Within and without : the social and medical worlds of the medieval midwife, 1000-1500

The medieval midwife was at once a part of the social community in which she lived, and on the margins of it. She straddled several roles: not only social, but also medical, economic, and religious. The world of the medieval midwife was a complex one. and it was necessary for her to use a wide variety of tools that she had at her disposal to perform her craft, including complex medical procedures, herbs and drugs, charms and prayers, and "sympathetic magic." Medieval midwives also occupied important roles in both "male" and "female" society in Europe. In addition to the traditional role they had as experts of prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal care, and the social leader of the events and spaces surrounding the birth, they were also viewed as experts in certain "male" areas of the community. Medieval midwives in England offered expert legal testimony in a variety of court cases involving pregnancy and lactation, rape, and even male impotence. In addition, in late medieval Italy midwives performed the important social role o{comare, or "godmother." to the babies they delivered. Using the extant sources, including written obstetrical treatises, laws and court transcripts, recipes and charms, as well as a variety of visual sources, such as manuscript illustrations, mosaics, and paintings, this dissertation argues that medieval midwives learned their craft empirically through succeeding generations, and that they were not as unskilled and dangerous as the medieval church and cities feared them to be. or that male medical writers and practitioners of the early modem period believed. The regulation of medieval midwives, therefore, was a process that had little to do with the actual practices of the medieval midwife, but rather, was integral to a larger process in the late Middle Ages of regulation and of subverting socially powerful people who had traditionally been outside of institutional control to that position.