Abstract
In a satirical broadsheet of 1603 entitled ‘Tittle-Tattle; Or, the Several Branches of Gossipping’ the stereotypical role of women in the community as gossips and scandalmongers is vividly represented (Fig. 4.1). Women are depicted as chattering with each other in various locales; from the marketplace to the water conduit and from there to the river; in the bakehouse and the alehouse. These are all outside activities, public exchanges of sorts, but there is one other section of the illustration that accompanies the broadsheet which takes place in an interior space, that of the childbirthing room, where the midwives and gossips are shown in dialogue around the childbed. Female communities are shown in this satirical print as being centred on the activity of gossip, and the semi-professional medical role of the midwife is effectively belittled in its implied alignment with the idle chatter or ‘tittle-tattle’ of the title.
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Notes
See, for example, Roy Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1987); Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of Inter-Professional Rivalries and Women’s Rights (London: Heinemann, 1977); Edward Shorter, A History of Women’s Bodies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500–1760: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), p. 107.
Adrian Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation’, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 68–107.
In the seventeenth century male midwives only entered the scene as a last resort when surgery became necessary since they were allowed to use the tools of obstetrics such as forceps. See Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Croom Helm, 1982).
For the historical counterbalancing of these myths, see David Harley, ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife Witch’, Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), 1–26; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996). Useful for considering the dissemination of cultural practice and belief is Pierre Bordieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
See David Harley, ‘Provincial Midwives in England: Lancashire and Cheshire, 1660–1760’, in Hilary Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 27–48.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 230.
Reproduced in extract form in Charlotte F. Otten (ed.), English Women’s Voices, 1540–1700 (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1992). See also Kate Aughterson (ed.), Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England: a Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995).
I am indebted for this account to Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 183–4.
F. Mauriceau, The Accomplisht Midwife, Treating of the Diseases of Women with Child, and in Childbed, translated by H. Chamberlen, London, 1673, sig.A4.
Nicolas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, or A Guide for Women in Their Conception, Bearing, and Suckling Their Children (London, 1716), p. 23. Reproduced in extract form in Aughterson, Renaissance Women, pp. 59–60.
Donna C. Stanton, ‘Recuperating Women and the Man Behind the Screen’, in James Grantham Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 247–65, quotation, p. 250. Bakhtin employed these multi-authored texts to talk about the transition from the open ‘grotesque’ and essentially low-cultural female gathering of the childbed — where talking and eating in huge quantities were very much the order of the day — to the post-Renaissance world of ‘private’ bourgeois manners: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 105–6. According to Stanton, this passage reveals not only Bakhtin’s gender-blindness in his theoretical writings but also the ideological agenda that underwrites them. Stanton, ‘Recuperating Women’, p. 248.
Margreta de Grazia, in ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 63–94, demonstrates how the opposed spaces of the (male) printing house and the (female) birthing room feed into the metaphorical language of early modern drama. Sawday has also drawn lines of connection between representations of the womb in the period and the blank text, the tabula rasa of the printing house: see Sawday, Body Emblazoned, p. 215.
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 33. See also 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 (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 117–45.
See my ‘Print, Popular Culture, Consumption and Commodification in The Staple of News’ in Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman (eds), Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon (London: Macmillan, 1998) pp. 183–207.
See, for example, my ‘“The Collective Contract is a Fragile Structure”: Local Government and Personal Rule in Jonson’s A Tale of a Tub’, English Literary Renaissance, 27 (1997), 443–67.
The Magnetic Lady II.ii.30–2. The edition of the play used is in C. Herford and P. and E. Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson: The Complete Works, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), Vol VI. Further references to the play are contained in parentheses in the text.
See Helen Ostovich, ‘The Appropriation of Pleasure in The Magnetic lady’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1700, 34 (1994), 425–42. It is worth noting that the French associations with the trade and the figure of Louise Bourgeois would have had particular relevance in the 1630s when Marie de Medici’s daughter, Henrietta Maria, was the Queen Consort of England.
See Jim Sharpe, ‘Women, Witchcraft, and the Legal Process’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime, and the Courts in Early Modern England (London: UCL Press, 1994), pp. 106–24. See also Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and Power in Early Modern England: The Case of Margaret Moore’ in the same volume, pp. 125–45.
Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane’s work in the 1970s promulgated the theory that witches were members of the village community who became scapegoats for cultural and financial transitions. Thus, they suggested, villages cast out old, poor, often single women as the support network of poor relief diminished, justifying their action and assuaging their guilt by means of the devil and the supernatural. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) (Reprinted, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) and Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). For feminist critiques of that stance, see Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches (London: Routledge, 1992); Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (New York: Harper Collins, 1994); Annabel Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, Politics, and “Good Neighbourhood” in Seventeenth-century Rye’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 31–66; Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). See also Richard Horsley, ‘Who were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in European Witch-trials’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1979), 714–5; and David Harley, ‘Ignorant Midwives: A Persistent Stereotype’, The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin, 28 (1981), 6–9. Kathleen McLuskie, in Renaissance Dramatists (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) differentiates between high cultural and popular cultural constructions of the witch. See in particular Chapter Three: ‘Women and Cultural Production: The Case of Witchcraft’, pp. 57–86.
See Ann Giardina Hess, ‘Midwifery Practice and the Quakers in Southern Rural England in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Hilary Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 49–76, quotation p. 88. Jim Sharpe suggests that white magic was prosecuted as frequently as black magic and that twentieth-century accounts of witchcraft are distorted on this point.
Elizabeth Cellier, To Dr — an Answer to His Queries, Concerning the College of Midwives (1688), reproduced in Otten, English Women’s Voices.
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Sanders, J. (1999). Midwifery and the New Science in the Seventeenth Century: Language, Print and the Theatre. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_5
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