. His first story tells of a monstrous child, born in his parents' house in Paris to family friends. The child's mother had bought an almanac with a story and picture of a monstrous birth, and got immoderately fond of it; her husband burned the book but she bought another, and a third; when her longing was over, 'the mischief was done' and she was delivered of a dead child with two heads. Aged fifteen, DuPlessis found the body himself, he says, buried in a little patch of ground he had been given to garden in. A later story tells of a monstrous child born to his mother-in-law, which took the form of a lobster 'boiled and red': when pregnant, she had longed for a lobster at Leadenhall market which was too expensive to buy, and although her husband (who, 'acquainted with the subject', knew the dangers of refusing women's cravings) had gone back to get it for her, she fainted at the sight of it and the damage was done. She told the story to her son-in-law, who had a painting of the monstrous child done, which she approved, saying it was 'very much like it'.66 A century after the heyday of cheap print and grotesque morality tales, DuPlessis was still telling familiar stories that proved the power of maternal influence. For him, monstrous births have become oddly self-perpetuating, pictures of monsters producing more monsters born to those who dote on the literature of horror.

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Conduct literature and spiritual reflections sought to represent childbirth as the pinnacle of feminine achievment, the nurturing of pious children the highest aim of a woman. Above all their stress was on a civilised maternity: sensible advice and good behaviour would produce good mothers and healthy children. The literature of monstrous births provided an omnipresent 'other' to be protected against, and more basic than all the dangers of pride, sin and meanness that found their way onto the features of foetus was the bestial nature of humanity and the precariousness of civilised reproduction. Advice on sexual intercourse faced the issue at its heart: sixteenth-century guides to marriage adjured husbands and wives to make their intercourse companionable and friendly, to avoid sinking into animal lusts. In a society in which many people still lived cheek by jowl with their animals, the line between human and animal reproduction was not always simple. Advice to mothers warned them of the dangers of getting too close to pets: Lemnius writes of'lascivious women, that use to delight themselves beyond measure with Whelps and Apes, and to carry them in their bosoms, to foster them, to kiss and hug them'.67 His main point here is the danger of the 'imperfect nature' of women taking 'strange impressions' from animals which would make their children deformed; but beneath it is a whole realm of fantasy about women's intimacies with lapdogs as pets, or cats, rabbits or toads as familiars. In the literature of monstrous births, women become the conduit by which bestial features or body parts - in some cases, whole animals - found their way into human reproduction. Seeing a hare could cause a hare-lip; a jockey's wife might give birth to a child with a horse's head.68 Several seventeenth-century accounts retailed the story of a woman with a hog's face, head or nose (Fig. 7), born to a wealthy Dutch couple, who later, according to some stories, brought her to London and offered suitors a £40,000 dowry. None of them, the stories said, could abide her swinish habits.69 Here, too, the grotesque scenarios retailed in cheap print elaborated more familiar and basic understandings: that women's fair looks concealed their bestial natures. And while the horrors of monstrous births have left little evidence of their impact on early modern women, there are many casual references to the bestiality which undercut civilised pregnancy. In seventeenthcentury Somerset, Joan Hallet called her neighbour 'a borowed sow . . . [with] a little pig sucking on her'.70 Katherine Bacon said Margaret West had 'cast her calf and buried it in a muckhill'. Elinor Harrup told Mary Reynolds that she 'rocked the hog in the cradle', and Mary Kniston told Avice Ridge that she had had 'a dog whelp'.71 Comparisons to pigs and cows were more than simple animal analogies, born of the intimacy of humans and animals in agricultural society; they played on the boundaries between human and animal and the ways in which pregnancy might undercut them.72 One mark of beastliness was

A" certaine Relation of the Hog- : facedGentlewoman callcd Miftris Tannafyn Sfyntyr, who was borne at Wirhjbam Whc

a Neuter Towne betweene the Emperonr and the Hollander, Icituate on therivef Rhyne•

*

*

—

can never recover her true (bape,te!l (be be married, See. Alfo relating the caufetM it it jrnce conceivedjiovp her mother caw fo bewitched*

London Printed'by % 0. and are to be fold by F. Gr0ve^t histfc op Oft8n#w-hit neare rt. Se^ukhtts Church 164P. 7. From A certaine Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman (1640). 'Mistris Tannakin Skinker', courted by a gentleman, can respond only in hog-talk; in the text, her parents hide her hog s snout behind a veil but still no suitor can tolerate it.

lust, and women were less able than men to civilise their sexual urges. Breastfeeding, as Joan Hallet's words suggest, threatened to make women look like animals. Multiple births were a further point of stress: litters were characteristic of dogs and pigs and the bestiality of bearing more than one child was further underlined by beliefs that multiple births were caused by having sex with more than one man. James Paris DuPlessis relates a story which warns of precisely this belief: About the middle of April 1690, a woman aged about forty years, which was married not long before, in the parish of Sutton Bangor in the county of Wilts., was delivered of 5 children at a birth in one day, of which two died

'The child in me': perceiving

pregnancy

W

immediately after their birth, before they could be baptized, the other three were baptized, and are healthy, strong, and lively, this woman when she was a maid, used to speak very disdainfully and scornfully of women that brought forth more then one child at a time, she called those mothers bitches, and the plurality of children a litter of brats (or pups), this woman said that she had refused many times very good proffers but would not marry for fears of such accidents, and about the age of forty she thought it convenient to marry, thinking her self out of all danger from any such accident, but she found her self grossly mistaken for her first lying in produced the five above said children. She obeyed the command of our great creator, Increase, multiply and replenish the earth. Though it was sorely against her will and as a punishment for her impiety.73 DuPlessis's retelling manages to mock both the rustic spinster's ignorance of natural facts, and her failure to rise above animal nature herself. In another story he retells an old tale of a Proven9al lady who gave birth to twelve boys and sent her maid to have eleven of them drowned in the river; the maid meets her master, he insists on seeing the 'litter of young puppies' and takes them away to a wetnurse; only when they are grown into 'big and fine young gentlemen' does he bring them home and tell his wife the whole story, in memory of which the family takes the name of 'Wolf'.74 In A Lamenting Lady, whose story is also retold by DuPlessis, the litter of 365 children owe their genesis to a noblewoman's shock at the twins of a beggarwoman. Begging was another point where the definition of humanity was under strain; to represent the children of the poor as litters, pups or whelps did not require a great mental leap. The foreignness of many monstrous birth stories points up another set of concerns, around race and miscegenation. The power of the imagination at conception or in pregnancy could change a child's skin colour: in the final chapter of Aristotle's Masterpiece, a catalogue of monstrous births cites two classical examples. In one, Hippocrates frees a white noblewoman from suspicion of adultery by explaining that in copulation she had fixed her mind on the picture of an Ethiopian: her child was black only because she had thought of a black man when it was conceived. In the other, the Ethiopian queen Persua has a white daughter because 'in the embraces of her [black] husband, she earnestly fixed her eye and mind upon the picture of the fair Andromeda standing opposite to her'.75 The circulation of stories like this provided a counter-narrative to other contemporary myths of blackness: the power of the sun, the blackness of the parents' sperm, or the inherited curse.76 It also directly undercuts the possibilities raised in George Best's explanation of race in 1578, in his account of the voyages of Martin Frobisher. Here blackness is in the blood, not the sun or the imagination:

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I myself have seen an Ethopian as black as coal brought into England who, taking a fair English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father was, although England were his native country, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this blackness proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which was so strong, that neither the nature of the clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, could anything alter.77 For Best, blackness is so powerful that it can never be erased. Not only is it a 'natural infection', but a black father's colour will overcome a white mother's 'good complexion'. Even the good climate of England is powerless. To fears of miscegenation and the persistence of black blood, the stories of Aristotle's Masterpiece perhaps presented a reassuring counter-myth, in which blackness can be imagined in and out of existence. George Best's book also presented another story of blackness, which linked it to the curse of Ham, Noah's disobedient son. The biblical story describes Ham being cursed for uncovering his father's nakedness, but other readings also referred to Ham breaking his father's orders that his sons and their wives abstain from sex while on the ark. It was this story that Best retold in the opening pages of his travel narrative. Ham, so that he could 'craftily' produce the first heirs of the new earth, 'used company with his wife'; in retribution, 'all his posterity after him should be so black and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the world'.78 According to Benjamin Braude, the story of Ham's disobedience, retold in travel narratives like Best's, gained steadily in credibility between the 1590s and the 1620s, becoming a basis for the justification of racism and slavery.79 In Best's text, Noah's admonition to avoid marital sex is distinctly reminiscent of Tudor marriage advice: about the dangers of lustful rather than companionate sex, of sex at forbidden seasons and during menstruation. In all these retellings, Ham's wife is invisible, but it is in her pregnant body that a definition of'black' is produced which conflates insubordination, dangerous ambition, monstrosity and excessive lust. Myths of monstrous births were not just about pregnancy; they were horror stories in which the pregnant body serves as a cipher. But this in itself is important for understanding the meaning of pregnancy in early modern culture. Precisely because they bore so little relation to everyday experiences of pregnancy, monstrous births played powerfully into the idea of women's reproductive bodies as a conduit for revenge, fear and danger. The cultural effect of this idea was to make the pregnant body into a blank tablet on which anything from economic disaster to ungodliness could be inscribed. Dangerous words caused real harm, poisoning the social world of a pregnant woman and endangering her foetus. Anne Tailor submitted a petition against her husband to the

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Preston quarter sessions in 1652, pleading that as well as beating her, when she was pregnant he wished 'that your petitioner might bear (on her body) a spirit or a whelp or that she might be with child with three children: and never live to bear them'. The words were so publicly circulated that she 'had very much ado to procure any womans help in time of her pains.'80 A preacher in Nottinghamshire in 1614 was disciplined by the church courts for terrifying his female parishioners by preaching 'that when a woman conceived with child, it's a serpent by nature' and threatening that 'a child baptised with an unpreaching minister is damned'. One woman who had come specially to hear him preach was terrified; one man said his wife would be still alive if she had not despaired and died hearing his teaching.81 The same concern was there in more mundane scenarios: social relations, words, gifts and conflicts had a tangible effect on pregnancies. The issue of food discussed by so many medical advice writers was more than a domestic question. Many people ate away from home and many women were, like the beggarwoman in the ballad, forced to beg for food; the charity and kindness of neighbours could make all the difference to a pregnancy. In the eighteenth century special attention was paid to the welfare needs of pregnant women and poor mothers, and workhouses and hospitals began to function as temporary shelters for single mothers, but for most of the seventeenth century, the gulf left by the abandonment of medieval habits of charity meant the welfare of poor mothers was met on a haphazard basis. Pregnant women might garner special invitations and attentions. In earlyseventeenth-century Lichfield Mary Ducket visited a neighbour to commission her to make some smocks and biggins for her baby, saying she feared she would have occasion to use them before they were ready; the landlord invited her to supper 'in respect that the said Mary was greatbellied'.82 Judith Awdry, a London wife, told the church court in 1573 that when she had seen her husband's master's wife and his apprentice kissing, they turned and invited her in and gave her a glass of wine, because they saw that she was pregnant.83 But other women, in particular illegitimate mothers, were likely to be less favoured, and the refusal of their requests might threaten not just their health but the child. The case of Elizabeth Wildey, a singlewoman who had stillborn triplets in Lichfield a fortnight before Christmas, 1681, was understood by mother, midwife and neighbours in the context of the dangers of frustrating pregnant women's desires. Margery Watkins, a fifty-year-old wife in whose house Elizabeth had lived before the birth, deposed: she is certain the said children were born before their full time not only because of the smallness and imperfection of them but both because the said Elizabeth Wildey had oftentimes told her this deponent that she accounted till or after Candlemas 1681/2 and that because the said Elizabeth

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Wildey the day before she fell in labour told this deponent that she had seen a piece of beef at Mr George Falconbridge's h o u s e . . . which she had a longing for, a slice of which this deponent immediately after the said Elizabeth's declaration of longing sent to the said Mr Falconbridge for but word being brought to the said Elizabeth Wildey that it was all ate, she . . . fell into strong labour and was the next day delivered of two of her three children. The court who heard this story was not concerned with the blame for the stillbirth, but rather with the evidence for the length of pregnancy: the putative father, John Slader, was being prosecuted for fornication, and Elizabeth's labour came four weeks before the date she had estimated. The convincing story of early labour prompted by frustrated longings was there to prove that the children really were born early, rather than conceived earlier and by a different father. The midwife agreed: 'she might have gone out her time had not she seen beef washing and putting into the pot at Goodwife Faulconbridge's which she longed for'.84 The whole story tells of the perceived vulnerability of pauper pregnancies: if poor mothers could not get the meat they longed for, and they very often could not, they might lose their pregnancies. A similar story of charity denied was told by a Sowerby woman in 1682 to explain a miscarriage that others suspected was an infanticide. Anna Beardall was a poor widow who had already had two illegitimate children; although she had made clothes ready for her child, which she expected at Easter, she had not told her neighbours she was pregnant, explaining that 'she had done so ill before that it would be a trouble to the townsmen when they heard she was with child'. In the first week of March she gave birth to a dead child; examined by the magistrate she explained that a week before the birth, on a Saturday, she 'went to Abraham Ryleys and thought to have begged a bit of a beef collop', but was refused and 'because she had none she thinks that did her hurt'. The following Friday she was 'so sore and so heavy' that she thought the child was dead, and on Monday, though she did not know she was in labour, she was 'suddenly taken' and bore the child before any help came.85 The stories that poor women told give another side to the reassuring medical advice that pregnant women be nurtured and carefully fed: there was nobody to meet their desires. They also counter the suggestions of some midwives and physicians that rich and poor mothers required different feeding, and that the poor should be contented with a weaker diet: these poor mothers wanted beef, not the food of the poor. To modern historians, the openness of the pregnant body has been evidence of the special care for female welfare that doctors, midwives, husbands, family and neighbours gave pregnant women. Such care has seemed a welcome respite in the mass of household advice which focuses on the subordination of wives

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to their husbands. Here, the wishes of women are elevated to commands, their desires attended to above all else. Adrian Wilson has compared the nurturing of women in the time of pregnancy and childbirth to Natalie Davis s reading of charivari ritual: for a brief moment, women are on top.86 Gail Kern Paster agrees: 'a desired pregnancy could open up a space within the confines of patriarchal marriage for the expansion or even momentary hegemony of female desire'.87 Ulinka Rublack has described an understanding of pregnancy that gave political and social meaning to pregnant women's special vulnerability: in Germany, councils gave cheap meat to pregnant women and sought to protect them from the damages of warfare.88 This does not seem to have happened in England. More broadly, these overwhelmingly positive accounts of the meanings of pregnancy elide another set of experiences: those of the poor and the single, for whom pregnancy was unlikely to bring favourable treatment or special status, but provoked their neighbours to threats or brutality as much as charity. Even for married women, the status that pregnancy brought was doubleedged. Pregnancy did not necessarily bring domestic power. Rather, the special treatment of pregnant women fits into the habitual understanding of the female body as open and public. This was hardly a wholly empowering idea, and it could make both married and single women extremely vulnerable: to dangerous words, to poor food, and to intrusive touch. Elizabeth Catterall, a Yorkshire gentleman's wife, miscarried at sixteen weeks of pregnancy in December 1655. She described the circumstances to magistrates for the assizes. On the 23 December last as she was walking down Skipton town street there came to her one William Hodgson . . . a shoemaker, who presently laid his hand upon her belly and gripping it fast in his hand told her this informant that he thought she would be as big as Benson wife and from thence she went to the burial of a child and found her self not well but said nothing to any body thinking she should be better again in a short space and for that she was persuaded the said Hodgson intended her no harm. But she saith that though she did often go abroad and rid ten miles to a market town yet she had not her health, and that about a fortnight before Candlemas last she was delivered of a dead child being but about sixteen weeks gone with child, but she saith that she did never perceive her self to be with quick child yet saith that the aforesaid grip given her by the said William Hodgson was the cause of her sudden miscarrying.89 Elizabeth CatteralFs pregnancy exposed her, a gentlewoman whose body was surely expected to be relatively protected from public touch, to the groping hands of a shoemaker. Unlike the single women who hid their pregnancies as long as possible, her pregnancy was publicly acknowledged - indeed, it was this very fact that led to the miscarriage. As well, she must have been thinking

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and praying about childbirth and mortality: in between William Hodgson's assault and the miscarriage, she went to a child's funeral. After the miscarriage, and in danger of death herself, she charged William Hodgson with the child's death, and told the minister, who went to confront Hodgson. Frances Mountaine, a butcher's wife, complained of a more vicious assault by John Holt, a clerk, in Alverthorpe in 1670. He took the bridle of her horse and struck her switch out of her hand, and took her by the foot, endeavouring to throw her off her horse, following her a little further put his hand up her coats & pinckt her by the belly & bruised her belly, she . . . being great with child, Immediately after pluckt open her waistcoat & pickt her by the breasts & also bruised her breasts.90 Holt's attention to breast and belly made his assault both sexual and a violent, masculine inversion of a midwife's search. Frances Mountaine spent the next six weeks indoors and was delivered, six weeks early, of a girl who was 'black and bruised', she thought from John Holt's pinches. John Holt's assumption of a midwife's prerogatives was not unique. Other men used words to assert the same power over pregnant women. Elizabeth Linton testified in 1647 that she was abused by Stephen Maultas, threatening 'I will be thy midwife and I will make you spew forth your child.'91 Women might fight in the same way. In Somerset two married women, Joan Willis and Susan Ram, fell into a fight, and Joan said to Susan, 'I hear you are with child of a young ram, I will see whether it be so or no.'92 Uncovering pregnancy could be part of the currency of social conflict. Not much in the experiences of pregnant women in seventeenth-century England overturned the dynamics of patriarchal order. Rather than guaranteeing women special treatment, what pregnancy brought was a state of openness which could physically endanger women as well as protect them. For married women, it might be a reminder of the sexual vulnerability of maidenhood and service; for single women, it reinforced their subordination to the physical authority of mistresses and neighbours. For all women, pregnancy brought them close to fears of mortality, of injury and deformity, and of divine judgement. It gave women's desires an urgency that might bring special treatment, as communities vied to provide them with the food and drink they needed for healthy births; but those desires were also representative of the dangers of the female body.

Denying pregnancy Outside marriage, pregnancy brought danger and discredit. For women without the option of marriage, the very fact of pregnancy could be hard to

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realise. The statute 'to prevent the murthering of bastard children of 1624, which made infanticide a capital offence, addressed itself specifically to the fear that single women, driven by shame and poverty, would conceal their pregnancies and allow their newborn children to die, rather than admit their state. In the eyes of early modern authorities, the concealment of pregnancy not only impeded punishment and made it impossible to shift women from parishes before they gave birth, but it also threatened infanticide. Moral commentators and lawmakers of the early seventeenth century were probably more worried about infanticide than circumstances warranted. There was little evidence that newborn child murder was really occurring in large numbers, but there was no proof either way, and this itself was troubling for legislators. The cumbersome wording of the 1624 statute made absolutely explicit the problems of proof, imagining great numbers of concealed births: many lewd women that have been delivered of bastard children, to avoid their shame and to escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the death of their children and after if the child be found dead the said women do allege that the said child was born dead; whereas it falleth out sometimes (although hardly is it to be proved) that the said child or children were murthered by the said women their lewd mothers or by their assent or procurement.93 Because concealment was the crime, the provisions of the act made it, uniquely, possible to presume guilt from an absence of evidence. Enough women were prosecuted for infanticide that the crime had a significant public profile: in Essex, for example, surviving assize files suggest at least one case a year.94 Pamphlets and broadsides circulated tales of infanticides that were rooted in familiar scenarios of economic distress and domestic disorder. In one, the desperate wife of a drunkard and wastrel kills her children to save them from slow famine; in another a poor widow abandoned by the baker who got her pregnant and promised her support lets her child die 'for want of suitable support'.95 The Bloudy Mother, published in 1609, recounted the story of Jane Hattersley, a Sussex servant whose long sexual relationship with her master produced four illegitimate children, three of which she killed. These narratives underlined the potential for concealing pregnancy, as well as murder. Hattersley is described as concealing her pregnancies with 'loose lacing, tucking and other odd tricks'; she recovers swiftly from giving birth, bearing witness to the popular belief that 'such common pieces can bear it out better then true and lawful bearers of children can'.96 Mary Goodenough hid her pregnancy and gave birth in secret, shutting her other children out of the room.97 Part of the work of murder pamphlets, particularly of those about infanticide, was to expose secrets and teach the observant to look for clues; one of their messages was that the denial of pregnancy could lead to the denial of a child's life.

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In pamphlets and in real communities, those charged with preventing dangerous concealment were other women. Those closest to a pregnant woman were sometimes complicit in her secrecy: in infanticide trials sisters, other servants and mistresses often testified that despite sharing beds or bedrooms with the accused, they had known nothing. Isabel Thompson was accused in Yorkshire in 1656, when one of her neighbours pulled what he thought was 'a pig in a poke' out of the water and found it was a dead child. Her two sisters, in whose houses Isabel had stayed during and after the birth, testified that they had never suspected her pregnancy, although there had been an 'alteration in her, because she had 'nature obstructed' for a year beforehand; they thought her pains were colic. What they were refusing to see was the evidence of unchastity: one sister ended her examination with the words, [she] 'denies to have seen or heard anything whereby she might otherwise judge of her than an honest woman'. Isabel's own examination, taken when she was imprisoned in York Castle, declared that she had been delivered of a stillborn child, laid it in her bed for a week, and then wrapped it in a piece of cloth and thrown it into the river.98 Those outside the household were readier to confront, challenge and search those they suspected of illegitimate pregnancy. When Susanna Vailes, a widow, was suspected of infanticide in Hull in 1668, witnesses' informations testified to the ways rumours and observations circulated. Margaret Fell noticed Susanna in church: '[I] perceived her body to be much grown.' Another wife with her agreed with her that Susanna was with child, but they did not dare 'ascertain' it. Three weeks later Magdalen Stockwell observed that 'she thought that Susanna Vailes was with child, if ever she [Magdalen] . . . had had a child'. When the accusation came to court, another three weeks later, Grace Barrowcliffe testified that 'Susanna Vailes was of late very big bellied, and now was grown very swampe again, and before this her . . . neighbours bid her [Grace] several times look at Susanna Vailes for she was very grown.' Around the same time, Sibel Walker, a spinster who was a surgeon's servant, told Susanna 'that she looked very handsome, and did think she was smaller in her body than formerly'.99 Concealment was not always a conscious business. The impossibility of single motherhood could make women literally refuse to believe themselves pregnant. If some women decided to conceal their pregnancies, as Anne Mast did to protect herself from the parish's disapproval, others may have suppressed even their own knowledge of what was happening. Margery Elworthy, examined by the Somerset quarter sessions in 1630, testified that she had been sent on an errand by her mistress to a man who 'persuaded her to give way to the satisfying of his lust'. She said she did not know that she had become pregnant; 'when the throws of her travail came upon her, she did think that wind only was the cause thereof'. She gave birth to a child that had 'no life or motion'

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which she wrapped in her underpetticoat and laid on the dunghill by her mistress's house.100 Margery Elworthy's child would have quickened long before, but she managed not to recognise the internal signs that were meant to be a woman's best guide. What she said to the court may have been a desperate defence: if you did not know you were pregnant, you could not help keeping it secret. But it echoes so many other stories, modern and early modern, of the suppression of pregnancy, that it is worth listening to. Modern medicine recognises one desperate response to unwanted pregnancy as a 'dissociative reaction', by which women, especially young women, suppress the knowledge of pregnancy throughout a whole nine months, and sometimes after birth.101 Twentieth-century women accused of neonaticide have generally been those who were least prepared to be pregnant, and they describe being unable to believe what was happening to their bodies, refusing to accept the signs of pregnancy and eventually, denying labour and the child itself.102 An unwillingness to be pregnant can result in a mental and even physical suppression of symptoms and their knowledge. In early modern culture, the precariousness with which pregnancy was regarded, as a developing, uncertain state rather than a decisive one, might well have constituted good preconditions for such a refusal to acknowledge pregnancy. The exclusion of single women from married women's exchanges of reproductive knowledge and stories would reinforce them: it was possible for young women to know very little about what signified pregnancy. The early modern perception of the fertile body and the experience of pregnancy means that we barely need a 'dissociative reaction' to explain how and why early modern women concealed their pregnancies. It was much less of a leap for an early modern woman to ignore the signs of pregnancy than it is for most modern women. For most women, the precarious, ambiguous sense of early pregnancy shifted, with quickening, into a firmer recognition. But some refused that knowledge, and some concealed it. For them, the shapelessness of early pregnancy might make it something inadmissible, which ended in a secret burial, a bundle thrown into the river, or something left in a privy.103 Single women defending themselves against accusations of infanticide frequently refused the description 'child', describing instead 'scapes' or 'slips' that they could not recognise as children. Isabel Barton, suspected of infanticide in Yorkshire in 1663, denied having a child but acknowledged that a man 'ravished' her in June, that her body 'grew big', and that a week before Christmas she had 'a miscarriage'; she said she 'never was with quick child and . . . what she was delivered of had no shape'.104 Anne Peace, similarly, described the miscarriage that she had at about five months' pregnant as 'a thing like a gristle' which passed from her body; she did not know what it was. Under further examination, though, she described it as 'a man child dead and still born being then about the half birth'. At two different moments, she provided two quite

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different descriptions of what she had borne. What these women said was shaped by their position: not knowing was the only way to explain not tending to the newborn child. But it also made sense in the light of contemporary understandings of pregnancy. The process of legal confrontation was also, for some women, what forced them to tell a different story, transforming puzzling growths and shapeless matter into solid pregnancies, miscarriages and births. Once confronted by the legal process and the accusations of neighbours, the inchoate experiences of secret pregnancies were forcibly shaped into narratives about real births and deaths. It was also the attitudes of the courts which helped define abortion as the 'making away' of a child, rather than the clearing of a blockage. While abortion was only technically illegal after quickening, and infanticide only possible after the child was fully out of the mother's body, courts frequently recorded the attempts of single women to procure abortions earlier in pregnancy, treating it as further evidence of sexual crime: thus, the list of complaints against a widow and a married man in Worcestershire in 1661 included, as well as the popular fame of their incontinency, the great suspicion and fear that she hath a design to destroy her child, there having been savin found in her bed'.105 (Taking savin, or juniper, was the best-known way of procuring abortion.) The courts attended even more carefully to abortions after quickening, and took note of who had provided them. In Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1669, Mary Browne admitted that she had had a stillborn child after consulting Jane Womersley, a local widow, who gave her 'something' to destroy the child; she admitted, too, that she had told both the child's father and Jane Womersley that the child was already quick, and that she had done the same three years before.106 Midwives, mistresses, masters and lovers were all named as accomplices. Elizabeth Brian, a prisoner in Bridewell in 1605, told the governors that the matron had given her a warm drink in a pewter pot 'and she thinks that destroyed the child within her'.107 Clare Horsely, a Kent servant, petitioned against her master that he had promised her marriage, got her with child, and 'counselled me for to take a certain thing whereby to destroy it'.108 Sara Anderson, sent to the London Bridewell in 1607 for having a bastard, admitted the birth of the child, named the father, and said that he 'gave her counsel to make away her child in her and prescribed her a drink for that purpose'.109 Far from describing pregnancy in vague terms, these testimonies were apparently perfectly clear about the destruction of a child in the womb. If the words came from court officials, they suggest that the range of available interpretations of pregnancy was wide, and legal process was one of the things that helped people define it. Abortion and infanticide confronted the early modern legal system - as they still do - with problems of definition: pregnancy and childbirth did not readily fit into discrete stages, and the points at which life started and at which a child could be deemed to be independent

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of its mother were debatable. Women who started with stories that fitted a more popular model, of preventing a child forming or clearing a blocked menstrual system, were likely to end up, as they were examined by a magistrate, with a narrative in which, much more explicitly, a child was destroyed in the womb. This elasticity of representation made it possible, sometimes, to use the available narratives to manoeuvre around otherwise damning circumstances. In 1663 Gertrude Law of Rotherham was observed by her neighbours to have grown 'big'. Two of them asked her if she was with child and she replied 'if she was it would come to light'. Then, she suddenly 'lost her great belly', and her neighbours decided they had been wrong; she told one that 'she had not been with child, but her swelling was occasioned by something else'. Five months later, the body of a child was found in a well in her street. Confronted by other women, Gertrude maintained her story of a swelling, deposing that 'about twenty weeks ago she was much swelled in her body by reason that for the space of eighteen weeks before that time she had not had the benefit of nature after the custom of women'.110 She denied having had a child within the last three and a half years; her words suggest she had had a child before that, and she was likelier to recognise what the signs of swelling and loss of periods meant. At the same time, her account of events meshed perfectly with popular thinking about pregnancy, in which certainty was only attained late, after quickening, and missing periods were not so much a sign of early pregnancy as a condition in itself which might, later, be interpreted as a quick child. The same flexibility of interpretation was pivotal to the very public case of Anne Greene, the woman who survived being hanged for infanticide in Oxford in 1650. In the subsequent reassessment of Greene's case, midwives testified that she had had a miscarriage after no more than seventeen weeks, and physicians argued that 'a child of that age may suddenly slip away and not be felt'. In her own petition Greene argued that she could not make known her pregnancy and delivery as the law required because she did not recognise what had happened herself, 'not knowing that she was delivered'. Her supporters challenged the evidence that her prosecutors had taken as proof of infanticide: she was not 10 weeks without the usual courses of women, before she had those continual Issues which lasted for a Month together: which long and great evacuation might make her judge, that it was nothing else but a flux of those humours which for ten weeks before had been suppressed; And that the child which fell from her unawares, was nothing but a lump of the same matter coagulated.111 Like the prayers for childbirth, this vision of pregnancy as coagulated matter echoed medical descriptions of reproduction. Across all these discourses, early

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pregnancy was visualised in terms that made formlessness concrete: as flux, issue or lump, which only slowly took shape as an infant. The gradual recognition which made pregnancies real left even wellqualified observers unsure of what they were seeing. Growing bellies could be interpreted in many ways: extra clothes, wind, or a body swollen by illness. Late in pregnancy, another sign augmented the belly: milk in the breasts. Medical literature treated this as an orthodox sign of a quick pregnancy, and it was the first thing midwives searched for in women suspected of infanticide; but this, too, was hard to prove. In Devon in 1646, Mary Warrin, a single woman suspected of being pregnant, was examined by a midwife who said 'that she having milk in her breast was such a thing as she never saw except there had been some issue, but for her being now with child she conceives not, but as for any other mark or sign . . . she finds none.'112 In the case of Elizabeth Chadwick, a widow of two years who was suspected of having a child, the matrons who examined her differed. Her neighbour Elizabeth Atkinson searched her and reported that 'her body was much settled, from what it was the day before' and that searching the house, she had found 'that much water had gone from her'; a second search, with other women, revealed 'signs that she had a child lately' and 'her breast... full of milk'. Another witness said that she thought Chadwick had had a child within a month, but several others 'found no cause to believe that she was with child' and were 'satisfied that her illness proceeded from some other cause'.113 Elizabeth herself said that Elizabeth Atkinson was accusing her wrongfully because 'there had been some differences' between them. In Susanna Vailes's case, one midwife, Philippa Bedell, concluded 'it is a hard thing to judge upon a woman b u t . . . her breasts have been renned for her milk is sweet, and with pains taking she might give suck . . . she thinks [she] hath not been six years without a child, nor t w o , . . . nor one year her milk is so good, b u t . . . hath not born a child within a week, but in three or four weeks time there may be an alteration in her body'. Bedell added that 'she put some questions to Susanna Vailes to which she answered she was always so but [she] saith that women do not always use to be so, but she knoweth not her constitution'. The other midwife who examined Vailes said that 'her milk was good, and . . . [she] might have had a child within few years and . . . the custom of women was upon her . . . this week, which may occasion her milk'.114 Ultimately, no one could really know a woman's peculiar constitution. Even the most apparently incontrovertible signs could be denied or concealed. Sarah Gilbert, a single woman in late-seventeenth-century Derbyshire, was suspected by her neighbours of having several bastards by William Bower. They testified before the church court that she had done all she could to conceal the births. One woman deposed that Sarah had been conveyed out of the parish by Bower when in labour; she was given her linen to wash and

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believed she saw stains from childbirth on it. The same woman testified that when she was pregnant, Sarah 'doth usually . . . keep within doors and will not be seen, that when she was delivered, 'she keeps her children so close up that they are never to be seen except by an accident', and that 'it is generally reported and believed by the neighbourhood that she hath had seven children by the articulate Bower and kept them all up after the same manner'. Another said that Sarah called her children by other names to disguise their identity. One man said that when she was pregnant, she would hide herself behind a half door to keep her body out of sight, and if she was forced to go out, 'she gathered her clothes all on a ruch or bundle before her belly to hide the same'. According to another, when Sarah came to ask if she could live in his house, 'she brought one of her base children with her and laid it to her breast' to convince him that she was 'not so far gone with child as she proved to be'. Other evidence included children's linens hung on the hedge, 'a little chair to peg a child in and gauds or baubles such as children play with'. For much of this time, Sarah Gilbert lived with her mother; when she moved, she said she was the wife of a Lancashire man. 115 Both of these claims offered her some protection against more intensive neighbourhood surveillance, but she remained, apparently, an object of deep suspicion - although no one was able to prove her alleged illegitimacies. The bodily deceits in which she was said to have engaged suggest a culture in which both men and women were proficient in reading the body's signs, knowing, for example, that breast-feeding and advanced pregnancy were incompatible. In the end, though, none of those signs were reliable: all could be concealed or counterfeited. Bodies were also hard to predict. Even now the timing of labour is one of the last features of childbirth to fit into a structured, predictable framework. In early modern England, although forty weeks was firmly established as the length of pregnancy, few people expected to be able to estimate delivery dates precisely.116 In most pregnancies, the exact timing of birth was not of great concern; while women might debate whether or not they had gone the full forty weeks, it was often impossible either to track the exact date of conception or forecast the exact day or week the child would be born. 117 But for single women timing was crucial: they had to be able to give a date for conception and a partner who fitted the date.118 Although one pregnant woman told the magistrate she 'did not remember the day for she was in hopes there would be no occasion for it', most were ready with a reference to one specific occasion of sex and a forecast of their due date.119 Katherine Vincent told the Somerset sessions she had conceived 'the night after Becket's day', and she calculated the child was due in seven weeks. Dorothy Weeks knew she had conceived '16 weeks before on a Sunday'.120 Jane Williams, examined five years after she had her child, remembered two specific dates when she might have conceived.121 These women remembered because they had to: illegitimate pregnancies required

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traceable fathers, and fathers were best pinned down by date. To protect themselves, men, too, occasionally kept a record. Dorothy Cornish deposed that John Eyles 'took note at the second time he had carnal copulation with her in his table book at what time the birth of the child would be', promising to marry her if she got pregnant by him.122 John Hills, named as father by Rebecca Finnes in Kent in 1652, said 'she must be very forward if it be mine'.123 And Rose Arnold, a Lincoln servant, described how, when she told her masters son she was with child by him, he responded, 'I know so much by my calendar.' Her pregnancy was just becoming visible, so he was probably making his estimate from that, rather than knowing she had stopped menstruating. His response was to suggest a remedy: 'I have read in a book that if a woman in such a case will but immediately drink a draught of well water it would cure her of such a disease.' Then he tried to push her into the well.124 Everyone involved in illegitimate pregnancies was ready to air their ideas about dates and timing. Neighbours made slanderous suggestions: in London in 1630 Ann Cooke sued another woman for saying 'I did not kittle before my time.'125 Midwives made judgements too: Margaret Marrys, delivering a woman in Somerset in 1635, questioned her about the father several times because the dates she gave were too early for her delivery date; she told the woman 'you can be before your time but not after it'.126 The medical and popular theory that seven months' children usually lived, cited in at least one seventeenth-century case, complicated matters further, and witnesses to premature or stillbirths might have to estimate age from the presence or absence of nails and hair.127 Magistrates were also asked to decide. In Kent in January 1602 Dorothy Kemsley admitted keeping company with two men, but insisted that her child's father was the son of her master, who had lain with her once, thirty-five weeks before. The examining magistrate referred the decision 'which of these two men is to be judged the reputed father, I leave to the censure of the Bench'. Dorothy did not give birth until March 1602, giving her, as someone noted on her examination, a pregnancy of forty-five weeks and four days, nearly six weeks too long.128 Other magistrates made firmer estimates. Margaret Ray, at the centre of a paternity dispute in Essex in 1637, told a neighbour that 'although she came too soon by a fortnight according to the computation of the Lord Gray when he examined her, yet the said Lord Gray said that such a young woman as she was might come a fortnight before her time, in regard of the misery she had endured'.129 In all these accounts, an unrealistically rigid sense of the length of pregnancy was invoked. To be delivered two weeks before time was extraordinary; to be delivered after it was, according to one account, impossible. The statements that those surrounding pregnant women made about the length of pregnancy were, in practice, no more accurate than those of the medical writers who declared that a seven-months child was likelier to survive than an eight-months one. Both were operating to

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a set of logical rules that required a greater consistency than the realities of reproduction and the uncertainties of the female body could provide. The question of timing was most obviously a problem in the case of illegitimate pregnancy, but it also arose for married women with absent husbands and for widows, whose neighbours were ready to speak out if they bore children too long after their husbands had gone. In Stepney in 1614 Susan Chaddock looked in the chamber pot of Elizabeth Barwick, a sailor's wife whose husband was away, and pronounced 'whosoever's water that was they were with child'.130 The two went on to sue each other in a series of defamation suits. In Essex in 1613 Margaret Cave was presented at the church courts for saying 'that if John Browne's widow were brought a bed by such a time she should be of good cheer for though her husband were dead yet the father of the child was alive'.131 Pregnancy was always debatable. Even quickening was not always decisive. Some women felt and announced themselves pregnant early on; others came to a gradual recognition; some suppressed everything. The flexibility of pregnancy was particularly significant for women whose economic and social situations made pregnancy so disastrous that they could barely believe in it; but it shaped other experiences too. Dorothy Tinsley, a married woman in Cumberland in 1696, found herself to be delivered of'something, she knew not what'. Her neighbours had watched her growing belly with suspicion, but she had apparently made no public acknowledgement of pregnancy or preparation for the child; her husband said 'he knoweth not whether his wife was with child or not, but owneth that she had a great belly, but that he never felt any child to stir therein'.132 Concealing pregnancy was always taken to be a single woman's crime, but married women, too, could ignore or suppress pregnancy. The uncertainty of pregnancy made women's feelings the best guide: only they could feel quickening, or notice the subtle bodily changes that marked the transition from congealed matter to live child. But pregnancy carried great political, social and cultural weight, and women's words were not always enough. When pregnancy came into question, other women, putative fathers, magistrates and neighbours all had their say. The honour culture of early modern gender relations, manifested to some degree through all ranks of society, was founded on two beliefs: that the paternity of children mattered, and that neither women's words nor their bodies furnished reliable evidence of their continence. All the legal provisions for illegitimacy and infanticide and the less formal initiatives of women and neighbours addressed exactly this issue, and so did the less formal interventions of women searchers. None of them resolved the uncertainties of pregnancy: the female body was ultimately unreadable, and its mysteries could mean sin, crime, disorder or murder. Looking at the radically different world in which early modern women

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conceived and carried their pregnancies, it is easy to idealise the experience of pregnancy without technology. Feminist critiques of the ways that technological intervention medicalises childbirth and seems to alienate women from their own bodies are apt to assume another, better, world, in which women make their own sense of their bodies.133 But early modern pregnancy did not necessarily work like this. There is almost nothing left to tell us how early modern women experienced the transformation of their bodies in pregnancy. A great belly' was admired when it was welcome - one gentry woman wrote to her daughter in 1680 'I am glad to hear the great belly thrives so well I wish it had been at a reasonable distance that I might have seen it.'134 It is harder to grasp the meaning pregnancy might have for subjectivity. In the modern world, pregnancy can challenge the notion of individual subjectivity, and the boundaries between self, others, and the wider world.135 In a culture with a less-developed notion of the boundaries of the individual and a later recognition of pregnancy, we might speculate that the relationship between foetus and mother was much simpler. But stories of infanticide and monstrous birth suggest other complexities. The range and flexibility of early modern understandings, while it might give women some room for manoeuvre in thinking through pregnancy, could also be disempowering. The uncertainty of bodily knowledge, for example, legitimised physical interventions by other women and by men. And while much of the early modern culture of pregnancy looks radically different to modern understandings, some of it is suprisingly familiar. The ideas which made pregnant women responsible for foetal health also contributed to a model of mothers as unreliable and dangerous without proper guidance; the spectre of monstrous birth made mothers an abstract trope for the effects of human corruption on the world, and warned of the specific ways women could harm the children they carried. As much as maternity was valued, the physical, economic and social vulnerabilities of pregnant women brought disabling risks and fears. The alienation of pregnant women from their bodies is hardly unique to late modern culture: it is the legacy of much deeper habits of thinking about the female body.

FIVE

Childbed conflicts

On 16 March 1679, a servant in Holborn entered her mistress's chamber to find a dreadful ghost sitting on the cupboard, with a ghastly countenance and belching flames of fire. The ghost told her not to be afraid, but to tell her mistress 'that she should take up two tiles in the hearth, and under them should find a board and what she found beneath, that she should bury'. Then she vanished in a flash of lightning. The servant and her mistress and master dug as they were told, and discovered the bones of two children. The ghost was that of a midwife, Mrs Adkins, who had died six months before and had haunted the house since; the secret that was uncovered was that, with the 'extraordinary subtility and private policy' that caused her to be admired in her lifetime, she had delivered single women of their illegitimate children 'who to save their mothers credits had been murthered, and buried there'.1 In a ballad and a broadside, this story was spread across the country. In this case, as in other ghost stories, spirits came back to expose hidden misdeeds. The secrets that the midwife's ghost uncovered stood for more than those two infants' bodies: beneath them, it could be conjectured, lay many more secret births and hidden stories of illegitimacy. In the seventeenth century, as fears about illegitimacy and infanticide were increasing, stories like this were a feature of oral and print culture. All the complex rituals that made giving birth a public ceremony, with place and participation carefully prescribed, could be threatened by evasion, deceit, and the 'subtlety' of women. Recent historians have done much to reconstruct the rituals of childbirth in early modern England. It was, as Adrian Wilson has argued, both a social and a bodily experience, organised around ceremonies of spatial enclosure and social participation. Childbirth was meant to take place in an enclosed room, apart from the rest of the household; thick curtains kept out light and air. Women were delivered in the presence of other women, under the supervision of one or more midwives and with the attendance of invited neighbours and family; not until the eighteenth century, when men-midwives began to usurp

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the place of women midwives, was the all-female world of the birthroom seriously challenged. For four weeks after the birth, the period of lying-in kept the new mother in bed or in the house, until the ceremony of churching symbolically reintegrated her into a mixed social world.2 For Wilson as for other scholars, the rituals of reproduction seem to provide a uniquely supportive and validating atmosphere for women, in which an all-female environment protects the labouring woman and the new mother from the outside world, from her husband's demands, and from domestic tasks. For one short period, her needs are paramount, and the series of rituals, from summoning the neighbours to churching, serves to fulfil them. This chapter suggests a less optimistic reading of women's experiences of childbirth. Our knowledge of reproductive rituals comes almost entirely from prescriptive and literary sources, or - occasionally - from the autobiographical records of the middling sort and the elite. It is hard to tell how many women actually followed the prescriptions. For many, lying-in for a month was probably impracticable. Equally important is what these rituals meant to the participants. A closer examination of the dynamics between women at lyings-in suggests that the all-female world of childbirth could be beset by conflicts and tensions. This was not a world in which all-female environments were necessarily associated with support and validation; these same women would have participated in censuring other women's immorality, disciplining servants, gossiping and slandering, and disputing with family members and neighbours. The divisions between women that helped enforce gender order outside the birthroom were likely to be reinforced inside it. While midwives' books, medical advice, maternal wisdom and printed images depicted an ideal ritual for labour and lying-in, horror stories like that of the Midwife's Ghost told another tale, about what happened when those rituals were evaded, when birth was concealed, or counterfeited. Stories of secret, illegitimate and murderous births circulated widely: in ballads and broadsides, in depositions, in parliamentary debates, in rumour from the royal court to the parish church. They reinforced the necessity of proper rituals for childbirth, and they exposed concerns that were not unique to single women and horror stories, but part of the whole culture of childbirth. Many of the births discussed here - although not all - took place in uniquely difficult circumstances; others are better recorded because they happened in richer households. The experiences of poor married women are perhaps the hardest to recover. But illegitimacy and even infanticide were familiar scenarios to early modern communities, and they involved many women other than single mothers. The conflicts they brought testify to a world in which the collectivity of women was not always nurturing, but divisive and fearful. The ubiquity of these other stories meant that childbirth rituals had many sides.

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Privacy For early modern commentators, the privacy of the birthroom was essential. It was construed most of all as protection from the outside world and from the sight of men; male intrusions into the birthing chamber were disorderly, lewd and uncivilised. In 1633 the archdeacons court of Oxfordshire prosecuted a midwife who had been accompanied in the birth room by her male servant, dressed - with the midwife's daughter's help - as a woman.3 Properly private birth was also one of the characterising features of English civilisation, of white, Christian women. Samuel Purchas's early-seventeenth-century account of the customs of Guinea noted the shameful openness of African women at childbirth: they were, he said, 'unfaithful Secretaries in Natures most hidden secrets, using in the sight of men, women, boys, and girls, to be delivered of their children'.4 In England, those who were excluded from the civilising rituals of birth in private were the poor and the single. In seventeenth-century London the poorest women gave birth in the fields on the city's borders, or the 'cages' that functioned as local prisons. One woman gave birth to her child in a church porch, another was delivered suddenly at the gate of a magistrate on her way to get a paternity order; a vagrant woman had twins, stillborn, 'in the streets near the cross keys'.5 In 1602 one woman who had been delivered of a child in Moorfields and had lain in for only two days was summoned to Bridewell to explain herself: she justified herself saying that she had had a midwife, and had a husband who was the child's father. She was ordered to be detained until she could provide sureties.6 The publicity of labour was not just a matter of medical help and morale. It also constituted a guarantee against secret births and concealed infanticides. Without witnesses, there might be no proof of the difference between stillbirth and infanticide. The 'lung test', when the child's body was floated to see if it had ever drawn breath, was recognised to be inconclusive; testimonies of midwives or other women who had witnessed the birth were the best evidence. From 1624, legislation against infanticide defined secrecy as a characteristic feature of the pregnancies and labours of single women; midwives' oaths bound them to prevent any woman from being 'delivered secretly', and to perform their work in front of two or three witnesses.7 Popular broadsides and ballads played on the fears addressed by legislation, telling stories of secret births and infanticidal mothers or midwives. Against this backdrop, some communities confronted the trauma of infanticide in their midst. In 1664 Sissily Linscale, a servant in a Yorkshire market town, told her own story of a secret birth she had witnessed at her cousin's house. She kept her secret for a year, but then, angered by her cousin

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speaking abusively of her master, told him of it, and through him it reached the assizes. Sissily deposed that some time about lent was twelve months she was going for her kine, and she heard a great cry at Jane Linscales and so went in to know what was the matter, and there she found Ann Linscale sett in a chair crying out back and body, and the said Ann sent her the said Sissily, for Elizabeth Agarr, and she not being at home, the said Siss[ily] went to her cows and as she came back she met Elizabeth Agarr, and told her Ann Linscale would speak with her, then the said Agar went to the said Ann, and seeing her ill, she went from that house to her owne house, and came back with a bottle and a paper, and made Ann Linscale drink that in the bottle and she took something out of the paper, and cowled it up into lumps and made the said Ann Linscale swallow them. Upon this she the said Ann Linscale was delivered of a child which had a little life in it then . . . and the said Elizabeth Agarr took the said child from her, and delivered it to the said Em Linscale who wrapped it in a cloth, upon this, the said Agarr, and the said Ann whispered together, and after Em carried the child in to the garth behind the house, and buried it, about sunsetting, this Informant and a child seeing her do this they cried over it. She saith further that the child wanted a leg, and one finger or two, but how it came to be so she knew not, and being asked why she did no sooner reveal it, she said, she durst not, for they did very much threaten her, and being asked why she revealed it then she said because the above said Agarr did abuse her master whom she then told it to 8c not before, and further she saith not. Sissily's master, repeating the story which she had told him, added to her deposition, reporting that Sissily had gone back to confront her aunt and cousin, who had threatened to 'pull her throat out', and that Elizabeth Agarr had threatened 'if she heard any word she should speak of it she would be the death of her'; in his version, Sissily's confrontation with her cousin was dramatic: 'Em is not this true that I have said, did not I see thee 8c thy sister Pegg bury the child hard by where thou standest, I pray god I may never see such a sight again.'8 Sissily's story was plausible enough that her master came with her to depose to the magistrates, and they examined her cousins and her aunt, who denied that a child had been born, but admitted that Ann Linscale had been ill about that time. The prosecution seems to have gone no further. But the very fact that no evidence could be found to support or disprove Sissily's allegations underscores the power such stories had. It was no easier to prove a woman had borne a child than it was to discover whether she was carrying one, and the moral and economic implications of illegitimate pregnancy left such possibilities looming large in the lives of neighbours and family. In Sissily's case those

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fears were multiplied by her position in relation to her kin. Sissily lived not with her relations but with her master; her parents were probably dead or living elsewhere. A single woman, she was automatically excluded, like children and men, from the scenes of the birthroom; to catch her cousin out in events like these left her with a secret that was more compromising and frightening than powerful. Other infanticide stories left less room for certainty about the interplay between secrecy and knowledge. Many of the births that were treated as suspicious infanticides, because they took place without sufficient witnesses and resulted in a dead child, were not entirely secret. Women gave birth in the kitchen, early in the morning, or even in shared rooms. In Northumberland in the 1660s, Jane Mewers, who had stopped at Howick on her way to her sister's house, 'thinking she had not been so near her time', went to bed with two other women in the same bed and in the same room as a man but got up without disturbing them during the night; being in 'such a distraction she knew not what she did', she gave birth among the coals. Her bedfellows knew nothing until the next afternoon. A Yorkshire woman testified that she lay with her sister the night that she bore her child, and all the week after, without suspecting anything. Her sister later proved to have given birth while she was out of the room, kept the stillborn child in the bed all night, and buried it in the garden in the morning. She 'made the bed always herself and did her work all that time as she used to do' and nobody suspected anything. Isabel Nicholson admitted to bearing her child in the same room as her master and mistress; she got up and buried it after her master had risen, a little before daybreak.9 In such circumstances, it was safer for the others in the house to have known nothing; some testimonies suggest a careful avoidance of knowledge. In a house in Newcastle upon Tyne, Barbary Howland found herself suspicious of her fellow servant Mary Green, but said she did not know why. Although she shared a bed with Mary, she 'did not know the said Mary Green to be with child: for she did work and spin without trouble and eat her meat and victuals and complained not of pain or distempers'. After 'pretending her head ached' one evening, Mary gave birth while her two bedfellows were sleeping and decided to leave the house, their mistress being away. Barbary refused to let her go, 'finding a fear and jealousy upon herself but the cause thereof she knew not', and when their mistress returned they found that Mary had the dead child wrapped in a petticoat.10 Barbary's suspicions did not have to mean a concealed birth; she might also have been thinking of theft, the other obvious explanation for a servant wishing to leave suddenly with a strange bundle. But she, and the other women who testified, might also have been colluding at some level in the pregnant woman's enterprise of secrecy and suppression. If they had any suspicion their sisters or bedfellows were pregnant, they might

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well hope, as the pregnant women themselves must have done, that the birth would never happen. In other cases, neighbours intervened to make sure a birth did not happen in private. When, in 1684, Elizabeth Robinson found Isabel Burrill groaning with pain as she milked her cow, she realised she was in labour and sent for other women to watch her until the child was born. Suspicion and fear, rather than compassion, was her main motive.11

The collectivity of women Historians have readily seen in the rituals of early modern childbirth a time when 'childbirth belonged to women': when the collective world of midwives and matrons enabled women to give birth in a supportive environment, when women bonded together to the exclusion of men, and when a lying-in women and her gossips ran the household and dominated the husband.12 But the rituals of childbirth divided women as much as they bound them together. Relations between midwives, mothers and neighbours could be tense and hostile.13 The moment of summoning other women and the midwife was a recognised stage in labour, but very few accounts leave any record of who the women who helped in childbirth were and how they were related to the mother. This is true not just of accounts by husbands or medical attendants, who might have ignored the significance of the women involved, but also of accounts by mothers and other women. Mary Downe, examined in Somerset in 1618 about the bastard born to her, said 'that there was her mother and some other women with her and the midwife'; other witnesses said there were 'many women there' but named none of them.14 At the other end of the social scale, and within marriage, Elizabeth Molyns simply wanted her daughter to be 'accompanied with such honest matrons as may be for her safety'.15 Not all women at childbirths, as Linda Pollock has pointed out, were intimates of the woman in labour; some might be there to learn from the established midwife, others to help with menial tasks like bringing water and linen.16 With such concern about the presence of witnesses at labours, women were also there to function as honest observers, proof that the midwife had done her work well, that the mother was the true mother, that a stillbirth or infanticide had not been abetted or concealed. It was the category of 'honest matron' that was crucial: women with experience of other deliveries, whose word was reliable. Occasionally, records allow us to reconstruct the relations between women at childbirths. When an exchange of insults at a lying-in in Essex in 1619 led to litigation, four women were present. At least three of them were in their forties, had lived most of their lives in the same parish or nearby, and had known each other for twenty or thirty years. Even if the mother was younger

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and newer to them, they constituted a well-established group of participants in neighbourhood life and rites of passage. This did not make them always a cohesive, harmonious group: when one of them went so far as to describe several of her neighbours lying all night at a feast, too drunk to get home, the others deposed against her at the request of the neighbours, who they had mostly known much less long.17 Sometimes attendances at labours brought together women of different social ranks. Some gentry women attended the lyings-in of village women. Lady Margaret Hoby did so in Yorkshire; although she was married three times, she had never given birth herself, but she had an extensive practice nursing and healing. Her presence at the childbirths not only of her connections and friends, but of women who are simply recorded as 'a wife', suggests a role that united nursing help with a position of local authority.18 Attendants at gentlewomen's childbirths varied; the 'honest matrons' at Elizabeth Molyns' daughter's delivery would probably have been local respectable or middling women. The Yorkshire gentlewoman Alice Thornton listed eight attendants at one of her labours in 1662: one midwife, her maid, and six other women, of whom two were titled and three were her aunt and sisters. Most of her attendants were of her own social status or higher, but she may simply not have mentioned anyone whose name was not worth writing down.19 If village women's births were sometimes attended by local gentry, they also might bring in women from a lower social sphere. In the background in many early modern medical scenes are 'poor old women', helpful in washing, nursing, or keeping patients warm; they were likely to help in childbirths as well, as part of the parochial duties that were entailed on those who hoped for poor relief. We should not conclude from these various social compositions that childbirth provided a bodily experience which united women across rank, age and status. Equally likely, it constituted another arena for the exercise of authority and deference, and perhaps one in which relations were peculiarly strained. The absence of detail about social relations in the birthroom does not mean, either, that the choice of women to help was unimportant. Records of witchcraft and of mental disturbances suggest, on the contrary, that the world of women that constituted the ideal setting for childbirth was also the setting for significant conflicts. Women worried about who was present at a labour. One of Richard Napier's clients, married a year and lying in with her first child, found herself troubled by bad dreams after the birth about 'a woman that was ill thought of that she did not bid to her travail'. She could not sleep or eat, picked fights with her husband, and became 'over careful of the world'. Another, although she was 'well delivered', fell ill seven weeks after her lyingin and noted that 'Goody Underwood took it in ill part that she did not lay her, but she was out of the way at the time.' Another woman 'was delivered alone of a child without the womens help and so took a fright' and was left

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unable to speak.20 Sibyl Fisher fell into fits after her delivery by two midwives: the first was 'unskilful' and the second, who was 'froward', and 'would not meddle with her because she was not first sent for' was suspected of witchcraft and accused of troubling speeches. Their combined influence left the new mother disturbed in both body and mind.21 Childbirth was a public affair however privately it took place; it was one of the ways in which women were embedded in their families and communities, and witnessing was important from the poorest woman up to the queen. The arrangements for royal women's childbirths were carefully planned to guarantee the legitimacy of an heir to the throne. As Rachel Weil has shown, they came under particular scrutiny in 1688, when the midwife to Mary of Modena was accused of smuggling in an impostor to provide a Catholic heir. Whole pages of published pamphlets, depositions and letters between James's older daughters were dedicated to questions about the placing of a screen between the queen and her attendants, the presence of her husband, the whereabouts of the female attendants at every moment of the birth, and the authenticity of her cries of pain. As one pamphlet asserted, such a birth should have been 'public to extremity', not 'private to a nicety'.22 To those who declined to believe in the heir's legitimacy, a 'public' royal birth required as witnesses not just honest matrons, but Protestant ones; men-midwives or doctors, not women; and nobles, princes and men of religion. Presented as ancient requirements, these were an invented tradition: Tudor ordinances explicitly excluded men and made careful prescriptions for the presence of women.23 Outside the royal household, no one expected men to be present at births, but gentry and aristocratic women, on whose children depended the responsibility of maintaining a noble lineage, sought and received reams of advice on the safest way to carry, deliver and feed their children.24 In most households, rooted in communities of labourers and farmers or townspeople, the birth of a child was anticipated and received by neighbours who expected to hear the news if not attend the labour, visit during the lying-in, see the mother churched, and watch out for the child as it grew. For the poorest families, and for single mothers, the birth of a child had just as much community significance, as a burden whose presence could significantly imperil the economic health of a parish. For the poorest women as for the rich, there was little that was private about bearing a child. Private, secret births were suspicious in themselves; attested births were important to public order as well as to family lines. Single mothers were likely to have trouble making even the most basic arrangements for lying in. Real arrangements could be just as secretive as those in stories like that of the Midwife's Ghost: harbouring illegitimately pregnant women was a punishable offence, regularly prosecuted at the church courts. Most of those who provided places and help for single women in labour were housekeepers, innkeepers, sometimes midwives, occasionally sisters or

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mothers. Particularly in the city, networks of help came into play. One London singlewoman's delivery was arranged by Helen Redgrave, a widow who ran a business from her kitchen in Fetter Lane. Through Helen Redgrave's brother, the woman had put her in the way of some work; when she confided to Helen that she was pregnant, Helen passed her on to Margaret Jackson, a midwife, who found her a place to lie in and delivered her child, which was stillborn. Helen also attended the birth; a man-midwife refused to undertake it, perhaps because the child was illegitimate, or because it was dead in the womb. Both Margaret Jackson and Helen Redgrave were implicated in other illegitimate deliveries. Helen alleged that Margaret had told her 'that many escapes were there holpen both of merchant's maids and others who were there delivered, and did well after', and Margaret said that she had also delivered one of Helen's servants of an illegitimate child.25 There could be an overlap between harbouring pregnant women and running a bawdy house: another woman was prosecuted at the Bridewell for 'keeping of whores and lewd women in childbed and suffering of men to come in and lie with them before they be churched'.26 Other women might help arrange for the child's future. Another London woman, Agnes Goddard, was prosecuted in 1610 for harbouring and delivering a single woman 'without enquiring her name and who was father thereof'; she had also made arrangements for conveying away the child, offering it to Ellen Edwards, whose husband had begun to 'take dislike to her because she was barren'.27 In situations like these, new mothers and their children often vanished swiftly, proving impossible for parishes and courts to trace. In Deal in Kent in 1631, 'widow Pett' defended herself against the accusation of harbouring two unmarried women, one of whom had gone to Holland leaving the child behind, with the explanation that the first woman had arrived when she was out, and given birth within twenty-four hours; as for the second, she said, 'she gave her entertainment as any other woman might have done until such time as she could get shipping to go over into Holland'.28 Pett's defence deliberately highlights the contradictory expectations that pregnant single women aroused in communities, particularly in relation to women and hospitality. Women were expected to offer good neighbourliness, compassion and shelter to those who were pregnant and in need; but to do so to single women could be positively criminal. The same conflict about the meaning of womanly compassion came to the fore in another Kentish case. In the early seventeenth century, Joan Jacquett, a vagrant, gave birth to an illegitimate child on the border between two parishes. Her descent into vagrancy stemmed directly from some of the harshest events to hit late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century communities: paid by the parish to leave her position as a servant to nurse her family through the plague, she was left orphaned and unemployed, and ended up sleeping in the woods and hedges, eventually getting pregnant by a man who fled. Turned away from

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the barn where she took shelter as she went into labour, she was driven back and forth between the parishes of Ryarsh and Berling until she eventually gave birth on some straw under a tree on the public highway. Like most seventeenth-century mothers, Joan Jacquett was accompanied in her labour by several other women - in this case, five married women, a single woman, and a midwife. But in every other way her labour violated the established rituals of childbirth: privacy, warmth and protection from the outside world. Joan Jacquett's labour was described in detail by the parishioners of Berling, where her child was eventually born. A group of the substantial male inhabitants made a complaint about her treatment to the justice of the peace, alleging that the women of Ryarsh - the neighbouring parish, Joans birthplace had driven Joan across the parish line to Berling during her labour. Their allegations made particular reference to the unwomanly behaviour of the Ryarsh women, who had betrayed their promises to help Joan. The petition complained that, finding her in the barn, the women of Ryarsh had 'conducted her by byways and fallows in her extremity, and left her in a corner of Berling to leave her load there'. It continued: The said Jane feeling her self in great torment of travail viz of childbirth returned again to Ryarsh hoping to be eased there. As soon as she came two of the women took her up by each arm and led her again to Berling in the midst of her travail, when it was far in the nighte, guarded with four other w o m e n . . . . Certain of these set her in a wad of straw under a tree; the rest of the women kept, and watched the passage, in the highway, between Berling & Ryarsh: lest she should be violently carried again to Ryarsh by the inhabitants of Berling. When they had settled her there they sent to Walling for a midwife . . . when she had been in travail 24 hours before and tossed to and fro as you have heard. She was at last delivered of a son, in a little straw, under a tree, in the common highway, in a cold night, no better provided than you hear: after a cruel, and savage manner, contrary to Christianity, nature, and humanity: left her there, to the broad world, and to shift for herself and her son, triumphing and rejoicing that they had achieved such an exploit: insomuch that one in the parish said that their wives had played the parts of valiant women.29 The interests of Joan Jacquett and her attendants, united in working towards the safe delivery of a living child, were also deeply divided by the economic pressures of illegitimacy. The principal complaint of the Berling men was financial: that the Ryarsh women had left them with the burden of a single mother and her illegitimate child. But they voiced it through an appeal to the 'Christianity, nature, and humanity' that was expected in the rituals of childbirth, when women's bodies, souls and lives depended on the care of other women. The brutality of the 'valiant women' who accompanied Joan Jacquett

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through her labour was painted to stand out against the charity and Christianity that was expected of women in the birthroom. In reality perhaps the difference was not so great. The women who watched through Joan Jacquett's labour, keeping her from comfort and shelter, could be said to be simply carrying the roles of women in the birthroom to their logical end. Witnessed labours and births were one manifestation of the embeddedness of women in their communities, and that embededdness brought divisions as well as alliances. 'Honest matrons' were obliged not just to help women in labour, but to uphold and enforce the interests of the parish. For midwives, those obligations and their contradictions were rigidly enforced. Other women's roles were customary and neighbourly; theirs was prescribed by occupation, training, authority and oaths. Midwives were meant to be licensed by the church, originally in order to regulate their role in baptising children in an emergency. By the seventeenth century, midwives were no longer expected to perform baptisms, and the midwives' oath focused on other matters, defining honest practice and good dealing in the birthroom.30 It bound them first of all to 'help every woman labouring of child, as well the poor as the rich'; to ensure that women in labour named only the true father of the child; to prevent counterfeit births and infanticides; not to use witchcraft or sorcery, or herbs or potions to cause abortion; not to consent to a woman's being delivered in secret; to keep matters 'appertaining to your office' secret from men; to bury stillbirths secretly and safely; and to ensure children were baptised with the correct service. Its preoccupations are instructive: alongside her duty to the mother, a midwife was bound by her obligations to the parish and the church. On her depended not only the lives of mother and child, but the child's spiritual health and its economic maintenance. By no means all midwives took this oath. Some were informal apprentices, learning the trade before they applied for a licence, others practised without a licence. Unlicenced midwives had certain liberties: they had not sworn never to refuse their help, nor to ensure that single women named the right father to their children. Sworn midwives were bound by an oath which, from all the evidence, governed their behaviour in the birthroom, and in particular, their treatment of single women. The midwives' oath makes no particular mention of illegitimate births; indeed, it insists that midwives treat all women the same, making no difference between rich and poor. But it did bind midwives to ensure that when women named fathers in childbirth, they named the right ones. This point seems only to have entered the midwives' oath in the seventeenth century, but the tradition that single mothers, and sometimes married women too, confessed their child's paternity in labour is older, and the midwives' obligation to extract that confession may be older too. Certainly, midwives' interpretation of their duty went beyond the letter of the oath. They questioned single women repeatedly, until a 'true confession' was given; they

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withheld their help until the mother confessed; and they timed their interrogations to the moment of greatest pain, when a mother would be sure to tell the truth. They assumed, in fact, many of the duties of legal officials, and some of the habits that, elsewhere in Europe, torturers used to extract true words from bodies in pain. Margery Dingley gave birth to an illegitimate child in Staffordshire in 1630. When her child was due, her neighbours brought her, shortly before her delivery, by the constable to the midwife's house. When she went into labour the same night, the midwife, Dorothy Sturmy, withheld her help until, when Margery was in the 'extremity of her labour', she confessed the father's name.31 Midwives across England testified to the same readiness to refuse their help until they heard the truth. Margaret Thompson, a seventy-year-old midwife in Durham, testified to delivering the child of Elizabeth Simpson: before this Examinant did lay any hands on the said Elizabeth or would make her any help in her great Extremity of Childbirth she did examine the said Elizabeth who was the true father of her child whereupon the said Elizabeth did swear and protest upon her salvation that James Taylor... was the father of her child and none other.32 Elizabeth Hallam, a sixty-year-old sworn midwife in Derbyshire, testified that she attended Hester Slater, a singlewoman who lived with her child's father, William Cooper. There was less doubt about paternity here than in other cases, but she followed the same ritual: finding h e r . . . in labour of childbirth she before she would give her any assistance required her to declare who had begotten her with child and charged her not to injure any person but to father it aright as she would answer at the dreadful day of Judgment Whereupon the said Hester taking a Bible into her hand and kissing it did before this deponent and several other persons present in her great extremity, declare that. . . William Cooper and no other person had begotten her with child and that he and no other persons had had to do with her in that way.33 In theory the question of paternity could be quickly answered. In practice the process of interrogation could be protracted and agonising, prolonged in tandem with a long labour and reaching its peak with the height of pain. Sometimes a midwife arrived when a woman's contractions began, and left again before labour was over: Johan Hodge, a Devon midwife, reported coming to Mary Browne when her 'travelling pulls' began, and telling her to 'discharge a good conscience, & to name the right father of the child'; but Mary was not yet 'ready for her to meddle with her', so she left again, and another midwife took over. In other cases one midwife stayed the whole time: in the 1660s Judith Berry saw a woman through a labour of three days and two nights, pressing

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her for the father's name throughout.34 It could take hours to elicit the truth. Alice Leveredge, a Kent midwife, gave the quarter sessions a detailed account of the exchanges between Elizabeth Chappin, a servant, herself, and the other women at Elizabeth's lying-in in 1602. At first she could obtain only vague admissions; but by the time Elizabeth was 'in her great extremity' she was ready to swear to the father's name. Her testimony recorded: Being first asked of the midwife who was the father of her child, and whether William Heneker was the man or no, she answered, I am afraid it will lie in his net. Then being let alone in her pain and extreme travail the space of two hours and more was afterward asked by the said midwife who was the right father of her child she answered that her master Absdon was the right father . . . and being charged that she did belie him she answered that upon her conscience he was the man and wished further that she might never rise if she did belie him. Being after a while again asked by the said midwife in her great extremity who was the right father of her child she answered, wishing that all the devils in hell might tear her in pieces if she had not told the truth and that she had not belied her said master. At the prompting of the other women there, Elizabeth went on to describe when and where both men, as well as a third, had had 'the use of her body'.35 Other midwives refused women's confessions because the times they said they had had sex did not fit with the date of delivery, and pressed them until they gave a better story. Margaret Marrys was questioned repeatedly through her labour, because her account of the child's paternity did not match the time of the child's birth: the midwife kept questioning her until she told a story that fitted.36 As powerful as the readiness of midwives to refuse their help, and the timing with which they asked their questions, were the words with which they extracted confessions from women in pain. Like confessors or torturers, they asked the vital questions at the moment of greatest pain because only then could the woman's words be trusted. They invoked death, divine mercy, and God's judgement. Elinor Phillips, a Worcestershire midwife, reported typically that, sent for to attend a servant in labour, cin the time of her extremity she did press and conjure [her] as she would answer it at the dreadful day of judgement to declare who was the father of her child'.37 Bennett Cradell performed the same duty for Edith Buckham, a sailor's wife, because she had heard that her husband was at sea and was not the father: she charged her 'before God' to name the father, and Edith said 'that one Albert Johnson was the father of her said child and no other wishing she might never be delivered thereof if he were not'.38 Edith's oath was the classic one of the woman in labour, repeated across England and through the century. In Staffordshire in 1665, Mary Baggaley 'wished the child and she might never part' if John Clewes were

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not its father; in Nottinghamshire in 1623 Elizabeth Hodgkinson told the midwife 'if William Ridley be not the father of the child I now labour of I pray god that it and I may never part'.39 Childbirth oaths did not feature in collections of sayings and proverbs, but they were a part of women's oral culture, familiar and frightening in their realism. With the Bible, the official declarations, the presence of witnesses, and the witholding of help until a true answer was given, midwives had a weighty authority in the birthroom and in the parish. Both justices and laypeople were well aware of that authority, so much so that sometimes the role of the midwife in obtaining a paternity declaration seemed likely to outweigh her medical task. With good reason, midwives were often wary of any unorthodox situations. In Shropshire in 1635, Sara Dawson warned a midwife that the pregnant, single Anne Phillips had the pox, and if she delivered her, she would lose all her gentry customers: 'it would be a means to bring her in disgrace with the gentlewomen of the town, so that they never have her come to them again'.40 A Kent midwife, Annis Forty, deposed that she had unwittingly attended an illegitimate birth with other women: she was 'fetched by a woman to . . . the widow Bowltons not knowing wherefore & to what intent only that she should go into womens company'.41 Midwives' duty to question women in labour was apparently long-standing. But it may have been more enforced in the seventeenth century. The need to find fathers for illegitimate children intensified with difficult economic conditions and broader concerns about morality; while interrogations were certainly used in the earlier seventeenth century, and continued to be reported through the civil war years, it was towards the end of the century that the concern for paternity became most pointed, manifested in the orders of quarter sessions, interrogations at assizes, and midwives' reports of the births they had attended. At this stage, the early men-midwives made little or no impact on this aspect of midwives' duties; they were unlikely to be called to births of this nature, and they might refuse to involve themselves with illegitimate or suspicious pregnancies. The official oath sworn by licensed midwives marked them out from unofficial midwives and other birthroom helpers. Justices and parish officers encouraged the presence of a licensed midwife at illegitimate births, because they could be expected to help establish a father; pregnant women and their friends sometimes tried to avoid it, so they would not have to declare a father; putative fathers and their families, in their own interests, might pressure women to avoid sworn midwives for the same reasons. In 1684 Hester Hibb, a single mother in Belper, Derbyshire, planned to have an unlicensed midwife; when the sworn midwife came and asked her who the father was, she 'very obstinately refused to tell saying that she was to have a Midwife that was not sworn & such a one she would have if it cost her five pounds'. But no other midwife came, and 'finding her pain increase' and the midwife refusing to help

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her, she confessed that her master was the child's father.42 Her determination was probably prompted by her master; putative fathers went a long way to avoid being named in labour. Andrew Waterlow refused to let his servant Susanna Watkinson have a midwife when she gave birth to a stillborn child, saying 'he had a mind to conceal it in this world and in the next let him and her shift it'.43 Henry Mainwaring arranged for his servant Anne Bolt to lie in in 'a very obscure private place', and sent his sister to attend her labour, who asked her no questions.44 But the absence of a sworn midwife could work against single women too. In some cases, men complained that women who fathered children on them had been delivered 'only amongst their own friends', with no independent witnesses; thus the paternity declaration could be taken to be unreliable.45 In Staffordshire, Franch Allen, reputed to be the father of the second illegitimate child born to Elizabeth Edge, petitioned the quarter sessions complaining that she had given birth without a sworn midwife, because her mother had stopped her from sending for one until too late. Instead she had been accompanied by only her own friends (including Anne Lowe, herself the mother of an illegitimate child of disputed paternity). When the midwife arrived after the child was born, she said 'how now what work is here what honest women have you had here to examine this woman?', and Anne Lowe, who was holding the child on her lap, 'privately made answer that there was no examination at all but he that was the father of the first was the father of this'. The women there, though, testified that Franch himself had suggested Elizabeth leave the parish before she was delivered, and that she had named him in labour, saying when the child was born 'it is a right Allen'. The quarter sessions moved to detain Elizabeth in the house of correction until she confessed the father's name.46 The 'honest' women who attended a birth bore a heavy responsibility. Communities expected married women to protect the moral integrity and economic standing of households and parishes. Accordingly, everyone present at the labours of single women was likely to have an interest either in the suppression or the eliciting of a father's name, if only as local ratepayers. It was not only midwives who asked the telling questions; other women joined them. Belie Kirsopp was questioned by Margaret Potts, a fifty-year-old labourer's wife who visited in a pause of her labour; Elizabeth Hodgkinson was visited during labour by 'some women' who pressed her to name the right father and 'discharge a good conscience'.47 Mothers questioned their daughters, refusing to help them until they answered. Anna Banton, of Hatchbeauchamp in Somerset, testified to the quarter sessions in 1664 that she had been with her daughter at her delivery and had 'several times' demanded the father's name from her, refusing to 'touch her or afford her any help in the delivery' until she declared it. The threats were successful and her daughter confessed the father's name.48 Elizabeth Nicklin's mother played the

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same part: finding her daughter in labour, she was said to have 'kneeled down and prayed God that her said daughter and her child might never part till she had fathered it aright'.49 Anne Carter was compelled by her mother and the midwife together to confess her child's father's name; both of them refused to help her until she spoke, and she responded by telling them both the name of the father, Ralph Allanson, and the story of their encounter: 'she went to borrow ten shillings of him in his own house . . . when she came down a pair of stairs he got her and with violence tore her clothes, and had thuse of her body . . . and so begot her with the said child'.50 Many single women delivered their children with no midwife present at all. Jane Cowper, another servant accused of infanticide, described how she gave birth at the house of Margaret Mason, described by another witness as an 'old woman'. Margaret was there throughout her labour, preventing a midwife or other women from coming to help, and Jane's testimony laid much of the responsibility for her children's deaths on her. She deposed that, when she gave birth to twins at seven o'clock on a Sunday morning: although she cried out at the bearing of the first, the said Margaret would let none come at her, but said if she cried out she would stab her and when the first was born she the said Margaret took it and gripped it by the throat with her right hand and when she was bearing the second, she put some water into her and the said Margaret laid her left hand on her the said Jane's mouth to hinder her for crying out, and bid her put down her pain and she says she knows not how she bore her second child, but soon after it was born Margaret bid her go to the door and shew herself, but it was so cold she could not stay and the said Margaret made her sit up all day on Sunday and all day on Monday and said they should not know at the next house, and if her sister Allen came in she would stick her. Jane Cowper's story makes Margaret Mason the perfect wicked midwife, intent on secrecy and brutal intervention, and also the perfect cruel mother. When the neighbours came to visit and search, Jane told them that Margaret had taken her first-born child by the throat and strangled it; searching the house, they found two bodies. She told the examining magistrate a further tale of barbarity - that Margaret had 'been in Ireland and said she had put children on spear points there', and that Margaret had offered her a medicine of steel filings to abort her pregnancy.51 It is not clear from the depositions what Margaret and Jane's relationship was. Margaret may have employed Jane as a servant; in Jane's account, she exerted considerable authority over her, telling her that if she went to any neighbour's house she would never let her back again and would keep her trunk. Or, she may have simply offered to lodge Jane for the birth, with or without an expectation that she would help dispose of her child. Either way, Jane's narrative makes the older, experienced woman the

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aggressor, while remaining opaque about her own intentions towards the pregnancy and its outcome. Mistresses played a part too. For many single women, they were there as quasi-parents, the closest there was to a responsible adult; in keeping with their role as moral guardians, they might chide and scold them. But many servants kept secrets from their mistresses. Marie Goose, an Essex wife, told the quarter sessions in 1633 that although Anne Mast, her servant, had been with her a year and shared her room, she did not suspect she was pregnant, because Anne gave no sign of sickness or 'distemperature of body' until the very day she gave birth, when she woke her mistress up in the middle of the night. As soon as she saw the child, Marie Goose 'examined her who was the father' and 'speedily sent for other neighbour women which immediately did come and they in the presence of this examinate did demand who was the father.'52 Other servants expressed outright hostility towards the mistresses who accompanied them in labour. Dorothy Steele, accused of infanticide in 1666, said pointedly that 'there was none present when she was in her travail but her mistress, but did not at all help her in her travail, and did leave her to bring forth her birth'.53 While this protected Steele's mistress from implication in the crime, it also indicted her of carelessness for her servant's welfare. For other mistresses, what their servant said in labour might directly implicate their own husbands, and some of them threatened and bullied servants into keeping quiet. In Staffordshire in 1684, witnesses claimed that Elizabeth Nicklin's master gave ten shillings to her midwife not to question her, and that when she had fathered the child on him anyway, her mistress came to her as she lay in bed ten days after giving birth and threatened to kill her if she did not find another father for it; in another two cases women (one a sister, one a wife) threatened to slit the new mother's nose.54 Alice Skinner, a singlewoman brought to Bridewell in 1598, claimed to have misnamed her child's father because she was frightened of his wife.55 Threats and interrogations made illegitimate childbirth into a punitive ritual. Rather than a collective enterprise in which the mother-to-be was the central participant, it became a battle of words and wills which could encompass every woman there. At Margaret Grymwood's labour, several women issued threats and oaths. Abigail Weaver, one of the other women there, warned Margaret as she had her 'pangs': 'the greatest of those pangs were nothing to the pains of hell if she should not speak truth'. Half an hour before the child was born, the midwife urged, 'Now upon thy life speak . . . there is now but a hair between life and death.' Margaret finally swore that 'the child was her master's . . . and none but his and wished the child might not have the shape of a Christian and she never be delivered of it, if it were not his'.56 The threat of death was not an idle one; and even on their deathbeds new mothers might be questioned. Mary Couse, mother of an illegitimate child in Somerset in 1694, was interrogated first in labour, by the midwife, and then,

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as she lay dying, by the parish overseers.57 Other testimonies referred to women making their oaths while 'down on their knees', suggesting an association between the position of labour and that of prayer which reinforced the power of labour oaths.58 The proximity of death and the extremes of pain made labour an important time for words and oaths. For married women as well as single, what was said in labour was powerful, and childbirth was a time for speaking secrets, expressing fears, making promises or swearing oaths. Women in labour, as we have seen, were bound by their pain and their dependence on God's mercy to speak the truth: what they said carried a special weight. In London in 1607, a midwife testified to the words that Christiana Greene had cried out 'in pain in her hour of childbirth'. Greene was a married domestic servant, and her words were about Marie Phillips, her mistress. She cried out three times 'Oh that wicked woman my mistress', and prayed God 'that I might not be delivered until I had spoken what I knew of her'. The midwife asked her what she meant and what she knew of Marie Phillips, and Christiana said 'I know this by her ...', recounting a story of two men who came to Marie's house with a stolen horse and got her to procure 'a young wench' for them. The midwife deposed that she thought Christiana's words were not malicious defamation, 'but only a conscience that she had that she should not be delivered of her child except she had offered the same'.59 The lying-in period after labour was also a time for other people to speak hidden truths, usually about paternity. One seventeenth-century joke, harking back to the supposed licentiousness of pre-Reformation priests, told of a new mother who gave herself away: In the time of Mass-Priests, a young woman brought a-bed of her first Child, it was no sooner taken from the Mother, but the Midwife, and all the other Gossips kissed it round, and every one that kissed it round, said: How like the Father it is, it is as like the Father, as if it were spit out of his mouth; which the Mother hearing, rous'd up her self, and said, Why, I pray you, hath he a shaven crown.60 Real confrontations sometimes replayed that moment of recognition. In London in the 1630s, Ellen Fanch, visiting a neighbour who was lying in, chose the time to abuse her sister-in-law, telling the new mother that Elizabeth Fanch's daughter was not her husband's but Richard Wood's: ' I . . . will take mine oath that he . . . didst beget i t . . . and it is like his children and I cannot love it.'61 The lying-in did not necessarily seclude a mother from her social world, nor from the conflicts of neighbourhood life. At Agnes Parsons's lyingin in Stoke Gifford, Somerset, in 1633, she lay in her bed at the top of the stairs while three of her female neighbours sat talking below by the fire with her husband, her father-in-law, and a servant. Marie Spiring talked of 'a revel at knackers' hole', where she had seen a couple being naught together, and 'when

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he had done he trussed up his breeches, and asked whether it was well or no, and she said twas pretty well'. Agnes told Marie off, calling out 'that she spake large speeches, and asked . . . whether she did not think to hear of it again', and sure enough, Marie ended in the church courts accused of defamation.62 In Birmingham in 1633 Catherine Hobson, while she was lying in, sent her servant off to tell a neighbour who had previously insulted her that she was 'a base quean and whore'.63 The threat of death and the day of judgement evoked by midwives was not unique to single mothers; it was part of a wider understanding of labour and childbirth. If women followed godly teaching, they knew labour to be God's punishment. One of the radical teachings of some sects in the mid seventeenth century was that, reborn without sin, women would begin to give birth without pain. Everyone else accepted pain in labour as divinely ordained. In books of prayer, the pains of labour were almost exalted as an opportunity for suffering and an exemplification of female piety. Frances Aburvagennie's 'godly and earnest prayer' for 'the time of travail' ran thus: Great and intolerable are these bitter pains and piercing pains, that in this my travail... Now feel I as it were a cruel and sharp conflict betwixt death and life; now feel I . . . the rod of thy correction, according to thy justice laid heavy upon me, for the use and exercise of sin and iniquity . . . Arm me, O mighty God with perfect patience, joyfully to bear thy correction, and in the midst of these my sharp and bitter brunts of grief, give me grace still to call upon thee . . .64 Thomas Bentley's collection of prayers for women, which included many for women in labour, laid much stress on the virtues of suppressing pain and complaint. They stressed, too, the relative insignificance of midwives and helping women, compared to God's grace: 'unless thou prosper my travail, all womens help, and all physic is in vain', he enjoined women to pray.65 One prayer was meant for 'long and dangerous travail of child': thou seest in what pitiful plight I am . . . I have a long time, O Lord, held my peace, suppressing my throws so long as my womanly strength will suffer. I have been quiet and still, and refrained my self, I say, as much as I am able; but now alas, such and so intolerable is my grief, so many and vehement are my throws; yea, so continual and tedious is my travail, that without thee, I can not possibly any longer forbear... For except thou, O Lord, make a way out, that which is conceived, cannot be born. Oh Lord, this day is a gloomy day, a bitter time and terrible hour, a day (or night) of anguish and tribulation, of sorrow and perturbation, unto the very soul of thine hand-maid: for the babe is come unto the place of the birth, and lo, it seemeth that thou for my sins hast shut up the doors of my

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womb, and caused the babe to stand still like to be stifled. What shall I say, O my God, what shall I do? Have mercy upon me, O Lord, have mercy upon me, and help me. Make a way out for my deliverance, for in me there is no help, no strength, nor power to bring that forth that I have conceived. It is thou only, O Lord my God, which hast fashioned it in my womb, that must do it. Oh therefore put forth speedily thine almighty hand, and help me, and give me strength and patience to endure whatsoever for my sins it shall please thee to lay upon me in this my sore labour.66 Most of all, this prayer echoes the same image that haunted women in labour and their midwives: the fear that the child would never be born. Thomas Bentley's prayers make the grace of being delivered a divine intervention into the intransigent female body: God was to 'make a way out', put forth speedily thine almighty hand'. In the late seventeenth century, John Oliver was offering women similar advice, citing the words of Revelations: 'He shutteth and none can open, he openeth and none can shut; he letteth and none can work, he worketh and none can let.'67 Two important understandings of the labouring body underlie these prayers and oaths. The threat that 'the child and I will never part' - the most common oath of labouring women - was a very real one where there was only one way for a child to be delivered. Obstructed births, where the head was too large to be delivered, often due a mother's hips being deformed by rickets, were the largest category of difficult births in the seventeenth century. While images and stories of Caesarian birth were relatively familiar, it was an operation that was very rarely performed and always resulted in the death of the mother. When a child could not be delivered, the most likely result was that it would die during labour, and have to be removed with the use of a crotchet; without this the mother would probably die. Very occasionally, the life of a child might be sacrificed to save a mother. While the overall incidence of stillbirths due to obstruction was not high - perhaps 2 per cent of all births - it was the image, rather than the statistic, that did most to shape women's fears at the time.68 As well, seventeenth-century understandings of birth placed relatively little stress on the agency of a labouring woman's body. Many medical works saw the foetus as the primary force in the progress of labour, fighting its way out through a passive female body. Thomas Bentley's prayers enjoined women to 'suppress their throws': the most they were expected to do was submit. Midwives had a rather different attitude. While they expected births to proceed with little intervention, as most did, the little evidence we have suggests they expected active, hard-working mothers. One London midwife, Elizabeth Bessy, was charged with failing to save a newborn child in 1631. In her defence she complained of the mother's unwillingness to help herself, and her responses illuminate some of the potential conflicts between midwives and

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mothers. Some were over experience, some over authority, and some over the attention given to the mother. Elizabeth Bessy was attending several births at one time, and she came to Agnes Fisher 'as soon as she . . . could well leave such other women as she had then in labour or were under her hands to be delivered'. She stayed with her from the early hours of one morning through to the next morning. Agnes complained of neglect while she was in labour; Elizabeth defended herself that she 'did not any ways neglect her but used all the best means she possibly could to assist and help the said Agnes in her delivery'. She did, though, take some rest, having come directly on from other labours: 'whilst... Agnes was without pain she . . . might and did sometimes (being wearied with labour and her former watching with other women) take a short nap which could not be hurtful to . . . Agnes in regard she . . . upon the least motion or calling (being very wakeful) was ready to assist her'. The child died within quarter of an hour of its birth; Agnes blamed Elizabeth, but Elizabeth said that though she used 'every possible means' to help Agnes, she was 'so dull and slow in her pains and so unapt or unwilling to help herself and to set forward the production of her child that her child was born very weak and feeble'. The hostility between mother and midwife came to a head the day of the child's burial. Agnes 'grudgingly and repiningly' told Elizabeth that if she had been careful the child might have lived; Elizabeth 'thinking rather to cheer her up then to dishearten her' replied 'jestingly': 'that she might give God thanks for sparing, for if she had not as many lives as a cat she might have died too'.69 Their different stories suggest a gulf in understanding that stretched from the respective duties of mother and midwife in labour, to the proper response to a child's death; midwives' relations with mothers typically lasted long after the delivery, with post-natal visiting, participation in the churching, and very often, attendance at the birth of the next child. If such conflicts were rare, details like these also testify to the sheer depth of cultural and social expectations that underlay childbirth rituals, and that accompanied giving birth in circumstances from well-arranged bedchambers, to hastily hired rooms.

Labour Reflecting on her life in seventeenth-century Yorkshire, the Puritan gentlewoman Alice Thornton described her labours at the births of her several children. She framed it as essentially an experience between herself and God. Like illness, labour was a test of her relationship with God; pain borne well testified to virtue and death cheated demonstrated God's mercy. Of her fifth child, she wrote: 'I was upon the rack in bearing my child with such exquisite torment, as if each limb were divided from other, for the space of two hours;

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when at length, being speechless and breathless, I was, by the infinite providence of God, in great mercy delivered.'70 The midwife who was present features only as a bystander: at first she 'did believe I should be delivered soon, but she was proved wrong, for the labour lasted three days. But even in Alice Thornton's providentialist narrative, childbirth took place in the context of social relationships. The pains which signified the relationship between mother and God were observed and helped by others present: doctor, midwife, husband, mother and visiting gentlewomen. The pains of labour were also a measure of virtue and civilisation. Already in the sixteenth century easy births without long labours or ceremonial lyingsin were a marker of cultural and social inferiority; hard labour distinguished white women from black, Christians from pagans, and virtuous women from whores. Jane Sharp's Midwives Book noted 'if any feel but a little pain it is commonly harlots who are so used to it that they make little reckoning of it, and are wont to fare better at present than virtuous persons do'.71 To 'make reckoning' of pain was best done by reference to God. Like other pains, those of labour were not easily measured or explained. Early modern women expected to bear children with considerable pain and in danger of death, but few of them left any story of their labours or any record of the languages available to them. For women like Alice Thornton whose pain was part of a godly suffering, the 'exquisite torment' was supposed to be offset by the certainty of God's ultimate mercy. Thornton's metaphors for labour, perhaps because of this familiar structure, were solidly rooted in her own body: 'as if each limb were divided from other'. For other women, the pain of labour suggested less bodily metaphors. Elizabeth Armitage, a singlewoman who had an (allegedly) stillborn child in Liversedge in 1682, was one of the few to give a magistrate a detailed description of labour. Examined several days after the birth, she said on Thursday last at night about midnight when she awaked of her first sleep she was so taken that she could not stir off the bed if it had been on fire under her and that she called out as loud as she could but nobody came at her and says she bore her child within half an hour after but it was dead and did neither cry breathe or move and at morn the first that came to her was young Lydia Blezard and she crept on her hands and her knees to open her a little door and desired her to go to Ellen Leach to desire her to come to her and speak with her and when she came she told her she had had a night would have killed a horse.72 Much less physically specific than Alice Thornton's, her metaphors are equally rooted in real fears and pains: a bed on fire, a night that would kill a horse. Elizabeth Armitage's account was exceptionally explicit. Most single mothers, especially those suspected of infanticide, had no opportunity to speak

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of their labours, certainly not formally and perhaps not informally either. For married women, the pain of labour was part of a worthy endeavour, experienced with neighbours, midwife and God, and they explained it in terms of work, suffering and mercy. Single women had no such context: their condition was inherently sinful and their labours had no value. If they had given birth alone, they had to convince their neighbours and a judge that their labours had come upon them suddenly, and that they had had no time to cry out for help. Mary Dotchin, like many other women delivered alone or in secret, said simply that 'she was delivered of a woman child in the common field'.73 Mary Coates gave birth in bed with her mother and said the child lay there for an hour before her mother awoke.74 Grace Ward, a Yorkshire servant, said 'she did not apprehend herself in labour, till the child fell from her as she was standing by her bedside'.75 Another Yorkshire servant, Dorothy Snowdon, was 'suddenly taken' at eight o'clock in the morning and had no time to call neighbours to help. She fell into a swoon as soon as the child was delivered, and both children were found dead.76 Instead of describing labour, women who gave birth in secret told their neighbours different stories of what they had suffered. Just as they described what others suspected to be pregnancy as wind, an extra layer of clothes, or a swelling, they spoke not of labour but of colic or fever. Isabel Thompson stayed in bed for several days, telling her sister and other women that she had the colic and was 'sick all over'.77 Margaret Walker told Isabel Foster she was troubled with worms.78 Jennett Young hid her labour by pretending that she had been seized of a fever.79 Mary Coates answered the enquiries of neighbours who knew she was 'sickly and weak' with reassurances that she was 'pretty lightsome', although the rain had made her legs painful; though one of the women had heard her 'bemoan herself sore', Mary blamed the noise on her mother, saying that 'she herself had had a pretty good night but that the said Frances her mother had had a woeful night'. They disbelieved her and eventually when they confronted her again, Frances fell on her knees and confessed that her daughter had given birth to a dead child.80 Susanna Vailes's tale of having the colic and vomiting was shaped exactly to fit the process of labour and birth that her neighbours belived she was hiding: the colic 'took her and held her' from around three in the afternoon to nine or ten at night, at which point she vomited 'and then was better and so she fell to rest'.81 Men often found themselves unable to describe childbirth pain. Hannah Allen bore her child in the presence of its father, her fellow servant Benjamin Greene. His testimony described what he saw: on Sunday last in a chamber of the house where she lived he this informant went into the chamber to her about one of the clock in the afternoon 8c found her laid upon a bed 8c asked her what she ailed 8c she told him she

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was not well & desired him to fetch her some brandy burnt whereupon he went 8c fetched her some brandy presently 8c brought it to her 8c then found her upon her knees on the chamber floor with 2 coverlets or rugs under her, 8c perceiving some wet under her asked her how it came there she told him she had made water there so he gave her the brandy which she drunk 8c he also then desired her to come down to the fire which she did within less then half an h o u r . . . this informant further saith That he hath b e e n . . . with her several times since particularly yesterday and asked her whether the child she had born was born alive or not 8c she said it was not 8c desired him this informant to hold his peace 8c talk no more to her about it.82 While Benjamin readily admitted fearing Hannah was pregnant, and clearly recognised what was happening when he found her on her knees, his description of the events does not represent them as a labour; Hannah's refusal to talk to him about it confirmed his inability to describe the event of childbirth. These stories and their silences are in many ways peculiar to illegitimate and secret births: married women did not have the same compulsion to transform labour into a different kind of pain. But the cultural insistence that decent childbirth should take place in front of proper witnesses - that an honest woman would call for help, and not conceal what her body was doing affected all women. If harlots gave birth in secret and with ease, the pains of honest 'travail' became the province of honest wives and public births. Labour pains, it seemed, were best explained in a collective context, with witnesses to share them.

Lying-in After labour women were still in a dangerous situation. Recovery could be very slow, and puerperal fever, one of the highest causes of death in childbirth, might still set in; the child would be carefully watched to see if it thrived. But the focus of the social ritual which surrounded new mothers shifted from pain and fear to thanksgiving and celebration. Women were expected to lie in for a period of around a month, and while many, probably, did not observe every prescribed detail of confinement, getting up to work, go to church, and lying with their husbands, the concept of the lying-in month was still a powerful one. The lying-in period was, however, distinguished as much by sociability as by seclusion. During the month of lying-in and around the ceremony of churching which concluded it, midwives, nurses and neighbours visited frequently, entertaining the newly delivered woman and giving thanks for the child's safe birth and the preservation of the mother's life. It was these visits that were identified with 'gossip-

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ing', and that were targeted by contemporary complaints. To some historians as to contemporary critics, lying-in rituals have seemed to reverse the dynamics of household order: women withdrew from household labour, men waited on them. The social rituals of gossiping, Adrian Wilson has suggested, could pose a significant, if temporary, threat to male authority.83 One problem with this reading of lying-in is the distribution of domestic work. There is little concrete evidence that lying-in reversed the roles of husband and wife. While satirists poked fun at men running to fetch food and drink for their wives and the gossips, it is more likely that it was female servants who took on most of the extra burden of domestic work. Nurses hired to help the new mother might end up doing more general work in the house. Servants might also find themselves expected to deflect the sexual burden left on a husband while his wife lay apart; more than one pregnant servant testified that her master had lain with her while his wife was lying in. Rather than an inversion of marital roles, lying in involved a redistribution of them amongst other women. Contemporaries found more to complain of in the social aspect of lying in. The development of gossip' as a term of abuse owes much to the satires on lying-in that presented mothers, midwives and neighbours as a greedy swarm of chattering women, 'prattling and tattling' as they ate and drank their way through the household resources.84 Like most early modern social rituals, the 'gossipings' involved food and drink; unlike most, they were generally thought of as a women's occasion, although men participated. As David Cressy has shown, sixteenth-century town governments tried to regulate the 'great excess and superfluous costs' of lying-in feasts and the 'costly dishes, meats and drink brought unto women lying in childbed'.85 In 1575 the town of Kirkby Kendal fined churching parties of more than twelve people twenty shillings apiece. The governors of Chester ordered no women except the midwife to accompany a mother back into her house after churching, fining both the visitors and the householder (mothers, sisters and sisters-in-law were excepted).86 Most legislation of this sort was impractical to enforce, but it registers some important concerns. Like wedding parties, also the object of regulation, churchings called for expenditure and display, consumption serving as a vehicle for companionship and community (as well as competition). But in the case of churchings, attacks on hospitality inevitably focused on rituals of consumption that were seen as largely female. The same issues were raised in the satirical literature of the seventeenth century. The genre of 'gossips meeting' satires recounted the rituals of labour, lying-in and churching, often from the viewpoint of the excluded husband. The expenses of childbirth are part of a female conspiracy to defraud husbands. Mothers, spurred on by midwives, nurses, and gossips, demand 'warm broths', 'costly caudles', partridge, plover, woodcocks and quails, they send their

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husbands out to buy the most fashionable baby linen, and feign sickness to get even tastier food.87 The husbands in these stories, like the cuckolds of popular literature, end up powerless, running to meet their wives' every demand. By the seventeenth century, town governments had long given up trying to regulate consumption, but the potential of childbirth rituals to leach money out of households into the market remained. The woman in childbed becomes a treacherous, clamorous body, a gateway through which strangers flood into the house and money flows out of it. Like pregnant women, women in labour were represented as dangerously demanding. One story told by the gossips of a satire of 1682 has a woman in labour crying out 'Oh I cannot be delivered, unless I see that cut off before my eyes, by which I did get it.' In the end her husband pretends to have his penis amputated and keeps up the masquerade until, as her lying-in draws to a close, she becomes so sexually importunate that he is forced to admit he has a stump left after all.88 In all of these satires, lying-in was represented as a forum of female sociability and consumption, the one feeding off the other as women vied to impress their neighbours and demanded impossible luxuries of food and drink. Contemporary medical advice prescribed that women of different social ranks required different treatment in their lyings-in: rich women, used to a gentle diet, needed special, delicate foods and should not risk hearty meals; ordinary, working women required a rougher diet for recovery.89 The complaints of satirists and, earlier, city governments echo the concurrent complaints about women's clothing: the middling sort were emulating the rich, the poor were emulating the middling, prostitutes were emulating virtuous women. In the case of lyings-in and gossipings, what this meant was that too much money was being spent on celebratory rituals of women whose social status did not warrant it. What is also very clear in the satires is the hostility that could be aroused by female hospitality, sociability and conversation. In The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, labour and lying-in bring a host of inquisitive women into the house - looking into the childbed linen and poking their fingers through its holes, going through the whole house, eating with 'sweettooth'd liquorish appetite', and interrupting each other with endless stories of folk remedies and monstrous births. Even the conventions of invitation are ridiculed: 'I wonder that there is no body that solicits to have the office of an Inviter to all such sort of gossipings,' muses the author of Ten Pleasures of Marriage, 'but the women understand these affairs and the ordering of such sort of invitations much better then any one else.'90 The formality, the hospitality and the whole ritual of communal feasting are absurd, because it is women doing it. Some of the detail in the tales of gossips' feasts may be accurate, but more significant is the cultural work these stories performed. Satires of women's col-

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lective activities played on familiar misogynistic images of women's endless talk, their insatiable desires and their fondness for luxury. Ridicule undermined the legitimacy of women's rituals of hospitality, but it also registered their significance, both as a transformative moment in marriage and a focal point of community life. These were significant rituals for early modern communities: performance of them, inclusion in them, and infringement of them were of public concern. Even outside the marital household, the rituals of lying-in, churching and christening might be observed. Bishops repeatedly warned ministers not to give single women the ceremony of churching unless they had performed proper penance; some were disciplined for doing so anyway, presumably at women's request.91 Single women's labours, instead of being attended by honest matrons, might be attended by other single mothers, as Elizabeth Edge's was. Christenings and lyings-in, too, might involve alternative social worlds. A London prostitute examined by the Bridewell court described her attendance at two such events in 1599. Once, she was invited to Mrs Wilkinson's house, to the christening of a child of Mrs Wilkinson's sister 'who never had a husband'; with her were five other women, all 'common whores'. Another time, she was invited to visit a woman 'having no husband and lay in childbed'.92 Gatherings like this seemed to undermine the whole basis of the social rituals of giving birth, subverting the regulation of reproduction that was meant to be achieved by women. Even more provocative were the rituals observed by informers in the molly-houses that constituted part of a homosexual subculture in early-eighteenth-century London. There, according to trial records, men performed mock labours, childbirths and gossipings. Notably, in Mark Ravenhill's recent dramatisation of Mother Clap's Molly House, the mock childbirth is reduced to a performance masterminded by Mother Clap, desperate for a real child of her own.93 It is, it seems, unthinkable for modern gay men that childbirth would constitute a ritual worth performing. But in fact there is nothing to suggest that anyone other than the men of the molly-house created and performed this ritual, and it was on this that both the trials in 1709 and Ned Ward's satire on molly-houses focused. What did lying-in represent, that men interested in having sex with each other performed it as a festive ritual in a predominantly male space? The ritual of giving birth is no longer a public one. Its social implications now are as likely to involve privacy and isolation as group celebration, eating and drinking. Childbirth has become a personal drama. But for early modern people, the body's experience in childbirth and lying-in was a basis for social ritual. The bustle and the groaning that the mollies allegedly imitated were merely a prelude to the social interchanges that followed: fussing over invitations, drinking, eating, gossiping about husbands and children. The rituals that

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seventeenth-century satirists and eighteenth-century mollies mocked were powerful social exchanges. There were very good reasons why lying-in should be regulated, satirised and performed. The bodily ritual that was supposed to be women's deepest secret was in fact highly public. Its setting in an all-female world has proved to be the source of conflicts, tensions and confrontations. The ritual of lying-in may have granted some empowerment to women over men and wives over husbands: it emphasised the special qualifications women had to understand matters of reproduction, and it offered newly delivered mothers some measure of seclusion and protection. Most of all, though, it depended on hospitable relations between women. Critiques and satires of gossips' feasts ridiculed those rituals, but they retained a significance in shaping women's experience of childbirth. But the collectivity of women also brought distrust and fear. Pregnancy opened a woman's body to the dangers of worldly influences; lying-in left her exposed to the force of gossip, jokes, interrogation and witchcraft, and even the question of who to invite could be traumatic. If some of the rituals of reproduction could be empowering for women, the experience of giving birth was both physically and socially overwhelming, and sometimes terrifying. Single mothers, of course, were particularly vulnerable: for them, the rituals of reproduction represented regulation and punishment, not protection or reassurance. But married women, too, might have good reason to find the public, social experience of childbirth and lying-in a time of tension and fear.

SIX

Precarious parenthood

It was a commonplace in early modern England that fathers could never be entirely sure of their children. Early modern jokes targeted one figure above all others: the cuckold betrayed by his wife's infidelity. Cuckolds are no longer funny; they lost their humorous power some time in the eighteenth century, becoming objects of pity rather than derision.1 But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cuckolds were the butt of endless jokes. They came home after a hard day's work or a bloody battle to find their wives in bed with their servants or their friends, or they married virgins who turned out to be four months pregnant by other men. Most of all, they risked being deceived into fathering other men's children. Cuckold jokes rehearse a well-worn anxiety about the speculative nature of paternity; they also stood for a wider set of concerns about masculinity. To some extent such anxieties were grounded in the actual dilemmas of men in families. Cuckoldry crystallised two issues that were central to familial patriarchy: sexual fidelity and economic probity. It also raised matters that were being discussed in medicine and politics. Medical writers were concerned with the nature of biological paternity, weighing up the arguments and evidence for the relative roles of women and men in the process of conception; to some, William Harvey's account of fertilisation threatened to suggest that women were capable of begetting children just by thinking about it.2 The wider political context of reproduction raised further troubling possibilities, particularly at two key moments when monarchy was in crisis. In the early seventeenth century patriarchalism provided an explanation and a justification of political authority: as fathers had power over their families, monarchs held supreme authority over their nations. The political events of the 1640s and the 1680s brought patriarchalism into question. In the 1640s, royalists and parliamentarians debated whether subjects could resist or depose Charles I; in the 1680s, Whigs and Tories debated whether James II could resign the throne to his son-in-law, as he did in 1688. Political writers in both decades

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questioned the basis of patriarchalism - the origins of political power in the family. Both Thomas Hobbes, in the 1640s, and John Locke, in the 1680s, pointed out that the insecurity of paternity impeded the status of paternal authority as the basis for absolute power. Hobbes s point was that 'it is not known who is the father to the son but by the discovery of the mother': the 'original dominion over children belongs to the mother', and paternal power was therefore derived from conquest, rather than nature.3 Locke's understanding of generation gave women 'an equal share, if not the greater', and took this as evidence that fathers had no more authority over their children than mothers. Through the late seventeenth century the issue of insecure paternity remained a key concern in Whig thinking, raising some awkward contradictions. As Rachel Weil has argued, undermining strict hereditary succession to the throne also threatened the rules of inheritance, and, by stressing the significance of women's part in reproduction, it raised the question of men's power over wives and families.4 Uncertain paternity raised troubling questions about the power of women, and the difficulty of controlling their bodies. Indeed, Mary O'Brien has argued that male anxiety about the rightful paternity of children is at the heart of patriarchal structures; men's control of women is an attempt to control what is fundamentally uncontrollable and therefore threatening.5 Similarly, Mark Breitenberg's analysis of literary representations of male jealousy concludes that men's fears about paternity are a register for wider concerns, some real, some anticipated. The uncertainty of paternity, then, can stand in for the whole insecurity that threatens male dominance in this era. The supreme authority theoretically granted to fathers was rarely easy to attain. The economic basis of the household was often problematic, and many men were unable to achieve the economic independence expected of masters, husbands and fathers. Perhaps cuckoldry demonstrated the humiliating ease with which male omnipotence could be challenged. But humour can also be conservative. In cuckoldry jokes, women always win. In life, they did not. Keith Thomas's trenchant analysis of cuckold jokes goes straight to the point: 'when marriage was by universal agreement a relationship of unequals, it seemed right to mock the foolish husband who allowed his property to be stolen'.6 The dilemma of paternity was not just a masculine one. The idea of uncertain paternity depended on and contributed to a construction of women as duplicitous and unreliable in body as well as in mind. If a tolerant humour is directed at the male cuckold, the woman who cuckolds him becomes a model of feminine cunning. Women in cuckoldry jokes take advantage of their husbands' innocence and blindness - literally so in one story, where the cuckolded husband only has one eye. Most often, they win by devious wit, clever lies and word-play. Cuckoldry thus becomes not just a trick of the body, but one of words, and an archetypally female project. In one ballad, a new husband whose

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wife has given birth to a child twenty weeks, instead of forty, after their marriage is convinced by the cunning misinformation of the gossips around the childbed, who tell him confidently that 'tis twenty by night man and twenty by day'.7 In a joke, a woman manages to follow her priest's advice to tell her husband he is not the father of her child by making him dress up as a hobgoblin and threaten her child so that she can say, as you were supposed to do to goblins, 'Away, away, the child is none of thine!'8 In this way women's ostensibly authentic words are shown to be cunning plays, as opaque as the pregnant belly. These word tricks provide repeated reminders of the deceits of the female body. Economically and emotionally, men forced to father other men's children are at the mercy of women's bodies and words. The problem of insecure paternity was not simply a matter of the mechanics of reproduction: it was traced directly back to the insatiability and deceit of women. But paternity also came into question in a set of rather different circumstances: where women were unmarried, and a child had no obvious father. If the fragile nature of paternity left men conscious of the risk of deceit and fraud, it also enabled them to evade paternal responsibility. The other side of insecure paternity saw a variety of manoeuvres by which communities redefined the meanings of paternity on the margins. For magistrates and householders, insecure paternity was just as likely to threaten them by creating burdens on the poor rates as by risking secure inheritance within the family. Once we expand our focus beyond the propertied elites, the meanings of paternity and its insecurities demand rethinking. This chapter considers the precariousness that adultery, illegitimacy and poverty wrought on parenthood: first, by examining the flexible nature of paternity, then, by asking what those circumstances meant for motherhood. The elusive paternity of illegitimate children was a problem throughout the seventeenth century. Illegitimacy levels were generally low; even in the pastoral regions of the north-west, where economic pressures meant marriages were postponed longer, only around 5 per cent of births were illegitimate, and everywhere, recorded illegitimacy dropped from a peak in the 1600s to a low in the 1660s. But with little evidence for the actual levels of bastardy, contemporary concerns often wildly exaggerated it, and state policy was motivated by moral panics, local politics, economic pressure and spiritual discipline. From 1576, the Elizabethan poor law had empowered magistrates to make parents contribute to the upkeep of illegitimate children. Mothers were necessarily accountable, but fathers were to be traced too. Parishes and counties under economic pressures were likely to make special efforts to get women to confess the names of fathers and to make enquiries to trace them: in 1633 the parishioners of Dorlston in Staffordshire reported that their efforts to trace the missing husband of Jane Wild had cost them 'sums of money', with no success.9 There were two periods when the quarter sessions focused particularly sharply

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on paternity investigations. The 1650s witnessed widespread concern for social disorder, with the church courts suspended and many of the customary mechanisms for regulating sex out of use. At the same time the quarter sessions found themselves responsible for dealing with illicit sex and some courts took the need to discipline illegitimate mothers and find fathers for illegitimate children particularly seriously. In counties like Essex, where the bench was dominated by Puritan magistrates, more examinations were taken from single mothers in the 1650s than ever before, and midwives and neighbours were zealous in reporting and questioning them. The next phase of intense concern seems to have come in the 1690s, when evangelical campaigns for the 'Reformation of Manners' infected town governments across England.10 In the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, for example, the church courts focused sharply on prosecuting fornication and adultery, and for the first time in many years, large numbers of long testimonies were taken and preserved. In neither period is there evidence of a rise in bastardy figures; moral panics had their own momentum, and just one illegitimate child could be perceived as a heavy burden for a parish. Whatever the preoccupations of popular literature, magistrates, churchmen and householders were likely to be concerned with insecure paternity less in terms of cuckolds deceived into being fathers than in terms of the burdens created by men who refused to be fathers. In the words of Louis Montrose, paternity was 'a cultural construct for which ocular proof was unattainable'.11 In the strictest sense this is true; but ocular proof was the very thing that early modern men and women sought for and speculated about. In Somerset in 1631, Mary Hosgood discussed the paternity of her neighbour's child at supper in front of six other women and men: 'Ursula Towte's youngest child is like David Dunscomb, and I dare swear that he made it that night that Robert Towte was about a hundred miles from here, for . . . it is as well like him as though it had crope out of his mouth, and it hath a crooked long nose even like him, and is white-favoured as he is.'12 In Leominster in 1675, Richard Caswall was prosecuted for fornication with his maid, Mary Munck. He had, according to witnesses, told his wife that the reason he got up at night was to protect Mary from his manservant Thomas, until she caught him actually in bed with Mary. When Mary became pregnant, she said that 'if she should be delivered of a lame child, then it was her uncle's . . . and if it should be an upright black child, then it was Thomas . . . , Richard Caswall's man's child'.13 Sometimes, exchanges reported between husbands and wives mirrored the cuckold stories of popular culture. In 1613 the Nottingham church court heard a case for defamation of character brought by Geoffrey Brock, a gentleman, against one of his tenants, Thomas Wallis. Two women testified that while Thomas's wife Anne was lying in after the birth of her son, her husband accused his landlord of fathering the child. The woman holding the child said 'here is a fine boy God bless him', to which Thomas responded

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'It is like Geoffrey Brock . . . it is his.' Confronting Geoffrey Brock in person, Thomas Wallis detailed the precise financial implications of his cuckoldry, and his plans for compensation: 'You have gotten my wife a boy my wife is now to be churched and it will cost me an angel or a mark and you will allow me nothing but I will sit in my house rent free.' Other witnesses recalled him saying 'if thou wilt not keep it the town will keep it' and swearing 'by Gods wounds I will have none of it I will leave it with him'.14 Only the ocular evidence is ever cited as proof that the child was not Thomas's, though doubtless there were other circumstances that were not discussed in court. If the scenario is straight from ballads and jokes, the details make clear the most mundane financial implications of adultery and cuckoldry: not so much abstract ideas about property inheritance and blood lineage, as the daily costs of maintenance, rent, and even that perpetual bone of contention, churching. This kind of haggling, fantastic as it may be, performs a strange trick: it writes the betrayed husband back into the marriage, and it replaces his wife's sexual agency with his own financial assertiveness. One of the effects of the language of cuckoldry is to avoid talking about female desire: 'make my husband a cuckold', Mary Combe was supposed to have called to passers-by on the Somerset high road.15 Verbal exchanges like these call on ocular proof as evidence of the 'true' father. But other stories make paternity a much more flexible affair. In cases of illegitimacy, midwives' obligation to question women in labour was based on the assumption that the father was for the mother to name. When illegitimacy got to this stage, it was usually because the father had fled, was married, or was unknown: in all these cases, paternity was a real and significant question, and it was defined in several different ways. Children could have multiple fathers. In a Huntingdonshire village in 1604, two married sisters fell out when one, Jane Carter, told the other, Helen Field, that Robert Potter was 'half the father' of Helen's child.16 Such an idea had some support in contemporary medical thinking. We have seen how much power the mother's imagination was held to have over the foetus, from the point of conception onwards, so that an unfaithful woman was supposed to be able to imprint the features of her husband upon her child by another man. More concretely, it was thought that twins, though not usually single children, could be the product of two different men. But the idea of multiple fathering is more a social than a biological concept: it represents paternity as negotiable and dependent on women's words. In London in 1599, one woman told another that her maid was with child and 'had two strings to her bow': she 'had two fathers for her child' and could charge Mr Watkins, a cutler in Fleet Street, and Mr Antell, an undersheriff of Wiltshire.17 In Somerset, another servant was reported to have said 'that if [William] Popham did use her well, that then the said Aplyne should father the child, if not, then the said Popham should'.18 Here, the withdrawal of

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paternal responsibility is the reward for a man's kindness. These words were reported speech; they did not necessarily represent what women said, but rather an idea of what illegitimately pregnant women might do to pin men down. The idea of multiple fathers, like that of insecure paternity, endows women with a simulacrum of choice. In reality that choice was likely to be illusory: men who did not want to be fathers were all too able to evade responsibility. But what the fantasy of multiple paternity did do was cast women's words as unreliable, as untrue as their bodies. The precariousness of paternity was facilitated by men's readiness to deny their part. Mary Nosworthy and Anne Scobell, two Devon women who became pregnant outside marriage in 1656 and 1667, both said that their lovers had told them 'what he did do he would own'. But neither of them did.19 Others offered a more partial kind of paternity: one man told a woman servant that if she was pregnant, 'he would do the best endeavour he could to father it'.20 Men who promised to act as fathers to their illegitimate children were, by women's accounts, rare. Other women told midwives, neighbours and the court of the evasiveness of their lovers, and the threats with which they responded to paternity claims. Elizabeth Jeffery, a widow from Barnstaple, said that her child's father told her he was a married man and 'he had a new pair of boots and a horse and would ride away'; he suggested she 'bring it on' a young man instead, and suggested two.21 Lucy Gribble, a spinster from Crediton, said the weaver who fathered her child threatened to slit her nose if she brought it on him, and then beat her, causing her child to be stillborn.22 In Yorkshire in 1669, Elizabeth Wright was suspected to have been murdered by her child's father, who had been heard to say that if she named him as the father, 'he would be her butcher for her'.23 Other men suggested alternative fathers: men whose reputation was less vulnerable, or who had disappeared, or who might be prepared to marry the mother. In the 1650s, mobile soldiers proved a particular problem for parish authorities. The Devon quarter sessions of Michaelmas 1651 examined two pregnant women, one of whom said her lover told her 'if she proved to be with child not to bring it upon him there being soldiers enough going' and the other who said she had lain with a soldier who told her to 'get any country man to father it'.24 Several women said their masters had persuaded them to father their children on another servant. Margery Eades told the Worcester quarter sessions that her child's father, Edward Benson, had refused to marry her and threatened to run away if she named him as father: instead, he urged her to father the child on several other men - 'sometimes upon one John Jones [a servant] . . . and at other times upon Charles Brooke [another servant] but . . . did urge [her] chiefly to accuse one Mr Edward Wheeler . . . and gave her a shilling so to do further saying t h a t . . . Mr Wheeler was best able to maintain t h e . . . child'. She followed his advice and, when she was examined in

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labour, charged Wheeler; only over a year later did she tell the magistrates that the father was Edward Benson.25 For illegitimate mothers, putative fathers and parishes, financial responsibility was the key issue of paternity. Examined in court, many women reported men had promised them money as long as they were not named publicly as father. Significantly, they mostly offered one-off sums rather than regular maintenance: what they were proposing was to dissolve the relationship, not perpetuate it. In London in 1599 Anne Ball's lover bargained with her that if she would allow him to marry who he wanted, he would give her thirty shillings at her marriage and twenty shillings more when he had it. Other offers were much higher. In 1650 a Somerset woman was offered £10 and the child's maintenance until it was two years old if she did not name its father; another was offered £10 and threatened with death by the father and his son.26 In London in 1606 Margaret Wall's master promised to give her £200, marry her to his manservant, and do 'anything' for her if she would not lay the child to him, but the manservant ran away, and she laid her child, both literally and metaphorically, at her master's door.27 Maintenance orders were fairly predictable, and even in cases where fathers were known to be wealthy, maintenance was set at a level suitable for bringing up a pauper child - around a shilling a week. In the first half of the seventeenth century Staffordshire quarter sessions regularly made orders that fathers should give mothers a shilling weekly until the child reached the age of seven, and then take the child; it is not at all clear if fathers ever did assume responsibility.28 Others established a cut-off point when the child was bound out as an apprentice, and some made fathers pay one-off sums of around £5. Some fathers, then, were offering significantly less than they would pay in court-ordered maintenance agreements; some were offering more, though few women named sums of more than £10. Given mortality rates, a one-off payment was not likely to be a good bargain.29 What these men were paying for, rather, was a range of levels of avoiding paternity. While some men refused all responsibility, others were prepared to offer some paternal gestures. Anne Sewsmith, a London widow, had a child by George Idell in 1598. She told the Bridewell that he gave her various sums of money, once as much as fifty shillings, offered her money to marry someone else, and paid for part of her lying in. When he went to arrange the lying-in at Epping, he went to drink with the couple who were to nurse her and raised a glass to the wife, saying 'I drink to the nurse and I pray be good unto Anne Sewsmith and use the child well for thou shalt nurse now my first child.'30 Whatever the truth of the story, it suggests some social acceptance of paternity outside marriage. In Worcester in 1633 George Clark, the keeper of Worcester castle, encountered more difficulties; his manoeuvres left a trail of evidence which, several years later, the quarter sessions pursued. First, he had

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arranged for the child's mother - whose name was never recorded - to stay in Pershore, in the house of one of the castle prisoners. Then Clark's wife complained and ordered the churchwarden to send her away, saying 'her husband should not keep a whore so near her nose'. When the woman gave birth, the midwife questioned her and she named George Clark as the father. Clark came to the baptism, paid for the feasting of the women that helped her in labour, and left orders at a victualling house to provide her with anything she wanted until the churching. At the churching he came and 'paid all scores', feasting the women again and giving them new gloves. Then he sent the child to a widow to look after, buying her a cow for the milk. Despite all these testimonies to paternal responsibility, he then got another man to stand bond for the child's upkeep. He sent some clothes and money, but apparently left most of the upkeep to the parish of Pershore, who estimated it had cost them at least £24. Stories like this demonstrate how far the legal definition of paternity and its practice could diverge. Determined not to be held responsible in court for his child's paternity, and managing to evade a formal order of maintenance, George Clark also made paternal commitments that recognised his social responsibilities to the child's mother and her lying-in companions.31 In lateseventeenth-century Herefordshire, Blanch Davies's master, who was also her father's landlord, tried to get her to leave the county and father her child on another man. She refused, and after the child's birth he visited her, promised to take five shillings off her father's rent for the cost of its clothes, and arranged the christening. When the child died at eleven weeks old, he promised to have it 'well brought home', and told Blanch's father to buy ale and bread for the funeral and a penny loaf for every child in the lane near the church, saying he would take the cost off his rent.32 Men might go a long way in the public acknowledgement of their paternity, as long as they were not bound by formal or legal commitments. To be named as a father brought men into discredit. Reginald Buckle said he wanted to convey his lover away so that her pregnancy 'should not have been known nor touched either of their credit'.33 Agnes Evans's master 'persuaded her to father her child on another man for £20', telling her 'if she discredited him he would be her death'.34 Mary Burge's lover offered her twenty shillings to say that the child he had fathered was her husband's, 'otherwise he should be undone forever'.35 Elizabeth Bassett's lover promised her she would not want as long as she found another father and did not 'disgrace him'.36 These concerns were partly economic. Credit was where financial status and public reputation met. Discrediting a man by naming him the father of a bastard child meant, first of all, forcing him into a maintenance agreement, either informal or enforced by the courts. A regular payment, however minimal, was often difficult to come by, and it mortgaged part of a man's future income for at least

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the next six years. Discredit might also damage marriage prospects. Significantly, married men, the majority of fathers in trouble for denying paternity, make no reference to their wives' attitudes. But unmarried men might well find that being known as a father damaged their prospects, not only because of the moral implications of paternity, but because of its economic consequences. And some simply refused to lower their status by marrying their child's mother, like Ann Barber's master, who told her that marrying her 'would be an undoing to him, but a making of her'.37 The whole process of being formally recognised as the father of a bastard brought respectable men into question. In parishes increasingly preoccupied with the cost of illegitimate children, a married householder who fathered a bastard risked stepping from the ranks of the ratepayers to those who were, or created, burdens on them, and to be named in court undermined some of the defining features of married men's status in the community. Most of these men were masters of servants as well as husbands and fathers, and many were accused of fathering children on their own servants. However predictable this scenario was, it was also awkward and potentially debilitating for male status. In theory, at least, masters of households were the pivots of moral, domestic, political, economic and social order. To be the subject of a bastardy order undermined a man's self-government. As much as the economic aspects of poor relief and paternity orders, and the social 'shame', it was the judicial side, the legal determination of what a father was and how he should act, and the implications of being a subject of judicial authority that these men shied away from. The same logic underlay the House of Commons' refusal, in 1593, to criminalise and punish men who had fathered illegitimate children in the same way they did women. In the words of one member, the punishment of whipping 'might chance upon gentlemen or men of quality, whom it were not fit to put to such a shame'.38 It was the punishment, not the crime, that shamed them. Masters, the guarantors of domestic, sexual and social order, were also often the greatest threat to it. None of this is to deny that men were vulnerable to the shame that was supposed to attend sexual sin. Some were more so than others: being a master, holding local power, or identifying with Puritan interests were likely to be particularly significant. Bernard Capp has argued that men's anxiety over sexual reputation has been underestimated, and that women's ability to name men as the fathers of their children gave them a powerful weapon which could be used as blackmail.39 Capp's examples certainly demonstrate male concern about accusations of immorality and paternity. But the shame which affected women, and that which affected men, were hardly comparable. Men were rarely if ever vulnerable to the effects of shame in the same way that women were, for the simple reason that they occupied different positions in the struc-

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tures of social power. Women were regularly whipped for bearing illegitimate children; men were punished much less often for fathering them. Fathers might be forced into marriages that lowered their aspirations; but mothers who did not marry were likely to end up poor, hungry and dependent on charity or the parish. While mothers of illegitimate children tended to marry later than usual, or not at all, many fathers were married already. Overall, the insecurity of paternity gave men a chance to escape, and undermined the position of women. At first glance the pressures of authorities seem to be at odds with these mens insistence that they should not be forced to father their children. Midwives, justices of the peace and overseers were empowered to investigate paternity of illegitimate children; midwives in particular were charged with establishing the 'true father'. But who the 'true father' was might be negotiable. Christian Astbury, a servant to Thomas Lewis in Stafford, gave birth to a child alleged to be her master's in 1692. Defending himself against the paternity allegations, her master claimed that after the birth she had sent for a tailor with whom she had been keeping company, and showing him the child, told him 'it was very like him and that he got it' According to him, the mayor of Stafford and the recorder also consulted about the father. The recorder said 'we will take care to have her instructed that she shall not father her child upon any poor body, because it shall not become chargeable to the parish'; the mayor replied 'Nay I am not for that, for that I am for setting the saddle upon the right horse, let it light where it will'; and the recorder visited Christian's bedside himself.40 In Somerset in 1612 Rachel Rooke told how her child's father, a visitor to her master's house, had suggested two men she should name as father; another man told her 'if she did put it to a married man it would be the worse for her, but she should put it to some young man and then perchance he would marry her'.41 In 1653 Elizabeth Sprang was given various suggestions on how to father her child. Her own confession named her master, but when she was delivered, one of the parish overseers was heard telling her to 'wrong nobody . . . and she should have no wrong by the . . . parish'.42 These rather ambiguous advices depended on an understanding of 'wrongs' and 'rights' that was not necessarily in line with biological paternity. Rather, mothers, fathers and parish officers had their own ideas, and their own agendas. Neighbours, especially women, had their say as well. Elizabeth Clement, pregnant in Somerset in 1651, told the magistrate that she had been persuaded by three women of the parish and one man to father her child on John Bellamy, a man who she had only met once: one of the women, Grace Streate, had told her 'that she should keep her hold, and she . . . did believe that there would be a good purse of money come from . . . John Bellamy'.43 Motives for such pressure might come from financial concern - it was clearly in the parish's interests to have a father named who could maintain the child

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- but Grace Streate and her fellows' persistence might also come from other grievances, neatly revenged by the public inconvenience of being named as a father. Men's reluctance to father was endorsed by their families, and particularly by their female relatives. Ties of loyalty bound husbands and wives, sons and mothers, in the urge to protect the integrity of the conjugal household and the future of its sons. For younger men, mothers stepped in. For married men, wives helped. Since so many single mothers were servants whose children were likely to be fathered by men in the household they worked in, mistresses's position could be awkward. Bound by their role as employers and substitute parents to protect the moral welfare of their servants, in these cases they often stood firmly by their sons or husbands. The pregnancy of a servant disenfranchised her from any familial protection - even, perhaps especially, when her child was thought to be related to the family. Marriage was thicker than blood: a paternal tie that threatened a conjugal household was unacceptable. Joan Willmott, a married woman in Somerset, was determined to protect her son from the accusations of their domestic servant, Elizabeth Robins. When neighbours visited her after she had been kicked by a colt, she confided to them that 'her heart was broken, for said she there is a worse thing happened, then the hurt which I had with the colt'. She explained 'our huswife is with child . . . and I think she will put it to our Tom . . . but he shall not father it for . . . rather than he shall father it, he shall run as far as a new pair of shoes will bear him'. Six months later, after the child was born, Joan's neighbours reported her words to the magistrates investigating its paternity.44 In cases like these, the structure of the marital family protected men from the full force of a paternity accusation. Women, as much as men, took an active part in concealing paternity, using the full range of threats and manoeuvres. Not one man in these cases is recorded as begging a pregnant woman to keep her secret from his wife. Instead, several called on their wives to help them out, providing for lyings-in, ensuring the father was not named in labour, and persuading or threatening mothers to keep quiet. Margaret Grymwood, a servant in Essex in 1655, gave birth in a neighbour's house, in the presence of a midwife, her mistress and several other women. The sworn midwife reported the questioning, Margaret's responses, and the reluctance with which her story was received: she being called to the delivery of one Margaret Grymwood great of a bastard child at Ilford in the parish of Barking, did several times in the said Margarets labour require the said Margaret to declare who was the true father of her child, who answered, none had to do with her but her master Straunge, and further the said Margaret wished that she & her child might

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never part, if ever any man had to do with her but only her master Straunge; And her Dame Straunge being by asked her what had your Master to do with you so often as you report who answered Aye, and oftener too. Other witnesses added that Margaret had said 'her Dame if she would but speak, could not choose but know of it' and 'that her dame knew in her conscience it was her Masters'. Mrs Straunge 'begged her not to wrong her husband' but she stuck to her story.45 Mrs Straunge's presence at this labour united two awkward roles: the mistress and the wronged wife. It was not unusual for the wives of men suspected of fathering illegitimate children to take responsibility for the lying-in and to exert pressure on the mother. Alice Ashmore, a London servant pregnant by her master, had her lying-in paid for by her mistress, who also pursued her after she left her service and threatened to kill her if she did not name another father.46 Maria James testified that after she had given birth, her lover's wife 'came to her in her weakness and gave her two or three boxes upon the ear'.47 Some mistresses joined with masters in keeping sworn midwives away from the lying-in. Susan More, a London servant pregnant by a friend of her master, was offered help for her lying-in by the man's wife, but the magistrate intervened and told her to be sure to have 'a strange midwife', who could not be suborned to evade a paternity declaration.48 Anne Robbins, servant to a gentleman in Wyre Piddle, Worcestershire, in 1665, stayed in her master's house to give birth and was promised that 'neither her nor her child should ever want as long as he had any land in Piddle'. In return her mistress's mother, who lived with them, persuaded her to name another man 'in the time of her extremity', promising her that if she did so 'she should continue in the house seven years and have part of the living towards the maintenance of her and her child'. However, three weeks after Anne's delivery, the same woman offered her £5 to run away and leave the child on the parish. When she asked her master for maintenance, he asked her not to discover him to be the father and promised to send her money'as soon as he could receive his rents'. Anne named no father, before, during or after the delivery, until two months after the birth, when she finally gave her master's name to the magistrates.49 Behind the complete respectability of some households' lyings-in, where neighbours visited to help and congratulate, might lie other, more secret rituals, where pregnant servants were kept out of sight and their labours were managed so as to avoid public declarations of paternity. Such scenarios make painfully clear the lines of loyalty that could divide women. As well, the part that wives and mothers took in protecting men from paternity accusations stemmed from their role in safeguarding household reputation. Paternity accusations threatened the reputation and the financial stability of households and communities; women stepped in to protect them.

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To contemporaries, and to some historians, the flexibility of paternity has seemed to give women a weapon against men.50 A few women did express it in those terms. Anne Stanton, examined at the 'extremity' of her labour for the name of her child's father, answered 'what is that to anyone I have a father that will maintain my child without troubling anyone'.51 Margaret Ray, a servant whose child was born in Theydon Bois, Essex, in January 1637, went much further. Examined by women present at the birth, and by magistrates after it, she first named John Greene as the father, saying he had forced her from her horse in Epping, and that 'she would either have [him] punished for the wrong he had done her or else she would make away with herself'. They had shared a bed in a lodging house, with John saying they were married, but Margaret told the magistrates he had forced her to do as he said by threatening to do her a mischief. Two weeks after the child was born, a neighbouring wife invited her into her house, 'pitying her by reason of the weather' and said 'Meg, you have a pretty child'. Margaret replied 'it must needs be a pretty child, for as proper a man as any in Essex was the father of i t . . . John Greene the son of Mr Greene of Burrows'. When a man who was in the room with them challenged her, saying 'surely you do Mr Greene's son wrong, for you came too soon for him to be the father of it', she said that the magistrate who examined her had said 'that such a young woman as she was might come a fortnight before her time, in regard of the misery she had endured'. Examined again two weeks later, she had changed her story, and said the child came ten weeks too soon for it to be John Greene's. She named instead her master, George England, and other witnesses testified she had told them it was his, that he had told her to 'lay it to somebody else and that she should never want', that she dared not name him for fear of his wife, and that she had hoped to die in the delivery of it rather than bring his name in question. But George England brought witnesses to prove that her dates did not fit him either. John Greene was determined to be the father, but within four months a paternity order was being made against George England instead. Reproved by the magistrate for 'having so many fathers to her child', Margaret Ray responded 'I will lay it to any man in the town that I list'.52 But Margaret Ray's defiance was rare, if not exceptional, and it has more echoes with the confident heroines of ballads and jokes than with the dilemmas of most single mothers. In reality the repeated construction of women as unreliable in body and word left them highly vulnerable. Pregnant single women did not have much power over the fathers of their children. Even when they were in train of marriage negotiations with suitors, plans could go wrong; pregnancy in such circumstances left a woman in much more danger than the father of her child. The very fact that paternity was impossible to prove meant, in the vivid phrase sometimes used, that a man could run as far as a pair of new boots could carry him. When, as was often the case, a woman's

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child was fathered by her master or his son, the balance of power was even more unequal. The naming of multiple fathers was manifestly a response to financial necessity and external pressures, but it was frequently treated as evidence of women's sinful deceit and mischief. Elizabeth Hodgkinson, a Nottinghamshire servant, was summoned to the church court in 1623 to explain her naming of two men as her child's father. She had first named her former master's son, John Brett, but changed her mind and sworn that the father was William Ridley. Her explanation for changing her mind was that the first declaration was made at the persuasion of her current master, who promised to protect her from doing penance if she named Brett. Ridley's witnesses claimed she had in fact been persuaded by John Brett's parents at the quarter sessions, who offered her a marriage portion to name Ridley instead of their son. Finally, it was alleged that when she was in labour, 'some women' visited her to persuade her to name Brett as the 'right father', but she told them she could not because her father had threatened to knock out her brains. Accused of 'adding mischief to mischief, and sin to sin', Elizabeth had little to say in her defence, continuing to affirm that although John Brett had had the carnal use of her body 'whether she would or not', William Ridley was the child's father. But she also admitted saying that she would never ask John Brett's forgiveness for slandering him, for 'she had not slandered him and he did know that he . . . had had the carnal knowledge of her body'.53 We are left with the sense that behind all the pressures of family, neighbours and fathers, paternity declarations might also be a moment when women told a truth that mattered to them. Marian Cooper, giving birth in Kent in 1606, did the same thing. She named her master first, but in labour she told the three wives present that the father was another man, a Mr Chambers of Halstowe. Chambers had (she said) brought her from London and placed her in service in a neighbouring tipler's house 'where by a trick that he had he could open her chamber door and come to bed unto her as often as he list'. When the women at her labour demanded 'why she had formerly laid it unto . . . her master', she said 'she had done him no wrong, for when her dame carried her pots and measures to Sittingbourne before the clerk of the market... her master lay with her in his own chamber the same day twice', and confirmed it, 'desiring of god that if she said any more than truth that she might never rise again'. In Marian Cooper's various confessions, the role of her master - taking advantage of his wife's absence to lie with the maid - makes him just as culpable as the man she later claims to be the father, the man whose sexual privileges over her accord pretty well with those of some masters.54 Women might also have their own sense of when they had conceived. A month before she gave birth, Sara Powell had told the magistrate that she was with child by Thomas Gregory after lying with him in his house on the second

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and third of January 1652. When she went into labour in July of the same year, this story became implausible, and the women present at the birth 'pressed her earnestly' to 'get the truth of her'; she kept on naming Thomas, so they 'left her in her great extremity so long as they durst, for fear of casting her away, yet they could never get any other answer, but that Thomas Gregory was the only father of the child'. Eventually she changed her dates, confessing that 'he lay with her first under a hayrick about fortnight after Michaelstide'; asked why she had set down January the second at her first examination, she answered 'she had done it, and now she could not help it'. Most women were ready with a date that fitted their expected time of delivery; Sara Powell's refusal to provide the right kind of information came from the force of her own memories, in which the New Year's incident had replaced the earlier ones. Like most others, she was insistent too that she had only lain with him then, never before or since. Only the women's examination in labour, and their threat of withdrawing help, made her rethink the story she had told to the magistrate at her first examination.55 For single women, choosing and naming a father involved careful timing. With the possibility of miscarriage or stillbirth, many pregnant single women must have been torn between admission and secrecy; in the specific culture of early modern pregnancy, where acknowledgement came late anyway, many may also have been mentally unprepared to acknowledge their pregnancies. Those who kept their pregnancy secret, as some managed to, risked conviction for infanticide if the child died at birth, but they might also have hoped for a secret miscarriage or stillbirth, after which they might have managed to maintain their positions. The maintenance of a single woman's reputation had a concrete economic importance: survival in the parish, in service or out of it, depended on keeping a good name as long as possible. Concealing pregnancy might also allow pregnant women and prospective fathers to plan a wide range of unofficial arrangements to avoid judicial involvement - 'to prevent the troubling of any justice with it', as one man put it. In 1630 Joan Michael, servant of a yarnmaker in Donyatt, Somerset, explained to the magistrates the machinations for the fathering and the keeping of her child, conceived (she said) by her master's son either in her master's bakehouse, or in the truckle bed where she slept at her master's feet. When her master and mistress examined her about the father, she named in succession two servants, a feltmaker, and 'divers other fathers'. But she had done so, she said, at the temptation of their son, upon his promises 'that he would always relieve her and maintain her and the child'. He wanted to leave meat and linen for her in his father's orchard, but she objected because it was too near the house and he directed her instead to a hollow tree at the end of the orchard where he kept his tools. In the event, the child died, but it is clear that Joan expected to have to leave service, and to continue living near enough to collect occasional sums and goods from her

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master's son. Her best hope lay in informal recognition and relief rather than an official affiliation.56 At least where the fathers were single, individual arrangements like this might continue to offer the hope of eventual marriage; they could also protect women for a time from the humiliations associated with poor relief. One Devon woman was called by her neighbour 'parish bird bastard'.57 But the evidence of these cases is overwhelmingly that men's use of the uncertainties of paternity made single mothers extremely vulnerable, pitting midwives, families, parishes and legal personnel against them. Perhaps it was no wonder that one servant, whose master paid another family to carry her off shortly after she had borne his child, expressed herself desperately: 'she hoped the child would not live, because she feared it would father itself'. Her only hope of survival was to leave the parish to escape punishment, and hope the child would die so that the paternity her master was determined to deny was never discovered.58 Another woman, questioned 'in the time of greatest extremity', swore 'that she had no other father for her child but God and Mr Ravenhill'.59 The narratives of illegitimacy cast a different light on the precariousness of paternity. Early modern people read and heard many stories in which women's unreliability made fools of men, conning them into cuckoldry or flattering them into complaisant 'wittalls' who accepted their betrayal. In plays, ballads and jokes, women's adultery made them powerful, and men their victims. It was the basis for a masculine jealousy which found its outlet in jokes about cuckolds and whores and dramas of revenge and murder. But illicit sex had a much more real face in the single women who bore children and tried to live with, or escape, the consequences. What cheap print, drama and ballads did not tell was the stories of women for whom pregnancy was an economic disaster, who were at the mercy of men's unwillingness to be named as fathers and the pressures of parishes and families to protect men's credit, and for whom the difficulty of proving paternity was unlikely to be a source of power. Some legal documents did tell those stories. In early-seventeenth-century Staffordshire, a series of petitions from single mothers to the magistrates testify to the language and narratives available to women, and those who spoke for them. Elizabeth Boult described herself as 'a poor servant fatherless and motherless, and not having any other friend to go unto and likely to lose a good service and so to perish unless order may now be taken that she may have some biding place'.60 Elizabeth Marshall pleaded that she had 'a long time lived in service in good credit and reputation' but 'with neither means not friends to depend u p o n . . . both she and her child like to perish'.61 Elizabeth Hodson, pregnant by her master's son, said that she was 'altogether unable either to relieve her self or bring up the same child, having no means at all to do the

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same, being quite destitute both of ability and friends'.62 Mary Orme, a widow, laid down the relative worth of her own and her child's father's estate with some care: c y° u r poor petitioners estate having not so much as the worth of ten shillings to maintain her self and these her four children: and the said Blake did yesterday last in this town confess he is able to lay down forty pound upon the hob or nail head upon any good occasion'.63 Petitions like these, written and perhaps crafted by other hands, are, of course, no more accurate as representations of womens' own voices than are the much briefer examinations by which they admitted to illegitimate pregnancy. But they demonstrate the existence of a rhetoric that single mothers used to define their experiences and fight for help. It was overwhelmingly a language of impotence. Most petitions for poor relief stressed the efforts paupers made to work, fighting on in the face of hardship; but single mothers told stories in which, immediately they gave birth, they lost all ability to call on their friends, to find a house, or to feed their children. Illegitimacy had immediate material consequences that were evident to mothers, fathers and their communities. Focusing on the dramas of cuckoldry that were, and are, commonly associated with uncertain paternity, it is easy to lose sight of the other side: the powerlessness of poor women.

Maternity In contrast to all the insecurities of paternity, its dependence on social and financial decisions, maternity tends to look like a simple biological event. Motherhood is apt to be construed as natural, fatherhood as cultural. I want to continue this chapter s argument by suggesting some of the ways in which this equation did not work in early modern communities. For the poor, maternity, like paternity, was a matter of social and economic practices, and it could be undermined or challenged. These challenges were most visible in the management of illegitimacy; but they had reverberations for wider discourses and practices of motherhood. Maternal discourses were politically, economically and culturally significant in early modern England. The eighteenth century has been seen as the pivotal moment in the establishment of modern discourses of motherhood: with a new stress on the importance of maternity for women's role and the potency of parental influence, affection was more vividly expressed, breast-feeding became a focus of debate, and paintings and novels depicted fond parents doting on children who, for the first time in western European art, look like children rather than miniature adults. By the late eighteenth century, Ruth Perry has argued, motherhood was being incorporated into an imperial project: more, healthier babies for a stronger nation. Toni Bowers has seen

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some of these late-eighteenth-century developments presaged from the late seventeenth century. The national crises of dynastic succession (focusing first on Mary of Modena in 1688 and then on Princess, later Queen, Anne) kept royal maternity in the publics eye, and the increasingly strict ideologies of femininity portrayed in advice literature focused on motherhood as the female vocation.64 The treatment of poor mothers in the seventeenth century suggests another way into the longer history of maternal management. Seventeenth-century practices and discourses of maternity made it clear that motherhood was economically and morally determined. Poor women could not always afford to fulfil the definition of motherhood; poor single women fell short of its requirements both morally and economically. The popular print of the seventeenth and eighteenth century told many stories of monstrous mothers who killed their children for the sake of lust, greed, diabolic temptation, misguided religious convictions, sometimes even to save them from starvation.65 The everyday uncertainties of motherhood came on a much less grand scale. For those who framed the law and those who enforced it, the economic condition of single mothers undermined their readiness to act maternally. In the infanticide statute of 1624, single mothers were understood to be likely to hide their pregnancies, kill their children or conceal a stillbirth; in the poor law legislation of 1601 the fear that single mothers would leave their children on the parish was so strong that even the threat to do so was punishable by whipping and committal to a house of correction. The fear of maternal denial was central to responses to illegitimacy. This was true at all levels, from parliament down to the families and friends of single mothers. In Much Marcle in Gloucestershire in 1686, friends, acquaintances and relations of Susan Smith observed her looking pregnant. When she disappeared for a few days and returned much slimmer, one 'discreet woman asked one of her relatives 'to speak with her, and to take care that she did not do a worse matter then she had done before, meaning the murdering or destroying of her child'. He, 'believing her in his conscience to have been delivered of a child, replied that he would take care in it, but wished that it might be kept as privately as might be, that so it might not come to her sisters ear, who was then sick, and the noise of it would break her heart'.66 What Susan had in fact done was leave the child with the midwife and some friends to find a nurse to keep it, but the enquiries of those who had been watching her meant that the story of the child's birth and its apparent father soon came to the attention of the courts. Child abandonment in early modern England remained, as it had historically been, something of a gesture of faith in charity. Children were left on doorsteps, on market stalls, or most of all, outside churches or hospitals in the hope that they would fare better with strangers.67 The dividing line between wet-nursing and abandonment was also a fine one; it might be only when the

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money stopped that a nurse realised a child had been abandoned. But the shift in attitudes to poverty and the fear of illegitimacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meant that abandonment looked increasingly desperate and criminal. Charity Wannells was prosecuted in Somerset in 1612 for a series of maternal failures and alleged child abandonments that took her across the county. Having left her husband and living instead with her cousin, she had left one child after its birth at Merriott; one with one Anthony Stephens of Upton, perhaps where she had given birth; and one with a wet-nurse in Carhampton. The Carhampton parishioners, suspecting the child had been abandoned, made the nurse take it back to the mother, but she denied any knowledge of it and locked the nurse in the house with her, threatening to imprison her unless she would take the child away again. One of the parish officials heard her cries and let her out, and Charity was committed on bail in an attempt to bring her to account.68 In London, Marie Demsdale was overheard saying to a young child abandoned in the street Alas poor child thou has a hard-hearted mother that would leave thee thus', but she confessed to the Bridewell that the child was really hers.69 Other children were abandoned later in life, in more complex circumstances. The inhabitants of one Staffordshire parish petitioned the quarter sessions to deal with Jane Wild, who had, they claimed, obtained poor relief fraudulently, and had burgled a house. Committed to gaol for four years, they complained, she left upon the town four of her children; the two elder, which she had by her first husband, by the towns care and oversight are bound prentices by indenture to two honest men; the other two, which she had by her later husband, for this four years space, viz, ever since her commitment, have cost the town for their relief eight shillings monthly; and so are like to do for many years together more. For they are very little. She is so unnatural to her children, that since her release from the gaol, she did never visit, nor so much (as we are informed) as enquired after their welfare; though she have passed many times through Dorlston, and stayed there many hours. The court decided that she was able to work and not worthy of relief, so sent her to the house of correction for a year and ordered the town to keep her children.70 Here, the essence of unnatural motherhood is its cost to the town; no mention was made of the childrens' fathers, one of whom may have been still alive. Abandonment could also be a collective affair, involving the complicity of family, neighbours and acquaintances. In 1697 Margaret Randall of Cheltenham admitted that, six weeks after her illegitimate son's birth, she had made an agreement with Susanna Powell that she would take the child for twenty

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shillings 'in money and clothes', to be paid in two instalments. Reunited with the child two months later, she recognised some of his clothes. Susanna admitted taking the child and abandoning it, abetted by another single woman, two weeks later at the college porch in Worcester, because it was 'much indisposed and like to die'.71 Another Worcestershire case involved a similar arrangement. In 1696, a travelling woman testified that she had bargained with a householder to take away his daughter's illegitimate child. John Dee, a miller, asked Sarah Harris to take the child 'for if it were not taken from her it would be murthered', and asked her how much she would charge to take it away. She replied that if he would give her £5 'she would take it away and breed it up as her own'; he 'swore he would not give five pounds with Turtons bastard but offered her twenty shillings if she would find out some parish to leave the child in'. So Sarah and a neighbour took the child and left it eighteen miles away. Despite their attempts, it was only a month before the quarter sessions managed to establish where the child came from.72 The financial negotiations were precise: for £5 a family could be freed of an illegitimate child for ever, for £1 they got the conditional, less certain, freedom of an abandonment. The unspoken assumption here, too, is that a travelling woman - already on the borders of criminality - was the best person to take away a child. That John Dee's neighbour went along with her suggests the lines between respectability and criminality were not so easily drawn, at least where women were concerned. The practice of child abandonment touched both married women and single. Nothing more was said about the mother: her father's fear that she would kill her child may have been grounded on her behaviour, but it may, too, have been shaped by the cultural conviction that single women could not be mothers. In response to abandonments, parishes and neighbours staged confrontations to reunite mothers and children. In 1611 one Somerset woman confronted another with the evidence of a supposed pregnancy twelve years before. Emma Gibbons brought a girl she had been looking after into Elinor Sawcer's alehouse, and challenged her: 'Do you know this girl?' 'No, truly,' Elinor pleaded, 'I never had but four children and they have been always dwelling with me here.' Emma persisted 'Goodwife you must know her better, ere you and I part, for I think this is your child, and it wilbe found so. Look upon it, it is like you.'73 Scrutinised for clues, this child's face - this time a twelve-year-old girl, not a baby - becomes the only solid evidence of maternity. The courts were left to decide who her mother was. In other cases the parish was reduced to collecting memories of the clothes in which abandoned children had been wrapped. Infanticide witnesses had to do the same kind of work of creating a maternal relationship. Testifying against women charged with murder, they told how they had refused to admit they were pregnant, given birth alone, with no

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labour pains, and ignored, hidden or killed the child: in every way, they showed, motherhood was denied. But infanticide witnesses also sought to reconstruct maternity - to end the drama with something that would confirm that even infanticidal women could act like mothers. A whole series of testimonies to the Northern Assizes in the late seventeenth century described how infanticidal mothers, prompted by their concerned neighbours, recognised their dead children, confessed and repented. In Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1676 Elizabeth Thornton testified to a magistrate that, summoned by a neighbour, she had taken part in a search of the house of Mary Butler, a single woman suspected of bearing a child. When one of the searchers found a dead child in the bed straw, Elizabeth Thornton 'laid it by its mother on a table and said Mary this is your child'. Mary 'confessed it was, but said, I have not hurt it for it was stillborn'.74 In 1695 Anne Johnson, meeting her neighbour Anne Giles, 'perceived her belly to be much fallen in'. She fetched another woman and searched Anne Giles's house, and confronted her first with an afterbirth found in the ashes, and then a child's body in the water near her house: on seeing the body, Anne confessed 'it was her child'.75 A midwife told of confronting Anne Nubond, a Yorkshire singlewoman, accusing her of having given birth in secret; her testimony ended with Anne uncovering her dead child, taking it up in its mother's apron and carrying it into the house.76 Here, as with the witnesses who defined paternity in terms of economic and emotional commitment, the biological bonds destroyed by the act of infanticide were reasserted through parental acts and words. Behind the threats of abandonment and infanticide that parishes so feared lay a fragile economy of maternity, in which the material consequences of every act of mothering had to be carefully weighed up. The parish's part in this economy gave contradictory messages to poor mothers: to leave the child on the parish might save the child, but risk the parish's anger; to stay in the parish with the child made you an unwelcome burden. Mothers' responses to these dilemmas reflect their careful calculations of the parish's goodwill and the exasperating and potentially tragic unpredictability of parochial decisionmaking. Elizabeth Butler, a London widow, gave birth in 1599, sufficiently close to the time of her husband's death for there to be a chance it was his, but a doubt that it might not be. Four days later, at the persuasion of the woman who had been her midwife, she got up early in the morning and took the child to Cornhill, where she left it lying on a stall. She had resisted her midwife's urgings to leave it in her own parish of St Martin Vintry, because 'the parish had been good to her': as a widow, she was probably already receiving poor relief or help with housing. After she had left the child, she said, she wanted to go back for it, but her midwife persuaded her not to, telling her 'thou fool it will be kept better then thou art able to keep it'.77 Other women were more defiant in response to their treatment by the

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parish. Alice Trott gave birth to an illegitimate child in Somerset in 1661; sent away from one parish by its overseers two days after giving birth, in case she left her child with them, she left it instead in a nearby parish, at the house of its overseer, who she later testified was the child's father.78 Katherine Talbott, a poor Yorkshire woman, was accused of infanticide when her year-old child died; in response she gave a lengthy examination that is more of a complaint than a defence. It told how she had petitioned for relief at three separate sessions, from the parish constable and the overseers; how she had been eventually 'advised to leave the child where it was born; how, nine months later, the churchwardens and overseers came and ordered her to take her child back, telling her they would help her maintain it; how, back with her child, the parish failed her again, and she was given no house and no work. Even when the child fell sick, she said, though it 'was not like to live one hour yet she was forced to go on with it to seek relief5. The child died in her arms on the common; her examination ends 'she laid it down under a hill side and left it there and acquainted nobody'.79 In theory young children were to be relieved with their mothers, no matter where they were born. But for at least some of its clients, the working of the poor law seemed to demand mothers leave their children - at the same time as penalising them for not supporting them themselves. The same double message came in the management of breast-feeding. For seventeenth-century mothers, breast-feeding was emblematic of virtuous maternity. Not only was it read as testimony of maternal love, it was also understood to physically induce it. As William Gouge argued, 'Together with the milk passeth some smack of the affection and disposition of the mother: which maketh mothers to love such children best as they have given suck onto; yea and oft times such children as have sucked their mothers breasts, love their mothers best.' Conversely, children suckled by wet-nurses, he claimed, were observed, 'to love those nurses all the days of their life'.80 Gouge's insistence on the importance of breast-feeding was part of a Protestant rhetoric of maternity. In pre-Reformation Europe Catholic theologians had tolerated the practice of wet-nursing. Since sexual relations were thought to corrupt a nursing mother's milk, breast-feeding impeded the conjugal duty, and, despite the known risks of wet-nursing, many theologians concluded that the conjugal relationship came first. As one early-seventeenth-century commentator put it, 'it is justified to imperil one's child so as not to be forced to practise continence for such a long time'.81 Even in the eighteenth century, at least one French theologian was recommending that a newly delivered woman whose husband demanded his conjugal rights should put her child out to nurse to prevent her husband lapsing into sin.82 The same texts also chastised women for not nursing their own children; the contradiction of conjugal and parental duty was fully apparent. But for many Protestant preachers and writers, maternity was the ultimate feminine role; and it involved not just

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giving birth but breast-feeding. Gouge's several pages on why women should nurse their own children described nursing as a test of self-sacrifice and commitment. Women, he wrote, had no choice but to bear children; there was no virtue in it. But in breast-feeding, God gave them a chance to choose their duty: 'God by this latter [duty] of nursing children maketh trial of women whether they will for conscience sake, do that duty which they may if they will put off.'83 In stressing the significance of mothers' commitment to breast-feed, Protestant critiques tended to side-step the issue of the conjugal debt. William Gouge's discussion made no specific mention of the effects of breast-feeding on the sexual relationship of husband and wife. The belief that sex corrupted the milk was still current, although it was not always adhered to. But for Gouge and the other authors of attacks on wet-nursing - Elizabeth Clinton, countess of Lincoln; Francois Mauriceau; Henry Newcome - it was, rather than a remedy for male sin, a privilege of female pride and vanity. Men were advised to accept their loss of sleep, but the principal sacrifice was demanded of women, who were adjured to abandon their other activities, to accept the loss of income from not being able to work, and not to worry about the loss of their figures. In the words of William Gouge, 'No outward business appertaining to a mother can be more acceptable to God then the nursing of her child.'84 If the full development of the separation of maternity from the public world can be best seen in the eighteenth century, its foundations were already there in the concerns of Protestant and Puritan reformers.85 The public discussion of breast-feeding necessarily brought into question the nature of motherhood. Opponents of wet-nursing defined biological maternity as a protracted process of nurture, rather than a limited event; and they did so, they claimed, against women's selfish instincts. For Gouge, maternal selfishness knew no bounds; some women, he thought, would even resort to surrogate motherhood if they could: 'if other women could bear their children in the womb nine months, and endure the pain of travail for them, they would hire them to do it'.86 Like the model of female chastity, that of natural maternity was always on the point of collapse. Yet those concerns had little if any effect on practice. The critiques of wetnursing addressed particular audiences: William Gouge wrote for the metropolitan bourgeoisie, Elizabeth Clinton directed her work at the women of the aristocratic elite. Neither were particularly moved to abandon the practice. Throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, a large number of women continued to participate in wet-nursing, either as the mothers of nursed children or their nurses.87 The women of elite families continued to use wet-nurses as the main method of nursing their young children and breast-feeding continued, for these classes, to be an exceptional practice. Contemporary commentary on breast-feeding focused on elite women: for moralists and satirists, rich women's use of wet-nurses demonstrated vain

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pride, laziness and regard for their own convenience. The critique of their childcare practices followed a well-established tradition of attacking female practices of consumption and display: absurd fashions, fancy food, selfadornment and cosmetics. What Gouge and his fellow writers never formally acknowledged was the significance of wet-nursing in enabling elite familes to reproduce themselves. As Dorothy McLaren has demonstrated, the practice of demand feeding meant that lactation had a significant effect on inhibiting conception by preventing ovulation, and these effects were widely known and used, both to delay conception and to hasten it.88 McLarens reconstruction of the comparative reproductive histories of one elite woman and her wet-nurse in Somerset reveals the stark differences of scale and timing: Urith Trevelyan bore ten children in just over ten years, while Elizabeth Gilbert, the wet-nurse to whom she sent them, spread her eight children over twice as long - twentytwo years.89 Nor was it only the elites who used wet-nurses. The ill effects attributed to city air, and probably also the demands of urban women's work, meant that many urban women also sent their children away to nurse. Parishes around London hosted large numbers of city infants. Many died young, others returned to their parents when they were weaned, aged two or three. For some women, wet-nursing was a medical necessity: nipples were prone to injury and flattening by corsets, a mother's milk might be insufficient. Lower down the social scale, and far from the audiences addressed by William Gouge or Elizabeth Clinton, the issue of breast-feeding was also contested in relation to poor single mothers. While the pressures on richer women to feed or nurse their children were largely confined to their husbands and their immediate families, poor women's infant feeding practices could be the subject of concern for the whole community. At subsistence level, breast-milk was a vital resource, subject to minute calculations and careful estimates. And with the concerns of parishes to prevent poor women abandoning their children, the issue of breast-feeding united a spectrum of fears about the nature and definition of maternity under pressure. Parishes needed poor women to nurse their own children. It made economic sense, since then only the mother needed to be provided for. It also ensured against mothers abandoning their children, both because of the physical difficulty of suddenly stopping feeding a child and because of the emotional bonds believed to be created by breast-feeding. Accordingly, single mothers dependent on the parish were encouraged to nurse their children themselves. However, this caused its own problems. It meant making a single mother and her illegitimate child a social unit rather than treating them separately, thus undermining both the moral and the economic basis of familial order. And since nursing a child generally kept a woman from earning enough to keep herself, parishes still had to find a way to support single mothers. Ideally, the father would support the mother while she nursed the child; if not, the parish

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might end up paying the mother to nurse her own child, or finding someone else to do it so she could support herself. Either of these solutions brought home the sharp economic implications of breast-feeding, making it very clearly an economic act rather than a simple product of maternal instinct. These problems were intensified by the practical difficulties of breastfeeding. Breast-milk was an unreliable resource. Problems with breast-feeding were familiar, and an acceptable reason for leaving a child temporarily: wet-nurses might take on children while their mothers went to find help for painful breasts.90 Once the mother had stopped feeding her child, though, there was no guarantee she would return. Nursing a bastard child had such significant financial consequences for the parish that in Lancashire in 1626, when Margery Eckersley was a few months pregnant, her neighbours tried to persuade her to swear to nurse it herself, as well as pressing her not to father it upon the man she named as father.91 Parishes were forced to respond to women's loss of milk. In Staffordshire in 1633, Elizabeth Bullock was ordered, like most single mothers, to keep and nurse her illegitimate child until it was seven, supported by sixpence a week from the father, Edward Swinnerton. But Edward fell sick, stopped earning, and defaulted on his payments, and Elizabeth, stripped of what was probably her sole maintenance, brought the child to Edward and left it with him, refusing to give him any maintenance for it or to nurse it herself. The parish sent the case on to the quarter sessions, by which time Elizabeth had lost her milk and Edward had put it to nurse; the sessions ruled that since it was by the father's default that the mother could no longer feed her child, he was to provide both for the child's maintenance and for a wet-nurse.92 In other circumstances losing one's milk was regarded as a wanton act. Joan Walker was punished at the London Bridewell in 1604 for having a child 'begotten in whoredom' and drying up her milk, leaving the child 'almost starved'.93 And the fact that having milk gave single mothers another resource also provoked anxiety - that they would abandon their own children and set themselves up as wet-nurses. Martha Hollingworth, a Yorkshire singlewoman with a new baby, aroused neighbours' suspicions by saying she was going to leave the child at her aunt's and be a wet-nurse; the child was later found dead. Anne Sewsmith, a London widow with four children, testified in 1598 that the father of her last, illegitimate, child had tried to persuade her to go and be a wetnurse, leaving her children on the parish.94 For illegitimate mothers and their parishes, then, breast-feeding was a vexed question; it was a vital but unreliable resource, one that maintained children at the expense of their mothers, but a testament to the maternal bond that the economics of illegitimacy seemed to do so much to threaten. Milk could be a bargaining tool between mothers, fathers and parishes. In the process, breast-feeding, which advice writers and parishes saw as the solidest manifestation of biological maternity

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and maternal commitment, ended up being seen as fragile and undependable, and breast-milk a commodity that, instead of binding mothers to their children, might actually allow them to leave them. Parenthood on the margins was perpetually a matter for negotiation. Clearly, to everyone involved in the drama of illegitimacy, motherhood was as potentially unstable as fatherhood. Both were bonds contingent on financial viability, whose conventional forms were undermined in the circumstances of poverty and illegitimacy. Parishes, here, function like parents: the social regulation of the seventeenth century empowered high levels of intervention into the families of the poor. The burden of supporting illegitimate children was negotiated between parishes and parents; and parishes made pleas to be relieved of the burden of supporting children just as heartfelt as those of poor mothers. In London in 1687 the citizens of St Clements Eastcheap petitioned the mayor to relieve them of the responsibility for supporting Grace Kenton and her child: Grace had been sent, pregnant, to St Clement's from the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, and 'suddenly after fell in labour whereby they [the parish] were prevented of time and opportunity to do themselves right therein.95 In Staffordshire in 1637 the inhabitants of Coppenhall petitioned the quarter sessions to free them from the burden of Helen Hassell, an ex-servant, who, they claimed, 'cunningly when she was at the end of her counts' came to the parish late at night, went into labour in the street, and warned the father to flee so that no maintenance could be obtained.96 Parishes necessarily accommodated themselves to poverty, fraud, theft and misfortune. But their attitudes to pauper parenting were ambivalent. At one level, a burgeoning civic responsibility gave them the responsibility for the children of the poor, authorising, for example, parishes to remove pauper children from families who could not support them. At the same time financial self-interest and moral concern combined to make parish officers do all they could to 'do themselves right' in keeping pregnant women and pauper children out of the parish. To parish officials, pauper infants could look like a living threat. One woman confessed to the London Bridewell that she had taken eighteen pence from the constable in one parish not to leave a child there, only to abandon it somewhere else.97 And three wet-nurses were convicted in 1685 of taking fees from parents to nurse their children, then abandoning them in St Botolph's Bishopsgate to get a second nurse's pension from the parish.98 A pamphlet of 1658 told of a murderous wet-nurse, trusted by parishes to nurse the children abandoned by 'wicked mothers', but proving in the end to be 'as wicked, and more cruel' than the mothers: she murdered her charges, then borrowed the neighbours' children when she went to the parish masters to claim her fees.99 The authority that parishes assumed in determining what parenthood was to mean made them complicit in the precariousness of both motherhood and fatherhood.

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This has implications, too, for parenthood within the law. The authority parishes were being given over children extended beyond illegitimate children to poor children, who could be removed from their families and placed in pauper apprenticeships. More broadly, the spectre of illegitimacy troubled everyone: in a parochial poor law system one single mother or one abandoned child could look like a considerable menace to the economic health of individuals, households and communities. Child abandonments, as we have seen, took place on the margins of respectable households and communities; they were collective, more often than individual, events. Illegitimate parenthood was a long way from the parenthood of married couples and stable households. Few women went through the experience of repudiating their child, and few men found themselves in the position of denying paternity. The significance of these stories lies, rather, in the place they occupied in seventeenth-century culture, and the ways they helped define parenthood both in the household and on its margins. The concept of insecure paternity was deployed from the courtroom to the theatre, with repercussions not just for male honour, but for the nature of women, and for the central metaphors of political order. The denial of motherhood provided a threatening opposite to maternity, a reminder of how contingent biological bonds could be, and of the ambivalences, fears and impotency that shaped motherhood in marriage as well as outside it. From the late seventeenth century, maternity was increasingly being represented as an idealised, domestic role, a natural bond that tied a mother to her child and her home. Against this picture, a vision of unnatural motherhood reiterated the dangers of abandoned children, infanticides, drunken or careless mothers. This was not a new battle. The definition of 'natural motherhood' and the struggle to expand its boundaries from pregnancy and birth to breast-feeding and beyond was a continuous one. The circumscription of mothers to the domestic world is a perpetual endeavour that has never wholly succeeded. Rather, maternity in the seventeenth century was a subject of social and cultural contest. It was clear to everyone that motherhood was defined by social, economic and marital status: women who could not afford to raise children were believed to be at risk of abandoning, refusing to feed, or even killing them. The attempt to make maternity the epitome of femininity was always a shaky project.

Conclusion

Against the backdrop of the seventeenth century's transformations, the social life of the gendered body remained largely unchanged. Chastity continued to define women's modesty; reproduction remained a predominantly female realm. Women still searched and touched each other's bodies, rape was still hard to prosecute, and servants still found themselves sexually subject to their masters, and physically subject to their mistresses. Witchcraft and monstrous births remained plausible, tangible threats. The nature of popular knowledge, founded on argument and metaphor, enabled it to accommodate a wide range of contradictory beliefs: continued debates about the role of menstruation, the mechanics of conception and the formation of the foetus suggest that the workings of the female body were still, in 1700, somewhat mysterious and unpredictable. All this fits with the emphasis in recent gender history on the continuities that shape women's lives, and the problems of fitting women's history into conventional historical narratives.1 Historians have moved away from a perception of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a time of more equality and freedom for women, compared to the rigid ideals of femininity and the strictly demarcated private sphere of the eighteenth century; it has become clear that that the ideological exclusion of women from the public sphere after 1700 was not necessarily reflected by practice.2 The more rigid definitions of sex and gender that were articulated in the eighteenth century, too, have their roots in the late seventeenth century, and sometimes earlier. By the end of the eighteenth century, it has been argued, the Galenic model of the one-sex body was giving way to a modern body, in which fundamental differences in physiology were the foundation for gender roles. But this story of the transition from one kind of body to another was, in Tim Hitchcock's words, 'largely articulated within a narrow and elite medical discourse'.3 The starting-point of this study was a wider definition of 'the body', one that encompasses not just medical discourses, but popular beliefs and common practices. I have

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suggested in this book that the most apparently natural of bodily events and processes - like desire, labour or motherhood - are the product of culture, and I have tried to show how social and material conditions made women's bodies what they were. The social history of the body suggests both deep changes and enduring continuities. At the level of popular belief, bodies continued to be understood in multiple, flexible ways. The stories, jokes and metaphors that helped people make sense of the body lasted a long time in popular culture, and Aristotle's Masterpiece, still in print in the early nineteenth century, continued to offer a model of the body's workings based on anecdote, ancient authorities and debate, in which women were still 'but men turned outside-in'.4 The redefinition of femininity in the eighteenth century has been particularly associated with a new ideology of female passivity, in which women are naturally chaste and where the biological functions of maternity provide their greatest fulfilment and their natural role. Both of these ideas had long histories, but it was not until the eighteenth century, it has been argued, that women's bodies were redefined to provide a biological foundation for them. Before then, the flexible body was too slippery to make biological sex a solid basis for social gender.5 A history of the body that is more attuned to its social meanings suggests a different story. Throughout the seventeenth century, the legal discourses of sexuality were consistently predicated on the idea of female sexual passivity: sexual consent was barely a question. Over and over, in court and outside it, women's and men's stories displace women's sexual agency onto men. The validation of female desire that was also part of seventeenth-century culture existed alongside the idea of sexual passivity, not against it; the two were not necessarily in tension. The legal redefinition of rape in the late seventeenth century made it a crime of sex rather than a crime against property, and brought women's sexual reputation more heavily under scrutiny. The ideal of virtuous motherhood also has earlier roots: it was already being discussed at length in advice to mothers, and in public discussion of breast-feeding, with clear implications for elite mothers, for the poor and for the state. Rhetoric about gender ideals was articulated in very different places in the eighteenth century and the seventeenth, and those differences are important to how ideas were understood; but many of the messages work on ancient, familiar assumptions. Other shifts look more specific to the seventeenth century. The reshaping of the poor law between 1597 and 1601 made parishes and magistrates more determined to find fathers for illegitimate children, and intensified the vulnerability of single mothers. In rural areas, women responded by searching pregnant women's bodies, or questioning them in labour. In towns, where more and more people were living, high mobility and large numbers of single youth made it harder to enforce sexual discipline informally, and it is possible,

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too, that the hierarchies of married and single were less stable. There, responses to illicit sex might be more formal. In London in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Bridewell provided a unique disciplinary institution whose guests' were very often single, 'light', women. In the later seventeenth century, campaigns for the reformation of manners targeted urban areas and substantially increased prosecutions. All this was largely a response to fears, rather than actual levels, of illegitimacy, but it had a powerful effect none the less: the communal enterprise of watching, touching, searching and questioning must have constrained both the social freedom and the sexual behaviour of the single. Part of the explanation for the rise in illegitimacy rates in the eighteenth century might be that such community controls were losing ground.6 Most marked is the disjuncture between the public ideals of domestic order that dominated the rhetoric of the post-Reformation church and the Tudor and Stuart state, and the demographic reality of seventeenth-century society. Across Europe in the century after the Reformation, the Protestant elevation of the household as the crucible of moral and spiritual reform was followed by punitive moral policies that had particularly harsh effects on single women, illegitimate mothers and prostitutes.7 Historians have often followed this concern with domestic order, treating the household as the principal organising unit of economy, society and gender relations. Yet at the very same time that Puritan preachers were expounding upon the values of the ordered household, that household was being severely undercut by economic and demographic realities. With a falling marriage rate, a rising age at marriage, differential sex ratios in many communities and changing labour markets, by the middle of the seventeenth century substantial numbers of the female population were not living the life-cycle that was defined as the norm: service, marriage, childbirth, widowhood. What this meant for women depends on what marriage itself meant. As well as an affectional family relationship, it was the marker of adulthood. For women of middling and poor families, marriage was expected to come after several years of service; it was the end of working for a master or mistress, and the beginning of working with a husband. On one level marriage was a move from a position with low social status, sexual vulnerability and meagre earnings, to a role with recognised status, protection and respect. On another, it meant relinquishing the freedom of independent earning and mobility for the 'coverture' of marriage, where a wife's legal and financial identity was, in theory, largely subsumed in her husband's. When large numbers of women failed to make that transition, the model of the household economy was disrupted. Very few single women ever became householders in their own right. Some urban authorities actively prevented them from doing so, prosecuting women for living without a master or 'working at her own hand'. While dairying, knitting and spinning, or working as charmaids, gave some single women the

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means to earn an independent living, many ended up spending longer in domestic service, and some made what was meant to be a preparation for marriage into a lifetime's occupation. The extension of service was unlikely to give women extra skills, or even much money; it was not like apprenticeship, which trained young men in the rules and techniques of a craft. Some mistresses taught young women spinning, lacemaking or other work, but service was essentially hard domestic work, for low pay, under strict household discipline. It was good practice for being a wife, but it offered little else. To continue being a servant and not to marry was likely to mean remaining subject to the domestic authority of a master and mistress, to sexual vulnerability, and to the lowly social status of servants in early modern communities. Older servants might find that their employers were near their own age, and the physical roles of authority and subordination that differentiated between married and single women might be especially awkward, because they were not always mapped onto predictable life-stages. Most mistresses had been servants, but it must have been increasingly apparent that not all servants would become mistresses. Marriage made a wife's body both more, and less, her own. It gave a woman a status she got nowhere else, embodied in sexual respectability, the maternal role, reproductive knowledge, and physical authority over other women. At the same time it put her body under the authority of her husband. Widowhood might preserve some of that status, although it might also bring an ambiguous social position. For some single women, not marrying may have brought some autonomy, but for many it was likely to mean a state of awkward semidependency and social insecurity. Age might bring single women into the circle of authority, giving them access to some of the status and knowledge that wives gained with marriage. But the rights and status of maternity were only achieved within marriage. Childbirth outside the rules was barely conceivable as motherhood: illegitimate pregnancy brought fear, abuse and public shame, and left unmarried mothers to create their own makeshift resources. Poor single mothers often came from poor families themselves, and were likely to end up on poor relief; the limited knowledge we have of their subsequent lives suggests that many did not marry, or married very late, and this was probably for economic reasons as well as those of reputation.8 Seventeenth-century communities reacted with hostility to the prospect of illegitimate births in their midst, forcing pregnant women out of parishes and prosecuting those who harboured them. If the most immediate issue for these communities was the cost of an illegitimate child, a deeper fear was the growing difficulty of creating legitimate families. In this demographic context, the compass of coverture was far from complete, and gender roles were embodied in an array of corporeal practices that extended far beyond the conjugal relationship. In churches, on streets, in

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alehouses and in lying-in rooms, between servants, mistresses and neighbours, the order of gender and the meaning of the female body was defined through physical contact. The subordination of the female body was a complex business, and the product of contradictory forces. Women's bodies were opaque in their workings; their most important function, reproduction, was largely invisible to the outward eye. True modesty demanded a careful guarding of the body's secrets, and chastity was both guaranteed and demonstrated by the enclosure of the body. At the same time, reproduction carried political and social significance in the outer world: from the royal household, through the bourgeoisie, to the unmarried poor, the legitimacy of pregnancy was a public business. The conflict between these two concerns did much to define the social meaning of the female body. The mystery of the body justified the scrutiny of women's bodies by law, speech and touch. Regulation, touch and intervention was part of the landscape of women's lives. At the same time, though bodily integrity was often understood in terms that are foreign to the modern eye, it was hotly contested in the house and on the street. The final strand of this story concerns the depth of plebeian women's engagement with the public world. The nature of the Tudor and Stuart state did not make for a firm distinction between what was private and what was public, although plenty of advice to householders prescribed that to keep wives within the walls of the house was the best guarantee of chastity. After 1660, the political reaction to revolution, regicide and religious enthusiasm helped redefine a 'public' in which citizenship and political participation could be understood as masculine.9 But throughout the seventeenth century, the nature of the female body was necessarily both a private matter, and public business: the politics of sex and reproduction were at the juncture of household and state. And it was through their authority over the body that women exercised an important role in public life. Midwives had an official part to play, sworn by their oath to interrogate single mothers and used by the courts to investigate allegations of infanticide or pregnancy. But lay women also had a role, searching and questioning those who might endanger the sexual discipline and economic stability of the parish. In the account of the 'valiant' Kentish women who drove Joan Jacquett over the borders of the parish as she was about to give birth, 'contrary to Christianity, nature, and humanity', we see some of the dilemmas this public authority brought.10 Midwives and laywomen were still doing this work at the end of the seventeenth century: whatever reconfigurations of public life were at work, at a parish level women's role in keeping local order was firmly established. But as midwifery decreased in status during the eighteenth century, midwives' official roles, and their association with state and church authority, disappeared, to be replaced by men. 11 Lay women's roles must have changed too, with the changing nature of parish politics, the pressures exerted by poor law overseers, and the development, in towns, of chari-

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table institutions and workhouses.12 The peculiarly intimate and tactile nature of women's public authority over the female body was disappearing. In many ways this politics of the body looks forbidding. The difficulty all women faced in articulating sexual consent, the vulnerability of domestic servants and the general brutality of parish politics of poverty and illegitimacy might seem to leave women, particularly the poor and single, at the mercy of patriarchal institutions and other women's authority. But the particular histories of touch, sex and reproduction, and the narratives and languages through which women understood the body's mysteries, also tell another story. Within the structures of social pressures and economic hardships, early modern people made their own sense of the world. Women told stories, made gestures and created rituals for the body. Spiritual resignation provided one way of living through bodily hardships; subtle or vociferous resistance was another. What bodies meant was established through perpetual confrontations and negotiations. The politics of the body made women awkward subjects of patriarchy, and brought them to participate in its enforcement. The social life of common bodies lays bare some of the convictions and practices that both troubled, and helped maintain, the hierarchies of early modern society.

Notes

Introduction 1. DRO, Q/SB 1611 (Information of James Gouswell). Legal forms have been removed from this quotation for clarity. 2. Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban

Poor in Early Modern England (Harlow, 1998), chaps 6-7; Lynn Botelho, 'Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Modern Suffolk', in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (eds), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (Harlow, 2001).

3. Ulinka Rublack, 'Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions', History Workshop Journal 53 (2002), pp. 1-16. 4. The complete midwife's practice enlarged (4th edn, 1680), p. 273.

5. On hermaphrodites, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, 'Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Early Renaissance Europe', in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender

Ambiguity (1991). 6. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

(Cambridge, MA, 1990). 7. See, for example, Karen Harvey, 'The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England', Gender and History 14/2 (2002), pp. 202-23. 8. Laqueur, Making Sex; see also Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Tudor and Stuart England (1982) and Ian McLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Oxford,

1980). 9. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of'Sex' (1993), p. 2. 10. Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (Boston, 1994); Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston, 1987),

pp. 48-9. 11. Aristotle's Masterpiece: Or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed (1684), p. 9.

12. On the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century vernacular medical literature, see Mary Fissell, 'Readers, Texts and Contexts: Vernacular Medical Works in Early Modern England', in Roy Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine, 1650-1850 (1992); Robert A. Erickson,' "The Books of Generation": Some Observations on the Style of

211 Notes to pages 180-189

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

the English Midwife Books, 1671-1764', in Paul-Gabriel Bouce (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 1982). Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (1994), p. 16. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, introduction. But for another way of using psychoanalysis to read bodies, see Miranda Chaytor, 'Husband [ry]: Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century', Gender and History 7/3 (1995), pp. 378-407. Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 127: the story is told in Ambroise Pare, Of Monsters and Marvels, transl. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago, 1982), pp. 31-2, and Michel de Montaigne, Travel Journal, transl. Donald Frame (San Francisco, 1983), pp. 5-6. For discussion of the case and the testimonies, see Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, 'Sexual Identities in Early Modern England: The Marriage of Two Women', Gender and History 7/3 (1995), pp. 362-77, quoting p. 371. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley, 1993); Sandra Lee Bartky, 'Foucault, Femininity and Patriarchal Power', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston, 1988); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York, 1994). On performativity, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction (1976); Discipline and Punish (1977). Natalie Zemon Davis, 'Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France', in Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery (eds), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, 1986); for a critique of the way historians have approached bodies through collective identities, see Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, Introduction. England's Merry Jester (1694), pp. 26-7. Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (1995), p. 25. On modern rules of looking, see Bartky, 'Foucault, Femininity and Patriarchal Power'. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (2000); Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998). Lyndal Roper, 'Drinking, Whoring and Gorging: Brutish Indiscipline and the Formation of Protestant Identity', in Roper, Oedipus and the Devil On women's status in law, see Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1559-1720 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 34-49. See Keith Thomas, 'The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered', in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1987). The 1650 act also defined adultery as extra-marital sex involving a married woman, though only a few prosecutions have been traced. See Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, 1994), chaps 1-2. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989), p. 260. The figures are estimates, and inevitably affected by varying rates of non-registration after 1642, but there is already a marked decline in the first part of the seventeenth century. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Britain (2002), p. 223. See Judith Bennett and Amy Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past,

212

Notes to pages 180-189

1250-1800 (Philadelphia, 1999); Richard Wall, 'Women Alone in English Society', Annates de Demographie Historique (1981), pp. 303-17; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 167-9; Pamela Sharpe, 'Literally Spinsters: A New Interpretation of Local Economy and Demography in Colyton in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Economic History Review 44 (1991), pp. 46-65. 31. Amy Froide, 'Single Women, Work and Community in Southampton, 1550-1750' (D.Phil, thesis, Duke University, 1996), chap. 4. 32. Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1996). 33. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (1982), chap. 3. 34. On the difference between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century illegitimacy rates, see Tim Hitchcock, 'Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England', History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), pp. 73-90. 35. David Souden, 'Migrants and the Population Structure of Later SeventeenthCentury Provincial Cities and Market Towns', in Peter Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600-1800 (1984); E. A. Wrigley, 'Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15/4 (1985), pp. 683-728. 36. Alexandra Shepard, 'Manhood, Credit and Patriarchy in Early Modern England c.1580-1640', Past and Present 167 (2000), pp. 75-106. 37. On the concept of patriarchy, see Judith M. Bennett, 'Feminism and History', Gender and History 1/1 (1989), pp. 251-72. 38. Recent work includes Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (Harlow, 2000); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (1995). 39. See the pamphlets collected in Simon Shepherd (ed.), The Women's Sharp Revenge: Five Women's Pamphlets from the Renaissance (1995). 40. SARS, Q/SR 100/5 (1661). 41. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980). 42. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). 43. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), lays particular stress on the power of shame. 44. H. F. Lippincott (ed.),'Merry Passages and Jeasts': A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange (1603-1655) (Salzburg, 1974), pp. 106,19, 43. On jest books and women's part in them, see Pamela Brown, 'Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Jest and Gender in Early Modern Popular Culture' (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1998). 45. Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, Women's Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook (2000), pp. 15-18. 46. Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth (Manchester, 1996). 47. BL, Egerton Ms. 2717, f. 175. 48. On parish politics, see Keith Wrightson, 'The Politics of the Parish', in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996); on the European context, Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999); on order, Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988). 49. The Somerset records are discussed in G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth-Century England (1979).

213 Notes to pages 180-189 50. Discussions of the church courts can be found in Martin Ingram, Church Courts> Sex and Marriage in England, 15/0-1640 (Cambridge, 1987) and Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996). On the quarter sessions and assizes, see Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Law: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994); Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003). 51. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998), p. 227. 52. See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction In The Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987); Gowing, Domestic Dangers. 53. See, for example, Steve Hindle, 'The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gender, Gossip and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England', Continuity and Change 9 (1994), pp. 391-419. 54. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (Oxford, 1979). Wrightson's later work is much more explicit about the ways gender and life-cycle shaped local hierarchies: see in particular 'The Politics of the Parish'. 55. SARS, Q/SR 93/1/76. 56. LRO, B/C/5 1665 (Def.: Willis c. Lane); NUL, AR/LB 228/2/46 (1641).

1 Uncertain knowledge 1. Every Woman Her Own Midwife (1675); for the 1650s texts see for example Nicholas Culpeper, Directory for Midwives (1651); A. M., A Rich Closet Of Physical Secrets (1652); The Compleat Midwives Practice (1656). 2. Aristotle's Masterpiece: Or, the Secrets of Generation Displayed (1684). 3. Mary Fissell, 'Readers, Texts and Contexts: Vernacular Medical Works in Early Modern England', in Roy Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine, 1650-1850 (1992). 4. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990); see also Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Tudor and Stuart England (1982) and Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (1995). 5. For a critique of Laqueur's work along these lines, see Katharine Park and Robert Nye, 'Destiny is Anatomy', New Republic 18/2/1991, pp. 53-7. 6. See for example The complete midwife's practice enlarged (4th edn, 1680), p. 273. 7. Karen Harvey, 'The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England', Gender and History 14/2 (2002), pp. 202-23. 8. Roy Porter, 'The Secrets of Generation Display'd: Aristotle s Masterpiece in Eighteenth-Century England', in Robert Purks Maccubbin (ed.), 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexualities during the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1987); Roy Porter, 'The Literature of Sexual Advice before 1800', in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge, 1994); Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, forthcoming.

214

Notes to pages 180-189

9. Patricia Crawford, 'Sexual Knowledge in England 1500-1750', in Porter and Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge. 10. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). 11. H. F. Lippincott (ed.), *Merry Passages and leasts: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange (1603-1655), (Salzburg, 1974), p. 101. 12. Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (1995), pp. 25, 28. 13. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, 2000), p. 85. 14. Harvey, 'The Substance of Sexual Difference', p. 217, cites a similar tale from a poem in Festival of Love (6th edn, c. 1770), pp. 394-5. 15. Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 109. 16. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford, 1999 [1671]), pp. 35, 37, 39; Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, p. 42. 17. Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 43. 18. See also Mary Fissell, 'Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England', Gender and History 7/3 (1995), pp. 433-56. 19. Bridget Orr, 'Whores' Rhetoric and the Maps of Love: Constructing the Feminine in Restoration Erotica', in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds), Women, Texts and Histories, 1575-1760 (1992). 20. See, for example, A New-Fashioned Marigold, Pepys Ballads, vol. IV, p. 98; Trap, Or, The Young Lass, Pepys Ballads, vol. Ill, p. 17; The Wheel-Wrights Huy-and-Cry (1693), Pepys Ballads, vol. IV, p. 115. Helen Weinstein, 'Doing it by the Book: Representing Sex in Early Modern Popular Culture' (unpublished paper, 1996) discusses these metaphors. 21. SARS, D/D/cd 44 (Cooke c. Palmer, 30 July 1614). 22. For more, see Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance (1989) and Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (1994). 23. Merry Passages', pp. 106,122; for more on Le Strange and women's role in the jokes he records, see Pamela Brown, 'Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Jest and Gender in Early Modern Popular Culture' (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1998). 24. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge, 2000), chap. 1. 25. Patricia Crawford, 'Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England', Past and Presents (1981), pp. 47-73; Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 215. 26. See for example A Banquet of Jests, The Second Part (1633), p. 121; Merry Passages', pp. 121-2,110. 27. England's Merry Jester (2nd edn. 1694), p. 119; see also A Banquet of Jests, p. 67. 28. The Wheel-Wrights Huy-and-Cry, Pepys Ballads, vol. IV, p. 115. 29. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), chap. 2. 30. England's Merry Jester, p. 92; another version, where it is the girl's master who sees her, is in London Jests: Or, A Collection of the Choicest Joques and Repartees (1684), pp. 117-18. 31. Poor Anthony's Complaint, Pepys Ballads, vol. IV, p. 146; Merry Passages', p. 99. 32. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683, ed. Alan McFarlane (1976), p. 142; Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1996), p. 50. 33. Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (Oxford, 1996), chap. 4.

215 Notes to pages 180-189 34. PRO, STAC 8 202/30, m.3 (Lawrey v. Dier). 35. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man (1651), P-175. 36. Laurent Joubert, Popular Errors, transl. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa, AL 1989), p. 188 (italics in original); Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 143. 37. PRO, STAC 8 202/30, m. 3 (lines and punctuation inserted). 38. On contemporary reports of genital excision and infibulation, see Elaine Hobby's note in Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 41. 39. GL, BCB 5, f. 204 (1607). 40. LMA, DL/C 213, p. 221. Janes uncle, a clergyman, was suing her father for defamation. On cases of sexual abuse, see Martin Ingram, 'Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England', in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). 41. Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 96. 42. Fissell, 'Gender and Generation', pp. 440-1. 43. See for example Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, 1985); E. Jane Burns, BodyTalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadephia, 1993), chap. 1. 44. A New-Fashioned Marigold. 45. He probably said cunt, and the 'C' is the clerk's. 46. SARS, D/D/cd 56 (Office c. Stone, 10 November 1621). 47. See also James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 35-6. 48. Rachel Weil, 'Sometimes a Scepter is only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England', in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500-1800 (New York, 1993), p. 147. 49. Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 40; see also Crooke, Microcosmographia (1631), p. 238. One origin of the stories is Leo Africanus's Historical Description of Africa (Lyon, 1556), recycled by Ambroise Pare in 1573 in Of Monsters and Marvels: see Katharine Park, 'The Rediscovery of the Clitoris', in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (1997). 50. Park, 'Rediscovery of the Clitoris', p. 179. 51. Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993), chap. 1. 52. PRO, STAC 8 67/11 (1615). 'Crased' means crazed, battered, broken, 'buckler' a small round shield. 53. SARS, Q/SR 8/20 (1609). (Edith's surname is not recorded.) 54. Sharp, Midwives Book, pp. 41, 38. 55. On the concept of separate spheres, see Amanda Vickery, 'Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History', Historical Journal 36/2 (1993), pp. 383-414; on the seventeenth century see Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988); Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford, 1998), chap. 4; Laura Gowing, '"The Freedom of the Streets": Women and Social Space in London, 1560-1640', in Mark Jenner and Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (eds), Londinopolis (Manchester, 2001); Bernard Capp, 'Separate Domains: Women and Authority in Early Modern England', in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996). On the eighteenth century see Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter:

Notes to pages 180-189

216

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

Women's Lives in Georgian England (1998); Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Making of Separate Spheres (Harlow, 1998). See, for example, John Dod and Robert Clever, A Godly Forme of Household Government (1612). Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680-1714 (Manchester, 1999), examines the complexities of this shift. Peter Stallybrass, 'Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed', in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1986). Thomas Raynold (transl. of Eucharius Roesslin), The byrth of mankynde, otherwise named the womans booke (1545), Biiv-Biii; Aristotle's Masterpiece, p. 104. Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (1995), p. 225. Adrian Wilson, 'The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation', in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990). Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 189. NRO, DN/DEP 51/55, f. 12 (1685). LRO, B/C/5 1606 (Def: Hashe c. Peplow). For further discussion of this point, see Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), chap. 3. BL, Add. Ms. 72516, f. 196 (29 November 1688). This point is usefully discussed in relation to incest in Susan Wiseman,4 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body', in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540-1660 (1990). See Beverley Lemire, 'Consumerism in Pre-industrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes', Journal of British Studies 27 (1988), pp. 1-24.

68. G L , B C B 4, f. 64, f. 46V (1599).

69. Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1996), p. 101. 70. Aristotle's Masterpiece, p. 94. 71. Mary Fissell and Kathleen Coyne Kelly, 'Virtuous Bodies: The History of the Hymen', in Adele Seeff and Jane Donawerth (eds), Attending to Early Modern Women (Delaware, 2001). 72. Statutes of the Realm, Jac I Cap. 27. 73. The Book of Oaths (1689), quoted in David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), p. 65. 74. Lisa Forman Cody, 'The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives' Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man Midwifery', Eighteenth-Century Studies 32/4 (1999), P- 479. 75. W. F., The Schoole of Good Manners (London, 1629), sig. C5, quoting Erasmus. 76. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (New York, 1978), p. 159. 77. See for example the accounts of Sarah Goldsmith and Katherine Hearne, from The Great Book of Sufferings, Friends House, vol. I, p. 548, quoted in Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, Women's Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook (2000), pp. 256-7. 78. DUL, DDR V12, f. 146. 79. Hie Mulier, Or The Man-Woman (1620); Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, p. 82. 80. Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 69; Rudolf M. Dekker, 'Women in Revolt: Popular Protest

217 Notes to pages 180-189 and its Social Basis in Holland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Theory and Society 16 (1987), p p . 3 3 7 - 6 2 .

81. LMA, WJ/SR II/146. 82. William Simpson, A Discovery of the Priests and Professors, And their Nakedness and Shame, which is coming upon them (1659), pp. 7 - 8 ('Going Naked, a Sign); see

Kenneth L. Carroll, 'Early Quakers and "Going Naked as a Sign"', Quaker History 67 (1978), p p . 6 9 - 8 7 . 83. 84.

Norman Penney (ed.), The First Publishers of Truth (1907), p. 259. The Naked Woman (1652), p. 8; on this incident see Sharon Achinstein, 'Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution, in Lorna Hutson (ed.), Feminism and Renaissance Studies (Oxford, 1999), pp. 3 5 8 - 9 .

85. G L , B C B 5, f. 17 (1605). 86.

LRO, B/C/1607 (Def.: Elizabeth Roe c. Margaret Howton,

1606).

87. H R O , H D 4/2/15, f. 39V (1669).

88. See for example CLRO, Rep. 20, f. 47V. 89. [John Mush], Life and Death of Margaret Clitherow, The Martyr of York, ed. William

Nicolson (1849), PP-194-5SARS, D/D/cd 34 (Office c. Joan Cranckland, 26 October 1605). The Somerset courts were perhaps unusually ready to prosecute both women and men for behaviour that seemed likely to incite fornication, as well as actual sex. 91. C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (New York, 1992), p. 65. 92. SARS, D/D/cd 102, f. 132V (1687): the words were reported as defamation of him. 93. SARS, Q/SR 92/34, 95/2/41 (1657). 94. David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), chap. 10. 95. On rituals of gender inversion, see Natalie Zemon Davis, 'Women on Top', in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975).

90.

96. G L , M S 9189/1, f. 130V. 97. See for example Crooke, Microcosmographia (1651), p. 174. 98. Joubert, Popular Errors, p. 208. This section was omitted in later editions. 99. Alison Klairmont-Lingo, 'The Fate of Popular Terms for Female Anatomy in the Age of Print', French Historical Studies 22/3 (1999), esp. p. 344. 100. SARS, Q/SR 100/45 (1661).

101. 102. 103. 104.

England's Merry Jester (2nd edn, 1694), p. 19. 'Merry Passages, pp. 59-60. England's Merry Jester, p. 22. Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 12.

105. On the work of midwives, see Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of SeventeenthCentury London (Oxford, 2000) and Hilary Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (1993). 106. Weil, Political Passions, p. 96. 107. State Trials 2:802-3, quoted in James C. Oldham, 'On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of Matrons', Criminal Justice History 6 (1985), p. 4. 108.

The man was Daniel Dunn: BL, Harl. Ms. 39, f. 420V, quoted in Oldham, 'On Pleading the Belly', p. 5; on the Howard case see David Lindley, The Trials of Frances

Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (1993). R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), p. 79. 110. State Trials, 2:822, quoted in Lindley, Trials of Frances Howard, p. 95.

109.

111. Rachel Weil, 'The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming-Pan Scandal', in

Notes to pages 180-189

218

Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688-1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 79-81.

GL, BCB 4, f- 383. 113. GL, BCB 5, f. 100 (1606).

112.

114. G L , B C B 5, f. 82 (1606).

115. Oldham, 'On Pleading the Belly', pp. 8-9; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (1996), p. 143. 116. Richelle Munkhoff, 'Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574-1665', Gender and History 11/1 (1999), pp. 1-29.

117. Edwin Freshfield (ed.), The Vestry Minute Book of the Parish of St Margaret Lothbury 1571-1671

(1887), p. 28.

PRO, ASSI 4 5 , 1 3 / 2 / 2 7 . 119. PRO, ASSI 45, 9/3/48. 120. PRO, ASSI 45, 7/ 1/10A (1663). 121. SARS, QS/R 2/74 (1607). 122. LRO, B/C/5 1688 (Imm.: Office ad prom. Sheldon c. Lakin). 123. Oldham, 'On Pleading the Belly', p. 15. 118.

124. G L , M S 9189/1, f. 130V.

125. LRO, B/C/5 1632 (Def.: Lane c. Harris) LMA, DL/C 230, f. 212.

126.

127. H R O , H D 4/2/12.

128. William Hale (ed.), A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes (Edinburgh, 1973 [1847] )> P-169. 129. ERO, D/AEA 27, f. 38. 130. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 215; F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), p. 160. 131. On these conflicts, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, chap. 9, and Will Coster, 'Purity, Profanity and Puritanism: The Churching of Women, 1 5 0 0 - 1 7 0 0 ' , in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Women in the Church (Studies in Church History 27, Oxford, 1990). 132. Hale, A Series of Precedents, p. 249. 133. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500-1720 (1993), p. 17. 134. Hale, A Series of Precedents, p. 258. 135. Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Polities of Reproduction in Early Modern England, forthcoming, chap. 2. 136. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 61, 221. 137. Petty Papers, BL Add. Ms. 72892, f. 5v; for the published account, which is based on Petty's notes, see [Richard Watkins], Newes from the Dead (1651). 138. 'The Life of Mr Anthony a Wood', Vindiciae Antiquitatis Academie Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1730), p. 512; further cases are cited in Frances Valadez, 'Anatomical Studies at Oxford and Cambridge', in Allen G. Debus (ed.), Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1974). 139. Newes from the Dead, pp. 6, 2, 7-8. 140. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (i975), pp. 2 6 4 - 7 3 141. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, chap. 2. 142. Cody, 'The Politics of Reproduction'. 143. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters. 144. Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery (Cambridge, MA, 1995), chap. 14.

219 Notes to pages 180-189

2 The politics of touch 1. The Lawes Resolutions ofWomens Rights: Or, the Lowes Provision for Woemen (1632), pp. 124-5.

2. London Jests: Or, A Collection Of the Choicest Joques and Repartees (1684), p. 104. 3. The Trial and Condemnation ofMervin LordAudley Earl of Castle-haven at Westminster, April the 5th, 1631 (1699), extract in Charlotte Otten (ed.), English Women's Voices 1540-1700 (Miami, 1992), p. 34. On the Castlehaven trial, see Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, 1999). 4. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), p. 98, citing Youth's Behaviour: or Decencie in Conversation amongst Men, transl. Francis Hawkins (1661). 5. Robert Codrington, The Second Part of Youth's Behaviour: or Decency in Conversation amongst Women (1663). 6. DRO, Q/SB 1657. 7. DRO, Q/SB Easter 1661 (examination of Jane Treeby). 8. CLRO, LSP, October 1675. 9. DRO, Q/SB Epiphany 1 6 6 7 - 8 (examination of Dorothy Knight). 10. DRO, Q/SB Michaelmas 1655 (information of Elizabeth Diggons). 11. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, GL, 10-13 December 1684, f. 3. 12. DRO, CC 170 (examination of Alice Jewell, 5 July 1625). 13. DRO, Q/SB Epiphany 1 6 6 5 - 6 . 14. SARS, D/D/cd 56 (Office c. Craydie, 19 June 1621). 15. Margaret Aston, 'Segregation in Church', in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Women in the Church (Studies in Church History 27, Oxford, 1990). 16. Aston, 'Segregation in Church', p. 265. 17. SARS, D/D/cd 7 1 (White c. Crosse, 14 May 1634 and 7 October 1634). 18. SARS, D/D/cd 7 1 (Bale alias Culliford c. Garvin, 30 May 1634). 19. William Hale (ed.), A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes from 1475 to 1640 (Edinburgh, 1973 [1847]), pp. 2 4 1 - 2 ; Aston, 'Segregation in Church', p. 287. 20. BIHR, D/C. CP 1639/1. 21. G L , M S 9056, f. 41V.

See for example PRO, ASSI 45, 3/1/145; SARS, Q/SR 182/6. 23. SARS, Q/SR 182/6. 24. On service, see Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981); Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996); Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660-1750 (Harlow, 2000). 25. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford, 1996), p. 124. 26. SARS, Q/SR 14/77 (1612); Q/SR 26/22 (1616). 27. DRO, Q/SB 1651. 28. GL, BCB 4, f. 36; he also complained that she had neglected the children, for which he had beaten her, and she was punished as a 'lewd maid'. 22.

29. G L , B C B 5, f. 4 7 (1605). 30. G L , B C B 5, f. 7 6 (1605). 31. H R O , H D 4/2/15 (1680).

220 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to pages 180-189

CKS, Q/SB 11 (1670). GL, BCB 5, f. 55. GL, BCB 5, f. 23V (1605). BIHR, CPH 4315 (1692). SARS, Q/SR 68/14 (1633). CKS, QM/SB 717 (1606). SARS, Q/SR 115/17 (1672); ERO, Q/Sba 2/91 (1654). Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion (1675), P- 214; in the eighteenth century Eliza Haywood warned servants at greater length: see Tim Meldrum, 'London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660-1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household', in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840 (1997), pp. 50-1. 40. CKS, Q/SB 11 (1671). 41. GL, BCB 4, f. 88 (Sara Harding). 42. SARS, Q/SR 2/12 (1607). 43. SARS, D/D/cd 70 (Hite c. Stapell, 21 June 1631). 44. SARS, Q/SR 26/10 (1619). 45. Miranda Chaytor, 'Husband[ry]: Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century', Gender and History 7/3 (1995), pp. 383-4. 46. William Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex Sessions Records, N.S. vol. II (1936), p. 238; CLRO, LSP, 18 January 1677 (inquest on Hester Que). 47. See for example Francisco Barbaro, Directions for Love and Marriage (1677), p. 90, cited in Mary Fissell, 'Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England', Gender and History 7/3 (1995), p. 444. 48. Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 410, f. 117. 49. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), chaps 2-3. 50. LMA, DL/C 218, f. 125. 51. HRO, HD 4/25 (Office c. Anna Maund, 1676). 52. Alan Bray, 'The Body of the Friend', in Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (eds), English Masculinities 1660-1800 (Harlow, 1999); see also Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1997). 53. See for example Barbara Harris, 'Women and Politics in Early Tudor England', Historical Journal 33 (1990), pp. 259-81; Pam Wright, 'The Ramifications of a Female Household 1558-1603', in David Starkey et al. (eds), The English Court (1987); Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford, 1998), chap. 7. 54. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002); Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago, 2001); see also Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993). 55. George C. Willoughby, Lady Anne Clifford (Kendal, 1922), p. 76; thanks to Karen Newman for discussion of this point. 56 On Stuart's ambiguous position in these years, see Sara Jayne Steen (ed.), The Letters of Arbella Stuart (Oxford, 1994), p. 46. 57. Willoughby, Lady Anne Clifford, p. 69; the 'very' is omitted in the editions of the 'Knole diary' by Vita Sackville West (1923) and D. J. H. Clifford (1990). 58. 'The Description of Cooke-ham', in Susanne Woods (ed.), The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (Oxford, 1993), p. 135.

221 Notes to pages 180-189 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 7778. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford (Stroud, 1992), p. 27. Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 37, 55. Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, pp. 249, 260. Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, 1997), p. 39, suggests the Clifford/Bourchier intimacy raised the 'potential scandal of same-sex sex', connecting it to the female relationships portrayed in Lanyer's poetry. Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia (1615) cites Leo Africanus's stories of tribades in Fez: see Patricia Parker, 'Fantasies of Race and Gender: Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light', in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1996), pp. 84-6. See also Harriette Andreadis, 'The Erotics of Female Friendship', in Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (eds), Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (New York, 1998) and Donoghue, Passions between Women. Susan Lanser argues for a shift in languages of affection in the eighteenth century in Susan Lanser, 'Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts', EighteenthCentury Studies 32/2 (1998), pp. 179-87. Harriette Andreadis's dating of a similar shift to a hundred years earlier (Sappho) suggests that there is a continued tension in early modern (and modern) culture between supposed innocence, and dangerous knowledge of lesbian acts. H. F. Lippincott (ed.),'Merry Passages and feasts': A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange (1603-1655) (Salzburg, 1974), p. 135. On the scandals surrounding Anne, Abigail Masham and Sarah Churchill, see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680-1714 (Manchester, 1999), chap. 8; Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford, 1991); Andreadis, Sappho, chap. 5. James's words were 'une passion demesuree': Andreadis, Sappho, p. 173. The letter is quoted in Weil, Political Passions, p. 210. SARS, Q/SR 102/64 (1662). LRO, B/C/5 1685 (Imm.: Office c. George Fox). This quotation has been put into the first person and legal terms removed. John Dod and Robert Clever, A Godly Forme of Household Government (1630), sig. A2 3v. LMA, DL/C 630, f. 287. The 1624 statute, which was concerned with neonatal infanticide, understood it as a likely outcome of concealed pregnancy by single women frightened or shamed by the consequences of illegitimate motherhood: Statutes of the Realm, 21 Jac.i c.27. PRO, ASSI 45, 7/1/11. SARS, D/D/cd 66, p. 38 (1628). WYASW, QS 1/1/1 (1662). PRO, ASSI 45, 7/2/117,117a (1665). PRO, ASSI 45, 8/1/81 (1666). Adrian Wilson, 'The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990). James Raine (ed.), Depositions from York Castle (Surtees Society 40, Durham, i860), p. 64. Raine, Depositions from York Castle, p. 69. Raine, Depositions from York Castle, pp. 113-14. Raine, Depositions from York Castle, p. 177.

222

Notes to pages 180-189

84. A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations against Three Witches, Viz. Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards (1682). 85. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations

(1996), p. 127.

86. Purkiss, The Witch in History, Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (1994); Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1995). 87. I have explored this case at further length in 'The Haunting of Susan Lay: Servants and Mistresses in Seventeenth-Century England', Gender and History 14/2 (2002), pp. 183-201.

88. Henry Goodcole, The wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch, late of Edmonton (1621), sig. B3-B3V, C3-C3V. 89. See for example Amy Froide, 'Old Maids: The Lifecycle of Single Women in Early Modern England', in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (eds), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (Harlow, 2001); Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (1998), chap. 7; Alison Rowlands, 'Witchcraft and Old Age in Early Modern Germany', Past and Present

173 (2001), p p . 5 0 - 8 9 .

90. E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 2 5 7 - 6 5 . 91. Pelling, The Common Lot, p. 155. 92. Claire S. Schen, 'Strategies of Poor Aged Women and Widows in Sixteenth-Century London', in Botelho and Thane (eds), Women and Ageing. 93. E R O , D / P 264/8/3, f f . 3iv, 17V, 12V.

94. CLRO, Journal of the Court of Common Council, 7 September 1592; quoted in Richelle Munckhoff, 'Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574-1665', Gender and History 11/1 (1999), p. 1. 95. Pelling, The Common Lot, p. 192. 96. Anne Kugler,' "I Feel Myself Decay Apace": Old Age in the Diary of Lady Sarah Cowper', in Botelho and Thane (eds), Women and Ageing, p. 72. 97- DRO, Q/SB 1652. 98. LRO, Kenricke c. Hopkins (1699: Def.). 99. Lynn Botelho, 'Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Modern Suffolk', in Botelho and Thane (eds), Women and Ageing. 100. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witches (Amsterdam, 1 9 7 1 [1581]), p. 54. 101. Rowlands, 'Witchcraft and Old Age'. 102. Stephen Bradwell, 'Mary Glovers Late Woeful Case', printed in Michael McDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (1991), p . 20.

103. Bradwell, 'Mary Glover', pp. 3, 5. 104. Bradwell, 'Mary Glover', p. 99.

3 Consent and desire 1. 2. 3.

SRO, Q/SR 213/19 (1633); Johnson was also accused of fathering Margery Walton's child, as were his father and his brother, John Johnson junior (213/20). William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), p. 106; Laevinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (1658), p. 18. Patricia Crawford, 'Sexual Knowledge in England, 1 5 0 0 - 1 7 5 0 ' , in Roy Porter and

223 Notes to pages 180-189

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Mikulas Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge, 1994), p. 85. Nicholas Fontanus, The Womans Doctor (1652), p. 6. See for example The Parlament of Women, with the Merry Lawes by Them Newly Enacted (1640); on the pamphlets see Sharon Achinstein, 'Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution, in Lorna Hutson (ed.), Feminism and Renaissance Studies (Oxford, 1999) and Susan Wiseman,' "Adam, the Father of All Flesh": Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War', in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992). Mercurius Philalethes, Select City Quaeries (March 1660), part 1, pp. 7, 3; see also Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears (Totowa, 1979), pp. 104-5. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears, p. 179. Select City Quaeries, part 1, p. 4; on the attacks on Marten see James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 122-3. On the political pornography of the Restoration see Rachel Weil, 'Sometimes a Scepter is only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England', in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993); Harold Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II (Lexington, 1996), and Turner, Libertines and Radicals, chaps 4-5. The Parliament of Women (1684), p. 137. VEscolle des Filles was the book that Pepys bought, masturbated over, and burnt; Aloysia Sigea, which had many lesbian scenes, was in fact translated into English as Tullia and Octavia by 1684. Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 (1993), p. 197. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 29. Ian Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), chap. 1. Libellous ballads are discussed in Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (Oxford, 2000), chap. 6; on sexual insult see my Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996) and Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987), chap. 10. As in The Maids Complaint for Want of a Dildoul, Pepys Ballads, vol. IV, p. 50. Peter Wagner, 'Trial Reports as a Genre of Eighteenth-Century Erotica', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5/1 (1982), pp. 117-23. See for example Aristotle's Masterpiece (1684), p. 189. The Parliament of Women (1684), p. 71. SARS, Q/SR 112/89 (Joan Chaffey, 1669); SARS, Q/SR 64/2/265 (Margery Elworthy, 1630); SARS, Q/SR 112/3 (Joane Fry, 1669); CKS, QS/B 6/1 (Margaret Knowler, 1656). SARS, Q/SR 85/14/1 (Marie Slader, 1651). LRO, B/C/5 1630 (Imm.: Office c. Higginson). Legal forms have been removed from this quotation. HRO, HD 4/25 (1676). SARS, Q/SR 29/20 (1617). GL, BCB 2, f. 34 (1574). SARS, D/D/cd 66, f. 89 (1628). DRO, Q/SB 1650. The Lovers Academy, from Samuel Pepys's 'Penny Merriments', vol. II, no. 35, pp. 836-7, Pepys Collection, Magdalene College, Cambridge, quoted in Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), p. 167.

224 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

Notes to pages 180-189 SARS, D/D/cd 32 (Taber c. Boddett, 1603). SARS, D/D/cd 61 (Office c. Redman, 17 May 1626). SARS, D/D/cd 61 (Office c. Hobbes, 1 August 1626). NYCRO, Q/SB 1698/165. SARS, D/D/cd 20 (Office c. Batt, 1620). Aristotle's Masterpiece, p. 189. DRO, Q/SB 1655-6. Tim Hitchcock, 'Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England', History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), pp. 73-92. NUL, AR/LB 225/1/22/2 (1626). SARS, D/D/cd 34 (Atwell c. Parsons, 14 December 1602). LRO, B/C/5 1607 (Def.: Margaret Howton c. John Roe). SARS, D/D/cd 58 (Office c. Fisher, 7 December 1624). On the rarity and difficulty of prosecution, see Nazife Bashar, 'Rape in England between 1550 and 1700', in London Feminist History Group (ed.), The Sexual Dynamics of History (1983); Miranda Chaytor, 'Husband [ry]: Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century', Gender and History 7/3 (1995), pp. 378-407. Statutes of the Realm, 4 & 5 Ph. 8c M., c.8, s.3,1557-8. T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: Or, the Lawes Provision for Woemen (1632) discusses both definitions of rape. Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (1800), pp. 627ff. Chaytor, 'Narratives of Rape'; see also Julia Rudolph, 'Rape and Resistance: Women and Consent in Seventeenth-Century English Legal and Political Thought', Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), pp. 157-84. Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS 7381-7399. Leah Marcus has related the case to the performance of Milton's Comus for Bridgewater in 1633: Leah S. Marcus, 'Justice for Margery Evans: A "Local" Reading of Comus', in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Milton and the Idea of Woman (Urbana, 1988). Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (6th edn, 1635), p. 281. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993), p. 91. Hale, Historia, p. 627; Barbara Baines cites the North Carolina legislator who spoke in 1995 of how, without a woman's consent, 'the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work'. Joe Dew, 'Legislator Assailed for Rape Comment', The News and Observer, 21 April 1995, Ai, cited in Barbara J. Baines, 'Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation', ELH (English Literary History) 65 (1998), p. 93. Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, 2000); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994). SARS, Q/SR 100/45 (1661). DRO, Q/SB 1613. Chaytor argues that this is a change in the late seventeenth century, related to the increasing stress in law on rape as a sexual rather than a property crime; but this sample of 69 testimonies shows similar patterns throughout the seventeenth century. Testimonies do change in the 1680s and 1690s, but this change is also part of a wider shift in legal record-keeping, in which more attention is paid to judging demeanour and crimes as guilty, unnatural, suspicious or immoral. Chaytor, 'Narratives of Rape', p. 392. Garthine Walker, 'Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England', Gender and History 10/1 (1998), pp. 5, 8.

225 Notes to pages 180-189 53. H. F. Lippincott (ed.)> 4Merry Passages and Jeastsy: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange (1603-1655) (Salzburg, 1974), p. 38. 54. Chaytor, 'Narratives of Rape', notes that no widows sued for rape at the Northern Assizes. SARS, Q/SR 93/2/121 (1656). DRO, Q/SB 1603. 57. LMA, MJ/SP 1699/29. 58. DRO, Q/SB 1660 (Joan Hussey). 55.

56.

59. D R O , Q / S B 1 6 5 5 - 6 . 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

SARS, D/D/cd 56 (Office c. Kerswell, 1 May 1622). SARS, D/D/cd 66, f. 156 (1631). SARS, Q/SR 102/73 (1662). Notebooks of Richard Napier, Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 410, f. 119. SARS, D/D/cd 34 (Office c. Thomas Hellyer, c. 1601/2); legal forms have been removed from this quotation. See Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 1 - 2 0 , for this 'cultural habit' in medieval French texts. The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, p. 344; Baines, 'Effacing Rape', p. 75. Walker, 'Rereading Rape', p. 16. LMA, WJ/SP 1644/8. GL, BCB 5, f. IV (Agnes Clark, 1604). SARS, Q/SR 7 7 / 1 / n . SARS, Q/SR 86/1/54 (1654).

72. G L , B C B 5, f. 3 (1604). 73. SARS, Q/SR 106/6 (1664). 74. Hertfordshire Archives, Diary of Sarah Cowper, D/EP F29, vol. 1, f. 60 (10 February 1701). 75. B L , A d d . M s . 4454, p. 133. 76. H R O , H D 4/30 (1688). 77. H R O , H D 4/27, 4/4 (1683).

John Ayliffe, Parergon Juris Canoni Anglicani (1726), pp. 4 4 - 5 . BIHR, CPH 2688. 80. SARS, D/D/cd 32 (Podger c. Fathers, 30 September 1600). 81. SARS, D/D/cd 34 (Atwell c. Baker, 1604). Legal forms have been removed from this quotation. 82. LRO, B/C/5 1683 (Imm.: George Newell c. Roger Norton). 83. BIHR, D/C.CP 1602 (John Payte c. Jane Payte). 84. BIHR, Trans. CP 1674/3 (Office c. Elizabeth Myres), pp. 1 0 5 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 2 . 85. NUL, AR/LB 221/3/14 (1608). 86. LRO, B/C/5 1608 (Def.: Smith c. Breamer). 78.

79.

87. G L , B C B 4, f. 53 (1598).

NRO, ANW/7/3 (John Rollinson c. Judith Edwards, 1615). 89. See for example Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), p. 67. 90. GL, BCB 3, f. 57V (Margaret Cornes, 1576). 91. See Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (2002), chap. 1. 92. NUL, AR/LB 221/4/4/1 (1609). 88.

226

Notes to pages 180-189

93. SARS, Q/SR 84/56. 94. SARS, D/D/cd 300, f. 243V (1636); DRO, Q/SB Michaelmas 1659 (information of Nicholas Dilling). 95. SARS, D/D/cd 56 (Office c. Hix, 16 March 1621). Hix was prosecuted again for incontinence in 1624. 96. HRO, HD 4/25 (Office c. Maund, 1676). 97. The New Parliament of Women (1683), f. 4v. 98. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, p. 63. 99. See, for example, the citations in Linda Pollock, 'Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society', in Valerie Fildes, Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990), pp. 40-1. 100. Alison Wall (ed.), Two Elizabethan Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575-1611 (Trowbridge, 1982), p. 37-8, translates the words as you will add together frequently, you will rise up'. 101. WYASL, RD/AC/5/2 (1690). The words were reported as part of a defamation by Elizabeth Heslop of Elizabeth Hutchinson, whom she alleged was kept by her husband as a whore. 102. SARS, D/D/cd 77 (Wells c. Spiring, 29 October 1633). 103. GL, BCB 3, f. iv (1576). 104. Donoghue, Passions between Women, p. 197; see also Ros Ballaster,' "The Vices of Old Rome Revived": Representations of Female Same-Sex Desire in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century England', in Suzanne Raitt (ed.), Volcanoes and Pearl-Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies (1995). 105. On the Calisto tale, see Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago, 2001), chap. 5, and Valerie Traub, 'The Perversion of "Lesbian" Desire', History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), pp. 19-50. 106. Traub, 'Perversion'.

4 cThe child in me: perceiving pregnancy 1. Thomas Bentley, A Monument for Matrones (1582), vol. Ill, p. 131. 2. John Oliver, A Present for Teeming Women (1663), p. 50. 3. Translated as Thomas Raynold, The byrth ofmankynde, otherwise named the womans booke (1545). 4. Aristotle's Masterpiece (1684), p. 4. Jane Sharp also uses the image of curdling, referring back to Aristotle: Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford, 1999 [1671]), pp. 106-7. 5. See also Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (forthcoming), chap. 4. 6. John Locke Two Treatises of Government (1986), p. 39 (1/55). 7. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (1651), pp. 29-30; Sharp, Midwives Book, pp. 52-3; see also Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1651), pp. 215-16. On the embryology debates, see Elizabeth Gasking, Investigations into Generation 1651-1828 (1967) and Eve Keller, 'Making Up for Losses: the Workings of Gender in William Harvey's De Generatione Animalium\ in Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (eds), Inventing Maternity (Lexington, 1999). 8. Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 53. 9. Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 128.

227 Notes to pages 180-189 10. See, for example, Sharp, Midwives Book, p. 127. 11. LMA, DL/C 220, f. 815; DL/C 235, f. 138. 12. Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 222, f. 262. 13. WYASL, RD/AC/5/1/14 (1615). 14. NUL, AR/LB 228/2/46 (1641). Jane Sharp told readers that 'too frequent use makes the womb slippery, and therefore whores have but few children': Midwives Book, p. 138. 15. HRO, HD 4/30. 16. ERO, D/ABD 6, f. 199V (1632). 17. LRO, B/C/5 1699 (Imm.: Breeley/Newall c. Cutts). 18. SARS, D/D/cd 75 (Lewes c. Andrewes, 21 May 1633). 19. G L , B C B 4, f. 21 (1598).

20. SARS, Q/SR 106/6A. 21. SARS, D/D/cd 54 (Office c. Henry Skane, 2 May 1620). 22. NUL, AR/LB 221/5/28/1. 23. Statutes of the Realm, 18 Eliz. c.3. 24. Keith Thomas, 'The Puritans and Adultery: the Act of 1650 Reconsidered', in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), p. 271. 25. Statutes of the Realm, 7 Jac. I c.4 s.7; Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (6th edn, 1635), p. 38.

ERO, Q/SBa 2/18 (1633). 27. Aristotle's Masterpiece, p. 12. 28. Sharp, Midwives Book, pp. 81-3. 29. F. L. Poynter and W. J. Bishop, A Seventeenth-Century Doctor and his Patients: John Symcotts, 1592-11662 (Luton, 1951), p. 58. 30. See also Cathy McClive, 'The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe', Social History of Medicine 15/2 (2002), pp. 26.

209-27.

31. Arthur Searle (ed.), Barrington Family Letters 1628-32 (Camden 4th series 28,1983), p. 172. 32. G L , B C B 5, f. 90 (1605).

33. BIHR, CPH 4315. 34. Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in EighteenthCentury Germany, transl. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 1 6 0 - 2 . 35. LRO, BC/5 1632 (Def.: Lane c. Harris). 36. DRO, Q/SB 1651. 37. PRO, ASSI 45 7/1/12. 38. SARS, Q/SR 29/29. 39. Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, transl. Lee Hoinacki (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 82; Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (1984), p. 38. 40. Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 215, f. 45V. 41. SARS, Q/SR 110/75 and 109/28. 42. Duden, Disembodying Women, p. 81. 43. Karen Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, 1996), p. 25. SARS, D/D/cd 80 (Biggen c. Day, 23 March 1635). 45. Newman, Fetal Positions, p. 33.

44.

228

Notes to pages 180-189

46. See the examples in Mark Kemp and Marina Wallace (eds), Spectacular Bodies (2000). 47. Newman, Fetal Positions, p. 6. 48. The source for many is Adrianus Spigelius, De Formato Foeti (Patavii, 1626). 49. Laevinius Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (1658), p. 9. 50. Culpeper, Directory, p. 156. 51. A Rich Closet of Physical Secrets (1652), chap. 1. 52. The Compleat Midwives Practice (1656), p. 54. 53. Jacob Rueff, The Expert Midwife (1637), chap. 6. 54. A True and Certaine Relation of A Strange-Birth ... borne at Stone-house in the parish of Plimmouth ... (1635), p. 14. 55. A Monstrous Birth: Or, A True Relation of Three strange and prodigious Things like young Cats... (1657). 56. A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster: born in Kirkham Parish in Lancashire (1646). 57. Oliver, Present, p. 53. 58. Lemnius, Secret Miracles, p. 14. 59. Rich Closet, chap. 1. 60. On monstrous births, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, 'Unnnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century France and England', Past and Present 92 (1981), pp. 20-54. 61. A certaine Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman, called Tannakin Skinker (1640), sigs A4V-B1. 62. A true relation of the birth of three Monsters in the City ofNamen in Flanders (1609). 63. The Lamenting Lady, Pepys Ballads, vol. I, p. 44. 64. Culpeper, Directory, p. 153. 65. Lisa Cody, 'The Doctor's in Labour; or A New Whimwham from Guildford', Gender and History 4 (1992), pp. 175-96. 66. James Paris DuPlessis, 'A Short history of human prodigious & monstrous births of dwarfs, sleepers, giants, strong men, hermaphrodites Numerous Births and extream old age & c.' (1730), BL, Sloane Ms. 5246, ff. 4,14. The painting in DuPlessis's text looks, in fact, exactly like a boiled lobster on a plate. 67. Lemnius, Secret Miracles, p. 14. 68. The Northumberland Monster (1674). 69. A certaine Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman. 70. SARS, Q/SR 3/1/1 (1608). 71. NUL, AR/LB 225/5/16 (Bacon); DUL, DDR vi2 (Harrup); NUL, AR/LB 220/6/13 (Kniston). 72. On the intimacy of humans and animals see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (1983); on the defining of people against animals, Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (2000). 73. DuPlessis, 'Short history', f. 42. 74. DuPlessis, 'Short history', f. 42V. 75. Aristotle's Masterpiece, sig. 15. The black child is illustrated, next to a 'maid all hairy', on the frontispiece; on the genealogy of this illustration and the stories see Mary E. Fissell, 'Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 60/1 (2003), pp. 43-74. 76. See, for example, Samuel Purchas's discussion of possible causes in Purchas his

229 Notes to pages 180-189

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

Pilgrimage (2nd edn, 1614), p. 655 (book 6, chap. 15); on sunburn see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, i995)> PP- 92-106; on genetics and miscegenation, Lynda E. Boose, 'The Getting of a Lawful Race: Racial Discourse in England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman', in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, 'Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994). George Best, A True Discourse of the late voyages of discoverie (1578), p. 30. Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), pp. 78-9; Best, True Discourse, p. 31. Benjamin Braude, 'The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods', William and Mary Quarterly 54/1 (1997), pp. 103-42. LROP, Q/SP 75/27. NUL, AR/LB 222/4/12 (Office prom. Bray c. Collie, 1614). LRO, B/C/5 1604 (Def.: Ducket c. Amberson). LMA, DL/C 211/1, p. 232. LRO, B/C/5 1684 (Imm.: Walmsley c. Slader). PRO, ASSI 45 13/2/14. Adrian Wilson, 'The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation', in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990). Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 181-2. Ulinka Rublack, 'Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany', Past and Present 105 (1996), pp. 84-110. PRO, ASSI 45 5/2/38. PRO, ASSI 45 9/3/41-2. PRO, ASSI 45 2/1/181. SARS, Q/SR 99/46 (1661). 'An Act to prevent the Murthering of Bastard Children', Statutes of the Realm, 21 Jac. 1 c.27. Keith Wrightson, 'Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth-Century England', Local Population Studies 15 (1975), p. 11. Natures Cruell Step-Dames (1637); Fair Warning to Murderers of Infants (1692). See Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700 (Ithaca, 1994), chap. 4. The Bloudy Mother (1609), sigs A4V, B2; thanks to Valerie Wayne for a xerox of this pamphlet. Fair Warning to Murderers of Infants (1692). PRO, ASSI 45 5/3/108. PRO, ASSI 45 8/1/121,120,123V, 124 (27,1 and 3 July 1668). SARS, Q/SR 62/2/265. Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803 (New York, 1981), p. 147. See, for example, Julie Wheelwright, 'A Moment as Mother', Guardian, 13 May 1995, p. 12. Similar denials and erasures are described in Regina Schulte, The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria, 1848-1910, transl. Barrie Selman (Cambridge, 1994). PRO, ASSI 45 7/1/10. WRO, QS 98/37; on attitudes to abortion, see McLaren, Reproductive Rituals, chap. 5.

Notes to pages 180-189

230

PRO, ASSI 45 9/3/17. Browne's marital status is unclear: she is described as married, but although the child's father's name is the same as that of her husband, he is not described as her husband, and her prosecution suggests that she lived as a single woman. Married women were very rarely suspected of abortion or infanticide. 107. GL, BCB 5, f. 30. 108. CKS, Q/SB 1/5. 109. GL, BCB 5, f. 186. 110. PRO, ASSI 45 10/1/59. 111. Petty Papers, BL, Add. Ms. 7 2 8 9 2 ff. 8, 9; [Richard Watkins], Newes from the Dead (Oxford, 1651), p. 9. 112. DRO, Q/SB 1646. 113. PRO, ASSI 45 6/2/14 (1662). 114. PRO, ASSI 45 8/1/119 (1668). 115. LRO, B/C/5 1684 (Imm.: Office c. Sarah Gilbert). 116. Forty weeks was calculated from the date of conception rather than from the previous menstrual period. 117. Memoirs of Sir Hugh Cholmley (1624), p. 40, cited in Linda Pollock, 'Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society', in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990), p. 44: Cholmley writes, 'My wife would not be persuaded but she went full forty weeks.' 118. For an example of a man denying paternity based on dating, see SARS, Q/SR18/73

106.

(1613).

SARS, Q/SR 110/74 (1668). 120. SARS, Q/SR 82/2/36 (1650). 121. SARS, Q/SR 82/2/37 (1650). 122. SARS, Q/SR 23/62 (1616). I have found no comparable examples of women keeping a written record, although they may simply not have mentioned it. 123. CKS, Q/SB 4/5. 124. LA, Court Papers Box 69, Confession of Rose Arnold. 119.

125. L M A , D L / C 234, f. 222V.

126. SARS, Q/SR 74/31. 127. See, for example, LRO, B/C/5 1691 (Imm.: Office prom. Newell c. Blood and Talbott). 128. CKS, QM/SB 426/11. 129. ERO, Q/Sba 2/28. 130. LMA, DL/C 221, f. 1290. 131. ERO, D/AEA 24/37. 132. PRO, ASSI 45 17/2/129. 133. Duden, Disembodying Women, tends in this direction, as does Iris Marion Young, 'Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation', in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, 1990). 134. BL, Add. Ms. 32500, f. 50 (Ann North to her daughter, 8 November 1680). 135. Young, 'Pregnant Embodiment', pp. 1 6 1 - 3 .

5 Childbed conflicts 1. Great News from Middle-Row in Holbourn: or a true relation of a dreadful ghost which appeared in the Shape of one Mrs Adkins, to several persons but especially to a Maid-servant at the Adam and Eve, all in a Flame of Fire on Tuesday-night last, being the 16th of this instant March, 1679 (1679).

231 Notes to pages 180-189 2. Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770 (1995); Patricia Crawford, 'The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England', Adrian Wilson, 'The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation', and Linda Pollock, 'Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society', in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997). 3. David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), chap. 7. 4. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (2nd edn, 1614), p. 649. 5. GL, BCB 5, f. 62 (Elizabeth Partridge); BCB 5, f. 24 (Elizabeth Powell); BCB 4, f. 371 (Frances Palmer). 6. GL, BCB 4, f. 320 (Mary Wiatt). 7. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 65. 8. PRO, ASSI 45 7/2/77-8 (1665). 9. PRO, ASSI 45 8/1/70 (1666); ASSI 45 10/1/118,120 (1671); ASSI 45 8/1/79 (1666). 10. PRO, ASSI 45 n/1/83 (1674). 11. PRO, ASSI 45 14/1. 12. See in particular Wilson, 'The Ceremony of Childbirth'. 13. For a critique of the idea of 'female bonding', see Linda Pollock, 'Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England', Social History 22/3 (1997), pp. 286-306. 14. SARS, Q/SR 29/93. 15. Pollock, 'Childbearing and Female Bonding', p. 296. 16. Pollock, 'Childbearing and Female Bonding'. 17. LMA, DL/C 227, f. 59-62. 18. Joanna Moody (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 (Stroud, 1998), p. 6; see also p. 79 ('Mrs Daunby'); p. 177 ('Cousin Isons wife', whose delivery Hoby attends but does not visit during the lying-in and does not see her again, as she notes, for six months, p. 191); p. 203 ('my cousin Boucher that lay in childbed'); p. 212 ('Cousin Isons wife who lay in childbed' again; on the same day she ' s e n t . . . to Joshuas wife who was brought to bed'). 19. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 57-8. 20. Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 198, ff. 53, 76, 83 (over-careful); 224, f. 170V. (Underwood); 193, f. 203 (delivered alone); these and other cases are cited in Michael McDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 108-9. 21. Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 207, f. 113V. 22. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680-1714 (Manchester, 1999), p. 97, quoting A full answer to the depositions... concerning the birth of the Prince of Wales (1689). 23. Weil, Political Passions, pp. 95-6. 24. Linda Pollock examines some of the more critical advice from women to other women in Pollock, 'Childbearing and Female Bonding'. 25. GL, BCB 5, f. 366 (1609). 26. GL, BCB 4, f. 155V (1600). 27. LMA, DL/C 308, p. 296. 28. Lambeth Palace Library, VG 4/13, f. 19V. 29. CKS, QM/SB 1335 [n.d: James I]. 30. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 64-5. 31. LRO, B/C/5 1630 (Imm.: Office c. John Bradley).

232

Notes to pages 1 8 0 - 1 8 9

32. DUL, DDR V9, f. 42 (1608). 33. LRO, B/C/5 1693 (Imm.: Office ad prom. Hinckley c. William Cooper). 34. DRO, Q/SB 1660. 35. CKS, QM/SB 427 (1602). 36. SARS, Q/SR 74/31 (1635). 37. WRO, QS 167/44 (1693). 38. LMA, DL/C 230, f. 92V. 39. LRO, B/C/5 1665 (Def.: Clewes c. Baggaley); NUL, AR/LB 224/3/17/2. 40. LRO, B/C/5 1633 (Def.: Phillips c. Daniell). 41. CKS, QM/SB 1297 (1617). 42. LRO, B/C/5 1684 (Imm.: Rider c. Wheeldon). 43. PRO, ASSI 45 13/2/100. 44. LRO, B/C/5 1694 (Imm.: Office c. Mainwaring & Bolt). 45. For example, William Fellowes, SRO, Q/SR 222, f. 11. 46. SRO, Q/SR 213, f. 6; Q/SR 214, f. 23. 47. DUL, DDR V9, f. 60 (1608); NUL, AR/LB 224/3/1. 48. SARS, Q/SR 105/6. 49. LRO, B/C/5 1684 (Imm.: Office ad prom. Ryder c. Lander). 50. DUL, DDR vi2, f. 164. 51. PRO, ASSI 45 13/2/27-32 (1682). 52. ERO, Q/Sba 2/18. 53. PRO, ASSI 45 8/1/no (1666). 54. LRO, B/C/5 1684 (Imm.: Office ad prom. Ryder c. Lander). 55. GL, BCB 4, f- 65. 56. ERO, Q/SR 363/47. 57. SARS, Q/SR 197, f. 10. 58. WRO, QS 159/24 (1690). 59. LMA, DL/C 217, p. 214. 60. A Banquet of Jests (1639), P-185. 61. LMA, DL/C 233, f. 229. 62. SARS, D/D/cd 77, f. 10. 63. LRO, B/C/5 1633 (Def.: Berriffe c. Hobson). 64. Thomas Bentley, A Monument for Matrons, vol. 3 (1582), p. 106. 65. Bentley, Monument, vol. 3, p. 98. 66. Bentley, Monument, vol. 3, p. 112. 67. John Oliver, A Present for Teeming Women (1663), p. 110, quoting Rev. 4:7. 68. Wilson, Making of Man-Midwifery, pp. 17-19. The figure of 2 per cent is an estimate for the eighteenth century. 69. LMA, DL/C 194, f. 83. 70. The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York (Surtees Society 62, York, 1873), p. 95. 71. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford, 1999, [1671]), p. 131. 72. PRO, ASSI 45 13/2/4. 73. PRO, ASSI 45 9/2/31 (1669). 74. PRO, ASSI 45 n/2/59 (1675). 75. PRO, ASSI 45 9/1/130 (1668). 76. PRO, ASSI 45 9/3/77 (1670). 77. PRO, ASSI 45 5/3/no-ii (1656). 78. PRO, ASSI 45 16/5/130 (1695). 79. PRO, ASSI 45 17/2/137 (1696).

233 Notes to pages 180-189 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

PRO, ASSI 45 n / 2 / 5 7 (1675). PRO, ASSI 45 9/1/122 (1668). PRO, ASSI 45 15/4/1 (1690). Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 84-5; Wilson, 'Ceremony of Childbirth'. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 202. See for example The Batchelars Banquet (1603); The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (1682); Well Met Gossip (1656). Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 85; Rupert H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenent and Tudor Reigns (Chester, 1893), p. 336. Morris, Chester, p. 336; Richard S. Ferguson (ed.), A Boke ofRecorde or Register Containing all the Acts and Doings In or Concerning the Corporation within the Town of KirkbieKendall (Kendal, 1892), pp. 89-90. The Batchelars Banquet, sig. 4v. Ten Pleasures, p. 159. The Compleat Midwives Practice Enlarged (1698), p. 121. Ten Pleasures, pp. 131,149. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 215.

92. G L , B C B 4, f. 102V (1599).

93. Ravenhill's play (performed at the National Theatre in 2001) was based on Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700-1830 (1992).

6 Precarious parenthood 1. Keith Thomas, 'The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England', The Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977, pp. 7 7 - 8 1 ; David Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740 (Cambridge, 2002). 2. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 144. 3. Thomas Hobbes, De Give: The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983), p. 123.

4. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680-1714 (Manchester, 1999), chap. 1. 5. Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (1981). 6. Thomas, 'Place of Laughter', p. 77. 7. The Somerset-shire Damsel beguil'd, Pepys Ballads, vol. IV, p. 22. 8. A Banquet of Jests, The Second Part (1633), p. 189. 9. S R O , Q S 213/17.

10. See Robert B. Shoemaker, 'Reforming the City: The Reformation of Manners Campaign in London, 1690-1738', in Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn and Robert B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750 (Stroud, 1992). 11. Louis Montrose, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form', in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986), p. 76. See also Richard Wilson, 'Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare's Late Plays', in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1994). 12. SARS, D/D/cd 71 (26 July 1631).

234

Notes to pages 180-189

13. HRO, HD 4/2/15 (Office prom, per Scarlett c. Caswall, 13 January 1675) Black here means dark-haired. 14. NUL, AR/LB 222/3/18/1 (1613). 15. This case is discussed in chapter 1. 16. LA, CP 69/2/17 (1604). 17. GL, BCB 4, f. 109. 18. SARS, D/D/cd 54 (Office c. Applyn, 5 December 1620). 19. DRO, Q/SB 1667 and Q/SB 1656. 20. SARS, Q/SR 86/1/40-1. 21. DRO, Q/SB 1652. 22. DRO, Q/SB 1614. 23. PRO, ASSI 45 9/2/49 (1669). 24. DRO, Q/SB 1651 (Elinor Gardner and Rachel Hele). 25. WRO, Q/SR 139/74 (1681). 26. SARS, Q/SR 82/2/4; Q/SR 82/2/35. 27. GL, BCB 5, f. 147. 28. See, for example, SRO, Q/SR 212/7 (1633). 29. Nicholas Rogers has argued for eighteenth-century London that, with such high mortality rates for wet-nursed children, to settle a sum on a child would often cost more than maintaining it at parish rates until it died: Nicholas Rogers, 'Carnal Knowledge: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Westminster', Journal of Social History 23/2 (1989), pp. 355-7530. GL, BCB 4, f. 38. 31. WRO, Q/SR 58/88 (1633). 32. HRO, HD 4/29 (1685). 33. WYASL, RD/AC6 (19 January 1618). 34. 35. 36. 3738.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

GL, BCB 4, f. 148. SARS, Q/SR 106/49. WRO, QS io8/i22a (1666). DRO, Q/SB 1651. BL, Cotton Mss., Titus f. ii, f. 81; see Joan Kent, 'Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of "Personal Conduct" in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 46 (1973), pp. 41-71. Bernard Capp, 'The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England', Past and Present 162 (1999), pp. 70-100. LRO, B/C/5 1693 (Imm.: Raines ad prom. Hinckes c. Lewis.). Lewis was eventually absolved, the judge deciding the case was malicious. SARS, Q/SR 14/10 (1612). SARS, Q/SR 87/12 (1653). SARS, Q/SR 83/2 /38 (1651). SARS, Q/SR 33/109V (1618). ERO, Q/SR 363/48. GL, BCB 5, f. 23. GL, BCB 5, f. 249 (1607); see also BCB 4, f. 65 (1598). LMA, DL/C 218, pp. 138-49 (1608). WRO, Q/SR 109/93 (1667). See for example Capp, 'The Double Standard Revisited'. WRO, Q/SR 126/62 (1677). ERO, Q/SBa 2/28 (1637).

Notes to pages 190-200

235

53. NUL, AR/LB 224/3/1 and 224/3/17/2. CKS, QM/SB 7 1 7 (1606). 55. SARS, Q/SR 85/7 (2 June 1652, 24 December 1652). 56. SARS, Q/SR 64/1/122 (1630). 57. DRO, Q/SB 1651 (box 56), Joan Windiatt. 58. WRO, Q/SR 164/15 (1692). 59. HRO, HD 4/28 (27 November 1684). 60. SRO, Q/SR 223/30 (1636). 61. SRO, Q/SR 213/14 (1634). 62. SRO, Q/SR 213/15 (1634). 63. SRO, Q/SR 213/11 (1634). 64. Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 1996), part 2; Ruth Perry, 'Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England', Journal of the History of Sexuality 2/2 (1991), pp. 204-34; see also Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge, 1983). 65. See the discussions in Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, 1994), chap. 4, and Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, part 2. 66. HRO, HD 4/29 (Office c. Susan Smith, 1688). 67. For the classical and medieval view, see John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers (1988). 68. SARS, Q/SR 14/25 (1612). 69. GL, BCB 5, f. 364V (1609). 70. SRO, Q/SR 213/17 (1633). 71. WRO, Q/SR 152/76 (1697). 72. WRO, Q/SR 176/130. 73. SARS, D/D/cd 44 (Sawcer c. Gibbons, 6 August 1611). 74. PRO, ASSI 45 n/3/53. 75. PRO, ASSI 45 16/5/68. 76. PRO, ASSI 45 15/1/85 (1687). 77. GL, BCB 4, f. 122. 78. SARS, Q/SR 103/39 (1663). 79. PRO, ASSI 45 5/3/94 (1656). 80. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), p. 512. 81. Thomas Sanchez, Disputationum de sancto matrimonii sacramento (Antwerp, 1607), vol. Ill, bk IV, dist. XXII, no. 15; cited, with further discussion, in Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 206-7. 82. Flandrin, Families, p. 206. 83. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, p. 514. 84. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, p. 516. 85. See also Rachel Trubowitz,' "But Blood Whitened": Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain, in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2000). 86. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, p. 514. 87. Valerie Fildes, Wet-Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, 1988), chap. 6. 88. Dorothy McLaren, 'Marital Fertility and Lactation 1570-1720', in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500-1800 (1985), and see the case of Sarah Gilbert 54.

Notes to pages 200-8

23 6

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

discussed in chapter 4, whose neighbours believed that she was feigning breastfeeding to make it look as if she could not be pregnant. McLaren, 'Marital Fertility', p. 45. See, for example, WRO, QS 176/152 (Examination of Margaret Elcox, 1696) and GL, BCB 5, f. 143 (Elizabeth Archer). LROP, Q/SB 1/10/38. SRO, Q/SR 210/19-20 (1633). GL, BCB 5, f. 5V (1604). PRO, ASSI 45 15/3 49 (1689); GL, BCB 4, f. 38. CLRO, LSP 1687. SRO, Q/SR 228/17. GL, BCB 5, f. 337 (Cecily Musgrave). Old Bailey Sessions Papers, GL, 26-7 August 1685, p. 3. A true Relation of the most Horrid and Barbarous murders committed by Abigaill Hill (1658).

Conclusion 1. Judith Bennett, 'Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide', in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History; 1350-1600 (1992). 2. Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society; 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres (Harlow, 1998); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (1995); Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (1998). 3. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (1997), p. 49. 4. From the third version of Aristotle's Masterpiece (early eighteenth century), cited in Roy Porter, 'The Secrets of Generation Display'd: Aristotle's Masterpiece in Eighteenth-Century England', in Robert Purks Maccubbin (ed.), 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexualities during the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1987), p. 15. 5. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, p. 83. 6. On the historiography of eighteenth-century illegitimacy, see Tim Hitchcock, 'Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England', History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), pp. 73-92. 7. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989); Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), esp. pp. 257-8; James Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550-1730) (New York, 1995). 8. Pamela Sharpe, 'Literally Spinsters: A New Interpretation of Local Economy and Demography in Colyton in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Economic History Review 44 (1991), pp. 46-65; Peter Laslett, 'The Bastardy-prone Sub-society', in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and Its Comparative History (1980). 9. See, for example, Shoemaker, Gender, pp. 10-11; Patricia Crawford, 'Public Duty, Conscience and Women in Early Modern England', in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993). 10. This case is discussed in chapter 5. 11. Lisa Forman Cody, 'The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives' Alternative

Notes to page 209

237

Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man Midwifery', Eighteenth-Century Studies 32/4 (1999), pp. 485-6. 12. See, for example, Tim Hitchcock,' "Unlawfully Begotten on Her Body": Illegitimacy and the Parish Poor in St. Luke's Chelsea', in Tim Hitchcock, Pamela Sharpe and Peter King (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor; 1640-1840 (1996).

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Manuscript sources Bodleian Library, Oxford Notebooks of Richard Napier, Mss Ashmole 193,198, 202, 207, 217, 224, 404, 410 Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York Diocese of York Cause Papers, CPH 2473-4881 Deans Court Cause Papers, D/C.CP British Library Katherine Austen, 'Meditations, &c.', Add. Ms. 4454 North Letters, Add. Ms. 32500 Letters of Ann Lee, Egerton Ms. 2717 Petty Papers, Add. Ms. 72892 Trumbull Papers, Add. Ms. 72516 James Paris DuPlessis, 'A Short history of human prodigious & monstrous births of dwarfs, sleepers, giants, strong men, hermaphrodites Numerous Births and extream old age & c.' (1730), Sloane Ms. 5246 Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone Maidstone Sessions Papers, QM/SB 621-1335 Sessions Papers, Q/SB 1-12 Corporation of London Record Office London Sessions Records 1676-91, LSP Devon Record Office, Exeter Consistory Court Records, CC 170 Quarter Sessions Bundles, Q/SB Durham University Library, Special Collections Consistory Court Deposition Books, DDR V9, DDR vii, DDR vi2 Essex Record Office, Chelmsford Archdeaconry of Essex Deposition Books, D/AED 5, D/AED 8 Archdeaconry of Essex Act Books, D/AEA 19, D/AEA 24, D/AEA 27 Archdeaconry of Essex, Commissary of Bishop of London, Depositions, D/ABD 6 Quarter Sessions Bundles, Q/Sba 2 Guildhall Library, London Microfilms of Bridewell Court Books, BCB 4-8 (originals held at the Royal Bethlem Hospital, Kent) Consistory Court Deposition Book, MS 9189/1

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References to archival sources incorporate dates, names and type of case where necessary to locate them. In a few quotations, repeated legal forms (such as 'the aforesaid') have been removed for clarity; this is noted in the relevant footnotes.

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247 Select bibliography Margaret SpufFord, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981).

Peter Stallybrass, 'Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed', in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986).

Keith Thomas, 'The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered', in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in SeventeenthCentury History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1987). Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears (Totowa, 1979). Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002). David Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740 (Cambridge, 2002). James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge, 2002). David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973). Garthine Walker, 'Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England', Gender and History 10/1, (1998), pp. 1-25. Richard Wall, 'Women Alone in English Society', Annales de Demographie Historique (1981), pp. 303-16. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge, 2000). Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (1975). Rachel Weil, 'Sometimes a Scepter is only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England', in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York, 1993). Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680-1714 (Manchester, 1999). C. Willett and Phyllis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (New York, 1992). George C. Willoughby, Lady Anne Clifford (Kendal, 1922). Adrian Wilson, 'The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation', in Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers. Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery (1995). Richard Wilson, 'Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare's Late Plays', in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1994). Susan Wiseman,' 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body', in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660 (1990). Susan Wiseman,' "Adam, the Father of All Flesh": Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War', in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992). Keith Wrightson, 'Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth-Century England', Local Population Studies 15 (1975), pp. 10-22. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (1982). Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Britain (2002). Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (Oxford, 1979). E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989).

Select bibliography

248

Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, 1990).

Unpublished dissertations Pamela Brown, 'Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Jest and Gender in Early Modern Popular Culture' (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1998). Amy Froide, 'Single Women, Work and Community in Southampton, 1550-1750' (D. Phil, thesis, Duke University, 1996).

Index

abduction 90 abortion 47,120,122,142,159,164 Aburvagennie, Frances 167 Adam 7, 20, 35 Adams, Christian 88 Adams, William 100 Adkins, Mrs 149 adolescents 82 adultery 7, 27, 30,103,104,105 advice literature 29, 62,131,136, 201 Africa 28,151 Agar, Jane 58 Agarr, Elizabeth 152 age 10, 78, 95 alehouses 1, 28, 38,196 Alford, Thomas 121 Allen, Hannah 69,171 Allen, Franch 163 anatomy, anatomists 17, 40, 48-50,111, 112,125 Anderson, Sara 142 Andreadis, Harriette 66 Andromeda 133 animals 73,131 and pregnant women 48,131-2,146 Anna of Denmark, Queen 67 Anne, Princess, later Queen 11, 68,156, 194 Anstye, Mary 60 apprentices 25, 60,195, 207 Aretines Postures 84

Arguell, Katherine Aristotle 112,113

46

Aristotle's Masterpiece

33,112,133-4, 205 Armitage, Elizabeth Arnold, Rose 146

3,17,18 (Fig. 1 J, 29,

170

arms 74 Ashmore, Alice 61,188 Asia 28 assizes 85,101,197 Astbury, Christian 186 Aston, Margaret 55 Atkinson, Elizabeth 144 Austen, Katherine 102 autobiographies 150 Axworthy, Michael 96 Ayliffe, John 103 Babb, Mary and Richard 103,105 Baggaley, Mary 161 Baines, Barbara 99 Baker, Agnes 103 Baker, Elizabeth 88 Baker, Frances 32 Bale, Joan 57 Ball, Anne 183 ballads 23, 26, 83, 84,127,129,133,151,178, 189 Banton, Anna 163 Barber, Ann 60,185 Barker, Frances 58 Barnes, Mary 63 Barrett, Bridget 78 Barrington, Lady 119 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson)

Barton, Ann 47 Barton, Isabel 45, 71,141 Barwick, Elizabeth 147 Basford, Sara 60 Bassett, Elizabeth 184 Bates, Dorothy 120 bawdry 36 bawds 83

22

Index

250

bawdy houses 157 Baylye, Anastice 89 Beardall, Anna 136 beating 64,70-1 see also wife-beating Bedell, Philippa 144 beds 60-1, 63, 64,71,105 bed-making 63 bed-sharing 33, 60, 66-7, 69-71,153, 171,189 truckle or trundle 60,105 begging 80,128-9, i33> 135 belly 55, 59, 69, 7i> 74> 89,103,112,123, 138,143-4,148,197 Bennett, Judith 24 Benson, Edward 182 Bentley, Thomas 111-12,167-8 Beresford, Mary 116 Berry, Judith 160 Bessy, Elizabeth 168-9 Best, George 133-4 Bevers, Martha 61, 64,119 bewitching 127 Bible 162 Genesis 6 Book of Job 112 Proverbs 30,101 Biggen, Elizabeth 122-3 Binton, Agnes 64 birthroom 151,153 Bissell, Marie 65 Blackery, Susanna 107 blackness 133-4 blood 22,181 blood-letting 22, 47,120 Bloudy Mother, The 139

bodice 20,67 body parts, see arms; belly; ears; eyes; genitals; hips; nose; legs; thighs Bolt, Anne 163 Bordman, Isabell 36 Botelho, Lynn 78 Boult, Elizabeth 192 boundaries 25, 52, 64, 74, 80-1, 95,106 Bourne, Elizabeth 28 Bower, William 144 Bowers, Toni 193-4 Brackley, Dorothy 120 Bradford, Elizabeth 121 Bradshawe, Ellen 44 Bradwell, Stephen 80 Braude, Benjamin 134 Bray, Alan 65, 69 Breamer, William 105

breast milk 22, 45, 54, 71-3, 78, 201-2 breast-feeding 22,144,193,198-202 breasts 35, 45-6, 54, 74,138, 201 searches of 46, 71 Breitenberg, Mark 24,178 Brett, John 190 brewing 50 Brian, Elizabeth 142 Bridgewater, Earl of 91-2 Bridewell, see hospitals Brock, Geoffrey 180-1 Brookes, Mary 44 brother 60 Brown, Frances 56 Brown, Joan 96 Browne, Elizabeth 63 Browne, Margaret 105-6 Browne, Mary (Devon) 160 Browne, Mary (Yorks) 142 Buckham, Edith 161 Buckle, Reginald 184 Bullock, Elizabeth 201 Buckinghamshire 114 Burge, Mary 184 Burghill, Philbert 91 burglary 195 Burrill, Isabel 154 Butler, Elizabeth 197 Butler, Judith 3 Butler, Mary 197 Butt, Elenor 28 Byron, Lady Anne 116 Byrth ofmankynde, The (Raynold)

Caesarian birth 168 Calisto 109 Camber, Mary 48 Capp, Bernard 185 Carpenter, Elizabeth 103 Carter, Jane 181 Castlehaven, Countess of 53 Caswall, Richard 180 Catholic 37,44 Catterall, Elizabeth 137 Cave, Margaret 147 Chadwick, Susan 147 Challand, Alice 89 Champion, Jane 88 chapbooks 83, 87,108 Chappin, Elizabeth 161 Chappie, Mary 57 charities 118 charity 129,135,194 Charles I 39,177

29

Index Charles II 27, 84 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A (Middleton) 22 chastity 30, 32, 59, 92, 204, 208 Chaytor, Miranda 64, 90, 93 Cheshire Chester 173 childbirth 11, 51,149-76 death in 172 rituals 149-50 secret 151-2 children 55, 38, 60, 73, 94-5 abandonment of 194-7, 2 °3 in paintings 193 and rape 94 and witchcraft 74f Chorier, Nicholas 109 churches 55-8, 76, 80,123,194 church pews 55-8 church courts 12,14, 85, 90,101,117,156, 167 consistory court of Somerset 12, 107 consistory court of York 62 Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough 11, 68 churching 47-8, 57,156,169,172,175 cities 73,157, 206 Civil War 12,17, 39, 83,127,162 civility 53 Clark, Elizabeth 56 Clark, George 183-4 Clement, Ann 121 Clement, Elizabeth 186 clergymen 47, 57,135 Clerk, Alice 65 Clerk, James 103 Clewes, John 161 Clifford, Lady Anne 66-8 Clinton, Alice 26-7 Clinton, Elizabeth, Countess of Lincoln 199-200 Clitherow, Margaret 37 clitoris 21,27 clothes 25, 32, 34-40, 64, 65, 80, 87, 92, 94, 98,104,105,106,122,164,174 aprons 54 baby clothes 135,145,196 bodices 20,67 breeches 38,55,104,107 coats 36,38,103,105 coifs 55,58 drawers 38,40 doublet 105

251 gowns 32,55 hats 35 hose 105,106 petticoats 32 shirt 44 smocks 32, 34) 37-8, 42, 89, 94,103, 104,105 under-petticoat 141 waistcoat 138 Coates, Mary 171 Cody, Lisa 34, 50 Cole, Ann 69 Cole, Richard 28 Combe, Mary 38, 40,181 Commett, Margaret 93 common' bodies 15-16 Commonwealth 13,17, 38, 78 communion 55 Compleat Midwives Practice, The 127 conception 3, 5,18, 28, 85,111,112-13,127, 145,177,181,190 and rape 91 conduct literature 64,131 see also advice literature consent 87, 90, 91, 93, 95, 99,100,110 Cook, Susan 48 Cooke, Ann 146 Cooper, Marian 62,190 Cooper, William 121 Cornish, Dorothy 146 County Durham Durham 34,120,160 Newcastle upon Tyne 74,153 court (royal) 84 courts (legal) 85-6,142 courtship 8,12, 31, 32, 83,189 Couse, Mary 165 Coventry and Lichfield, diocese of 180 coverture 58,206-8 Cowper, Jane 164 Cowper, Lady Sarah 77,102 Cradell, Bennett 161 Cradie, Edith 55 Cranckland, Joan 37 Crawford, Patricia 8, 48 credit 24, 36,184 Cressy, David 173 Crispe, Mary 97 Crooke, Helkiah 24, 30 Cross, Frances 56-7 cross-dressing 35,109,151 cuckolds 25, 39, 42, 86,115,174,177,178, 180-1,192,193 Culpeper, Nicholas 50,112,113,127,130

252 Cumberland Brougham Castle 67 Kirkby Kendall 173 Penrith 67 Cumberland, Countess of 66 cunningwoman 119 curses 129 Cutts, Ruth 115 dancing 47 Davies, Blanch 184 Davies, Margaret 99 Davis, Natalie Zemon 30,137 Davyes, Mary 104 Dawson, Sara 162 Day, Richard 122-3 Day, William 92 death 62 Dee, John 196 defamation 36, 62, 78,106,115,116,167 demeanour 6,31 desire 83, 87,101-10, 205 devil 75,127 Derbyshire 144,160 Belper 162 Devon 54, 55, 60, 78, 87, 93> 96,107,144, 160,182 Barnstaple 182 Chidley 1 Crediton 54,182 Exeter 74 Dewphill, Mrs 36 Dialogues of Luisa Sigea, The (Chorier) 84,109 Diana 109 dildo 84 Dingley, Margery 160 disability 115,122 discredit 184-5 dissection 48 divorce 43 doctors 120,136 Dolton, Mary 61, 64 Dotchin, Mary 171 Dormer, Anne 31 Dowlish, Alice 72 Downe, Mary 154 dreams 155 drink 173-5 drinking 39,183 drunkenness 155 Drury, Lady 22 Ducket, Mary 135 Duden, Barbara 119

Dynes, Jane

54

Eades, Margery 182-3 Earle, Katherine 74 Earnley, Mary 74 ears 74 Eckersley, Margery 201 Edge, Elizabeth 163,175 Edwards, Ellen 157 Edwards, Judith 106 Egypt 27 ejaculation 24,83 Elias, Norbert 7 Ellis, Susanne 87 Elworthy, Margery 140 embryo 112,113 England, Anne 93-4 England, George 189 England, Robert 96 erection 108 erotica 19, 21, 68, 85,106,108 Essex 58,115,118,139,154,165,180 Barking 187 Braintree 77 Danbury 47 Hadley 48 Terling 15 Theydon Bois 189 Etheridge, Thomas 108 Evans, Agnes 184 Evans, Elizabeth 72 Evans, Margery 91-2 Eve 7, 20,35 Every Woman Her Own Midwife 17 eyes 6-7,41 faeces 53,75 Fair Warning to Murderers of Infants family 89-90,187, 206 Fanch, Ellen and Elizabeth 166 fathers 178 father-in-law 60 putative 147,159,162-4 present during childbirth 171-2 single 192; see also paternity Fathers, Elizabeth 104 femininity 127,198, 203, 205 feminist texts 9 fertility 79,114-16 Field, Helen 181 Filmer, Robert 113 Fincher, Samuel 86-7,107 Finnes, Rebecca 146 Fisher, Agnes 169

253

Index Fisher, Sibyl 156 Fissell, Mary 19, 26, 50 Fletcher, Anthony 21 Fletcher, Elizabeth 36 foetus 112,122-7,181 Fontanus, Nicholas 83 food 116,135,136,137,173-5 Fookes, Margaret 35 fornication 12, 78, 86, 90, 94, 97, 99,103, 116,117,136,180 Forty, Annis 162 Foster, Isabel 171 Foucault, Michel 6 Fox, Adam 20 Fox, Mary 69-70 Francis, Elizabeth 71 Frie, Elizabeth 88 friends 91 friendship 53,67-9 Frobisher, Martin 133 Galen 2,17,18, 83, 204 Garton, Elizabeth 61 Garvyn, Avis 57 genitals, female 2, 89 breech 10,52-3 cony ii, 21-2, 89 gear 89 hymen 24,71 labia 29 privy parts, privities 28, 37, 38, 86, 89 vagina 2,11, 21, 26, 27, 37, 85 vulva 24 genitals, male 2 breech 68 penis 1, 2, 20, 21, 27, 44, 85, 95,116, 174 prick 115 privy members, privities 1, 95, 97, 98 scrotum 2 ware 116 yard 21, 93, 97,104 gentlemen 32, 88, 91,180 gentlewomen 32,116,137,155,169 George, Ann 107 Germany 137 ghosts 75, 149 Gibbons, Emma 196 gifts 66,135,184 Gilbert, Elizabeth 200 Gilbert, Sarah 144 Giles, Anne 197

Gloucestershire Cheltenham 195 Much Marcle 194 Glover, Mary 79-80 God and reproduction 11-12,111 and childbirth 167,169-70 Godbeheere, Mary 115 Golding, Mary 95 Goodard, Agnes 157 Goodcole, Henry 75 Goodenough, Mary 139 Goose, Marie 165 gossip 116,123 gossips 22, 23,154-5,166,172-6,179 Gouge, William 198-200 grandparents 94-5 Granger, William 71 Gray, Lord 146 Green, Eleanor 105 Green, Mary 153 Greene, Ann 74 Greene, Anne 48-50,143 Greene, Benjamin 171-2 Greene, Christiana 166 Greene, John 189 green-sickness 82 Gribble, Lucy 182 Grymwood, Margaret 165,187 Guillemeau, James 123 hair 74,78 Hale, Henry 89 Hale, Matthew 90 Hallam, Elizabeth 160 Hallet, Joan 131,132 Ham 134 Hampshire Southampton 8 hanging 49 Harris, Anne 47 Harris, Sarah 196 Harrup, Elinor 131 Harsidge, Elynor 54 Harvey, Karen 19 Harvey, William 112,177 Hassell, Helen 202 Hattersley, Jane 139 Hatton, Agnes 46 Haynes, Ann, Susan and Catherine Heatly, Alice 46 Hellyer, Thomas 97 Hendley, Susanne 94 hermaphrodites 4,109

103

Index

254

hermaphroditism 2,3 Herefordshire 61,184 Hereford 36 Ludlow 36,115 Leominster 47,180 Hertfordshire 102 Hibb, Hester 162 Hie Mulier

35

Higgenson, Judith 115 Higgs, Elizabeth 116 Hills, John 146 Hindmarsh, Ann 105 Hippocrates 133 hips 5 Hitchcock, Tim 89, 204 Hix, Frances 88 Hobbes, Thomas 177 Hobbs, Edith 89 Hobson, Catherine 167 Hoby, Lady Margaret 155 Hodge, Johan 160 Hodgkinson, Elizabeth 162,163,190 Hodson, Elizabeth 82,192 Hollander, Anne 34 Hollingworth, Martha 201 Holt, John 138 homosexual subculture 175 homosexuality (male) 69 honour 58 Hook, Jane 119 Hopkins, Matthew 44 Home, Miles 108 Horsely, Clare 142 Hosgood, Mary 180 hospitals 77,194 Christ's (London) 60 Bridewell (London) 13,32,36, 44, 60, 61, 71, 73,106,108,142,151,157, 165,183, 202, 206 House of Commons 185 household 7-10,33, 60, 93,178,185 houses 33, 58, 62 housewifery 59 housework 173 Hovell, Mrs 21 Howard, Frances, Countess of Essex 43 Howland, Barbary 153 Howton, Margaret 36 humours 2, 22, 78-9, 97,144 Hunt, Arabella 5 Idell, George 183 illegitimacy 12,13, 38,179-80,195, 207 illegitimacy rates 8,179, 206

illegitimate children 145,149,157-8, 162-3,177-203 passim, 205 illicit sex 12,13,30, 46, 78, 85,103,110,192 impotence 43,114,115 incest (forbidden degrees) 103 incontinence 23,52 India 27 Indoe, Margaret 121 infanticide 8, 33, 42, 45. 49> 71, 139> 149> 151,153,154,159> 194> 196-8, 203 infertility 114-15,157 inheritance 78,178,181 insults 24,31, 59,154 impotence 115-16 Jackson, Katherine 87 Jackson, Margaret 157 Jacquett, Joan 157-9, 208 James II 44, 68,177 James, Maria 188 jealousy 31,129,192 Jeffery, Elizabeth 182 Johnson, Albert 161 Johnson, Anne 197 Johnson, Gabriel 87 jokes 6-7, 8,10-11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 37, 42, 52, 83,106,115,178,179,181 Jones, Agnes 44 Jones, Ann Rosalind 35 Jordanova, Ludmilla 3 Jorden, Edward 80 Jorden, John 104 Josselin, Ralph 24 Joubert, Laurent 24, 41 Jupiter 109 juries of matrons 43-4, 71 Karras, Ruth 60 Keene, Emmett 54 Kemsley, Dorothy 146 Kenricke, Anne 78 Kent 142,161 Berling 158 Deal 157 Halstow 190 Ryarsh 158 Sittingbourne 62,190 Kenton, Grace 202 King, Jane 25 Kirkby, Mary 115 Kirrly, Thomas 63-4 Kirsopp, Belie 163 kissing 1, 42, 54, 68, 74,103,105 Kniston, Mary 131

Index L'Escolle des Filles

255 84

labour 4, 35, 42,144,154,160-1,167-72, 184,190-1 Lakin, Mary 46 Lancashire 201 Preston 135 Lane, Judith 47,120 Langley, Mary 87 Lanyer, Amelia 67 Laqueur, Thomas 2, 3,17,18, 21, 26 law 85, 90, 95 ecclesiastical or canon 43,103 on adultery 8 on infanticide 33, 49,139,151,194 on rape 90-2 women's status in 52 Law, Gertrude 143 Lawes Resolution ofWomens Rights, The

52, 99 Lawrey, Mary 24-5 Le Strange, Nicholas 10, 20, 21, 22, 68 leaky women 22-6, 40 Lee, Ann 11 legs 31,35, 36,104 see also thighs legal records 12, 86 Lemnius 131 Lemnius, Laevinius 125 lesbianism 66, 68,108-9 Leveredge, Alice 161 Levine, David 15 Lewis, Martha 103,115 Lewys, Elizabeth 121 Linscale, Sissily 151-3 Linton, Elizabeth 138 litigation 12,57 Littlewit, Win 22 Locke, John 113,177 Lockwood, Jane 45 London 9, 25, 31, 32, 35, 47, 54, 58, 60, 71, 76,102,114,135,151,157,166,168,175,183, 188,195 Cornhill 197 Holborn 149 Fetter Lane 157 Leadenhall 130 Moorfields 151 Northumberland Abbey 44 Old Bailey 75 St Botolph's Bishopgate 202 St Clement's Eastcheap 202 St Giles Cripplegate 202 St Martin Vintry 197 Seargents Inn 41

Smithfield 60 Southwark 108 Stepney 147 Strand 44 Westminster 99 Whitehall 36 love 57, 87-8,105 maternal 126 Lovesey, John 106 Lowe, Anne 163 lust 86, 97,101,104,107,127,129,131,132, 134,140,194 Lustful, Lady 86 Lutterell, Thomas 21 lying-in 150,154,172-6,180,188 Lyle, Robert 1 magic 73-5 magistrates 14, 42, 95,146,162,179,180, 186,191, 205 maids (virgins) 44 maintenance orders 117,183 Mainwaring, Henry 163 Margaret, Countess of Hennenberg 129 marigolds 26 marital status 58, 73,122 marketplace 26, 54, 89 markets 130 marriage 24-5, 32, 46, 52-3, 58, 59, 78, 100,206-8 marriage advice 134 marriage age 206 marriage rates 8, 206 married men, as fathers of illegitimate children 185,187 married women 47* 62, 64* 73> 83, 94> 158, 163 and authority 46, 71 and pregnancy 113,114,117,137,147 see also marriage; coverture; matrons Marrys, Margaret 146,161 Marshall, Elizabeth 192 Marten, Henry 84 Mary of Modena 44 Mary, Princess, later Mary II 156 Mason, Margaret 164 Mast, Anne 118,140,165 masters 14,15, 49, 60-5, 69,182,185,188, 190 masturbation 108 maternity 4,127,193-207 see also childbirth; pregnancy matrix (womb) 21 matrons (at Bridewell) 44, 73

Index

256

matrons (married women) 46, 72, 75,114, 159 see also juries of matrons Matthew, Elizabeth 105 Maund, Ann 86-7,107 Mauriceau, Francis 123,125 (Fig. 4), 199 McLaren, Dorothy 200 medical books 3~4> 17-18, 68, 83,108,114, 115,146 memory 14 Mendelson, Sara 8 men-midwives 149,156,162 menopause 78-9 menstruation 11, 22, 47, 48, 78, 79,119, 120,134 menstrual cloths or rags 22, 42, 48 missing periods 45,119,143 metaphors 4,21 for labour 170 for rape 93,106 for sex 84,106 Mewers, Jane 153 Michael, Joan 191 Middlesex Edmonton 75 midwives 13, 34, 35> 42, 43> 49> 50-1, 57> 75, 83,112,126,136,146,111-76 passim, 181,186,187-8, 208 conflicts with mothers 168-9 training 159 treatment of single women in labour 160-2 unlicensed 159,188 midwives' books 33 see also medical books midwives' oaths 33,151,159,162 migration 59 Milburne, Jane 74 Milward, William 70 miscarriage 46, 49> 59> 78,121,122,137, 141 misogyny 25 mistresses 14,15, 23, 59, 60-5, 69, 71,165, 187-8, 207 mobility 205 Modena, Mary of 44,156,194 modesty 6,11, 34, 36, 40, 64, 75> 102-4, 208 molly houses 175-6 Molyns, Elizabeth 154,155 monarchy 113,177 monstrous births 148,127-35, 204 Montrose, Louis 180 More, Susan 188

Mother Clap's Molly House (Ravenhill) 175 mothers 11, 44, 60, 74,114,163,178,195 advice to 128 see also maternity Mountaine, Frances 138 Muldrew, Craig 13 multiple births 132-3,135 see also twins Munck, Mary 180 murder 7,182,194 murder stories 106,139, 202 Mush, John 37 Myres, Elizabeth 105 nakedness 34-40, 60, 65,105,134 Napier, Richard 64,114,155 nature 89,113,127,158 neck 41 neighbours 74,105,106,146,149,154,156, 166,172,186,188 neonaticide 141 New-fashioned Marigold, A 26 New Parliament of Women, The 107 Nevill, Sir Henry 94 Newborrow, Alice 63-4 Newcome, Henry 199 Newman, Karen 123 Nicholson, Elizabeth 153 Nicholson, Isabel 72-3 Nicklin, Elizabeth 163,165 Noah 134 noblewomen 129,133 Norfolk Norwich 76,106 Norris, John 54 North, Mary 58 Northumberland Howick 153 Norton, Roger 104 nose 31 nostril 41 Nosworthy, Mary 182 Nottinghamshire 106,115,116,135,162, 180,190 Nowell, Susan 95 Nubond, Anne 197 nurses 11, 79,172,173 nursing 62, 65, 76-7, i57> 183 O'Brien, Mary 178 oaths 181 in labour 13,159-61,165-6 see also midwives' oaths obedience 62

Index old men 60 old women 22, 57, 75-81,116,155,164 Oliver, John 111,128,168 On Human Generation (Aristotle) 91 oral culture 19-20, 84,162 orgasm 113 Orme, Mary 193 Osborne, Katherine 100-1 ovaries 2,112 overseers 186 ovulation 200 Oxfordshire 151 Oxford 48-50 Page, Elizabeth 69-70 pain, in labour 169-72 Paris duPlessis, James 130,132-3 parishes 117-18,196, 200, 201 Parliament of Women 83, 84, 86 parliamentarians 177 Parsons, Agnes 166 Parsons, Thomas 89 parturition 121 timing of 145,146,161 Paster, Gail Kern 23, 30,137 paternity 160-2,177-93 patriarchalism 177-8 patriarchy 7, 30, 51,138,177 Patten, Mary 116 Peace, Anne 141 Peach, Thomas 103 Pearce, Sibil 55 Pedler, Bridget 96 Pelling, Margaret 76, 77 penetration 92,99 pensions 77 Pepys, Samuel 129,130 Perkins, Elizabeth 61 Perry, Ruth 193-4 Persua, Queen 133 petitions 118,192-3 Pett, Widow 157 Petty, Sir William 48 pew disputes 55-8 Phillips, Anne 162 Phillips, Elinor 161 Phillips, Marie 166 Phillips, Mary 121 physicians 48-9,121,136, pick-pocketing 54 Pierson, Margery 77 Pitman, Bride 100 plague 45, 76, 77 Pollock, Linda 154

257

Pomeroy, Anne

41, 42

Poor Anthony's Complaint

23

poor law 13,117-18,179,194, 205 poor relief 117-18,192, 203 popular literature 194 population change 8 Pore, Johan 100 pornography 84,106 Porter, Roy 19 possession 79-80 Potts, Margaret 163 poverty 12, 45, 76-7, 79,195, 207 Powell, Elizabeth 108 Powell, Sara 190-1 Powell, Susanna 195-6 Powle, Elizabeth 119 pox 27,30-1 prayers 111,167-8 preaching 135 pregnancy 4,11, 44, 59, 62, 63, 64, 71, 94, 100,111-48,194 bridal 8,32 concealed 138-41,153-4 illegitimate 100,116-18,138-46,152, 177,179-203 length of 146,189 after rape 91-2,100 symptoms 14, 45,118-21,143,145 unwanted 120,141 premature birth 138,146 Priestman, Margaret 61 priests 166 print culture 10 privacy 33, 64, 208 in childbirth 151-4 privy 141 property 83,90 prostitutes 83, 84,101,174,175 prostitution 32 Protectorate 38 Protestantism 198,206 psychoanalysis 4,79 public 208 Pulford, John 1 Pulter, Amy 5 Purchas, Samuel 151 Puritanism 206 Puritans 47, 79,169,180,185,199 Purkiss, Diane 74 purse 21,54 Quakers 34,35-6 quarter sessions 13-14, 63, 85,101,179-80, 183

Index

258 quickening

Select City Quaeries

121-2,141,147

race 27-9,133-4,170 Ram, Susan 138 Randall, Margaret 195 Ranters 83 rape 13,15, 25, 53, 54, 58, 63, 90-101, 204, 205 Ravenhill, Mark 175 Ravenhill, Mr 192 Ray, Margaret 146,189 Rea, Catherine 103,115 Redgrave Helen 157 Reformation 9,12, 47,117, 206 Reformation of Manners 13,180, 206 remarriage 8, 56, 76 reputation 59, 90,184-5,188,191,192 Restoration 29 Reynolds, Mary 131 rickets 168 Rich Closet of Physical Secrets, A

127

Ridge, Avice 131 Ridley, William 162,190 riots 35 Robbins, Anne 188 Robinson, Elizabeth 154 Rochester, Lord 31 Rodway, Joan 41, 92 Roe, Elizabeth 36 Roesslin, Eucharius 111,123,124 (Fig. 2) Rooke, Rachel 186 Roper, Lyndal 4, 74 Rowlands, Alison 79 royalism 38 royalists 177 Rublack, Ulinka 2,137 Rueff, Jacob 127 ruffs 127,128 (Fig. 6) Russell, Agnes 89 Ryley, Marie 72 savin 120,142 Sawcer, Elinor 196 Sawday, Jonathan 48 Sawyer, Elizabeth 75 Schiebinger, Londa 3 Scobell, Anne 182 scolds 6 Scot, Reginald 79 searchers 45, 46, 75 secrecy 30 sects 9,167 Sedley, Sir Charles 31 seed 18, 22, 83,111,113,119,125

83

separate spheres 29 servants 4,15, 33, 49> 58, 59-65, 69, 74, 82, 105,117,165,173,182,187, 206 Sewsmith, Anne 183, 201 sexual abuse 25, 60, 64 sexual difference 5,19, 25, 29 sexual intercourse 23, 68, 78, 82-110,114 non-penetrative 88-9 sexual knowledge 20, 40-51 shame 11, 23, 27, 65, 98,185 shamelessness 104 Shapin, Steven 92 Shapiro, Barbara 92 Sharp, Jane 21, 27-8, 42,109,113,114,125, 126 (Fig. 5J, 170 Shawe, Elizabeth 47 Shepherd, Richard 104 Showld, Margery 60 Shropshire 104,162 Simpson, Elizabeth 160 Singer, John 26 single men, as fathers 185,192 single mothers 13,170-1,180,192-8, 200, 207 breast-feeding 200-2 lying-in 156-7,175 punishment of 118 single women 8-10, 46, 55, 71-3, 74, 95, 118, 206-7 giving birth 156-66 and pregnancy 100,138-47,179-203 Sinnerton, Edward 201 Skinker, Tannakin 128,131,132 (Fig. 7) Skinner, Alice 165 Slader, John 136 Slater, Hester 160 Smith, Amy 58 Smith, Margaret 58 Smith, Richard 105 Smith, Susan 194 Snowdon, Dorothy 171 sociability 172-6 social status 116,122,129-30 sodomy 1, 28, 65, 68 soldiers 107,182 Somerset 1, 28,39, 42, 46, 58, 60, 62, 63, 69, 72, 87, 89, 93, 97,108,116,121,131,138, 140,145,146,154,165,186,187,196,198 Axbridge 39,89 Bridgwater 57 Carhampton 195 Creech 56 Crosse 39

Index Donyatt 191 Glastonbury 26 Hatchbeauchamp 163 Ilchester 104 Ilminster 100 Lottisham 97 Merriott 195 North Cheriton 122 Raddington 37 Stoke Gifford 166 Taunton 96 Tickenham 107 Upton 195 Wells 57 Spareing, Mary 64 sperm 133,134 see also nature; seed Spiring, Marie 166 spirit 135 Sprang, Elizabeth 186 Spufford, Margaret 108 spying 106 St John, Lady 119 Stacy, Anne 72 Staffordshire 115,160,161,163,183,192 Allestree 56 Birmingham 167 Chelsey 82 Coppenhall 202 Dorlston 179,195 Lichfield 47,135 Salt 69 Stafford 186,201 stage 23 Stallybrass, Peter 29, 35 Stanton, Anne 189 Star Chamber 28 Steelev, Dorothy 165 Sterry, Peter 36 stillbirth 120,121,135,136,140,141,146, 153,154,168,170 Stockwell, Magdalen 140 Stone, Bassett and Emmanuel 26-7 Stone, Isotta 96 Stone, Rebecca and Elizabeth 57 Storr, Thomas 38 Stranger, Dorothy 74 Straunge, Mr and Mrs 187-8 Streate, Grace 186-7 Stuart, Arbella 66 subjectivity 6,148 Surrey Godalming 130 Swinnerton, Edward 201

259

Symcotts, John 119 Tailor, Anne 134 tailors 26 Talbott, Katherine 198 tavern 31 Taylor, James 160 technology 113,148 Ten Pleasures of Marriage, The

174

thighs 36,105,106 Thomas, Grace 74 Thomas, Keith 178 Thompson, Isabel 140,171 Thompson, Margaret 160 Thorne, Elizabeth 97 Thornton, Alice 155,169 Thornton, Elizabeth 197 Tinsley, Dorothy 147 Toft, Mary 130 Tome, Leonard 87 Tories 177 torture 160,161 Totley, Grace 87 towns 73, 205, 206 Towte, Ursula 180 Traub, Valerie 66,109 travellers 54,196 Trevelyan, Urith 200 tribadism 28, 68,109 Trott, Alice 198 twins 5,115,129,181 underwear 38,40 uncle 25 Underwood, Goody 155 unlicensed midwives 162 urbanisation 8,205 urine 22-4, 75,119,172 vagrant 151 Vailes, Susanna 140,144,171 veils 47-8 Vicars, Katherine 120 Vincent, Katherine 145 violence 100,110 virginity 24, 32, 41, 43-4, 47> 49> 90, 94 virgins 44> 177 visions 74 vomiting 22,171 Wagstaffe, John 47 Walford, Margaret 26 Walker, Garthine 93, 99 Walker, Joan 201

260

Walker, Margaret 171 Walker, Sibel 140 Wallis, Anne and Thomas 180-1 Waltor, Ann 62 Wannells, Charity 195 war 137 Ward, Grace 171 Ward, Ned 175 Warrin, Mary 144 Warwickshire Coventry 36 washing 76-7,95 Waterlow, Andrew 163 Watkins, Margery 135 Watkinson, Susanna 163 Weaver, Abigail 165 Weegan, Helen 116 Weeks, Dorothy 145 Weil, Rachel 27,156,178 West, Elizabeth 105 West, Margaret 131 wet-nursing 11,194, 200-2 Wheeler, Edward 182 Whigs 177> 178 whipping 13, 37) 64, 77) U7) 185-6,194 Whitcop, Joan 48 Whitehead, John 105-6 whores 1,10,30,32, 36, 48, 58, 78, 89, 104-5, H5) 157) 172 Whorewood, Margaret 121 Wiber, Dorothy 67 widowers 76,107 widows 8, 56, 57, 59, 76, 77) 78, 83, 87, 94, 102,116,139,144,147) 197 wife-beating 7, 52, 65 Wild, Jane 179,195 Wildey, Elizabeth 135 Wilkin, Isabel 115 Williams, Jane 145 Willis Joan 138

Index

Willis, Deborah 74 Willison, Mrs 67 Willmott, Joan 187 Wilson, Adrian 30, 51,137,149-50,173 witchcraft 2, 73-5, 79, 85,128,176, 204 familiars 74,131 witches' marks 44 witch-hunting 44 witnessing 103-4 wittall 192 womb 2, 21, 26, 80,113,115,119,123,125-6, 129,166 women on top 26,109 Womersely, Jane 142 Wood, Anthony a 49 Wood, Dorothy 116 Wood, Richard 166 Woolley, Hannah 62-3 Worcestershire 142,161,182,196 Pershore 184 Worcester 183,196 Wyre Piddle 188 work 51,206-7 Wright, Elizabeth 182 Wrightson, Keith 8,15 Yewens, Jane 96 Yong, Agnes 60 Yorkshire 45, 61, 71, 72,108,140,141,151, 171,182,197,198 Alverthorpe 138 Beverley 142 Bradford 197 Cumberworth 45 Liversedge 170 Riccall 58 Rotherham 143 Skipton 137 Sowerby 136 Young, Jennett 171