Agency, Authorship, and Authority in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Midwifery Manuals Written by Women

This paper considers the manifold strategies used by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century midwives to actively take part both in the circulation of notions and evidence about pregnancy, labour, and childcare, and how they sought to regain control of such a gendered area of medicine as midwifery and obstetrics by countering mainstream beliefs about their ignorance and unreliability. The analysis chiefly takes into account the linguistic tools used to take the floor and state the midwives’ agency, authorship, and authority in the paratexts of five midwifery manuals of the time. Among other things, results show that the abandonment of anonymity, the use of techniques to express evidentiality and of argumentative strategies employed to demonstrate the author’s trustworthiness were used by midwives to reclaim their rightful place within the dissemination of scientific and medical information of the period.

References

Primary sources

• Mears, M. 1797. Pupil of Nature, or Candid Advice to the Fair Sex, London: Crosby and Co.
• Nihell, E. 1750. Treatise on the Art of Midwifery, London: A. Morley.
• Sharp, J. 167). The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered, London: Simon Miller.
• Stephen, M. 1794. Domestic Midwife, or, The Best Means of Preventing Danger In Child-Birth Considered, London, S. W. Fores.
• Stone, S. 1737. A Complete Practice of Midwifery, London: T. Cooper.

Secondary literature

• Ahearn, L. M. 2001. Language and agency, «Annual Review of Anthropology», 30, pp. 109-137. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.109
• Allison, J. 2021. Midwifery from the Tudors to the 21^st Century: History, Politics and Safe Practice in England, London, Routledge.
• Angeles Lopez Orelliana, M. 2012., Popularising Scientific Discourse, «Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis lingüístics», 17, pp. 83-96.
• Astbury, L. and Leong, E. 2019. Medical Knowledge and Practice, in A. L. Capern (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe, London, Routledge, pp. 301-325.
• Banks, David. 2008. The Development of Scientific Writing: Linguistic Features and Historical Context, London, Equinox Publishing.
• Beal, J. 2013. Jane Sharp: A Midwife of Renaissance England, «Midwifery Today», 107, pp. 30-31.
• Berridge, V. 1990. Health and medicine, in F. K. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950: Social Agencies and Institutions, vol. 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 171-242.
• Bosanquet, A. 2009. Inspiration from the Past: Jane Sharp, «The Practicing Midwife», 12 (8), pp. 33-35.
• Bosanquet, A. 2010. Martha Mears, Nature Worshipper, «The Practising Midwife», 13 (1), pp. 34-36.
• Brown, M. 2011. Performing Medicine. Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760-1850, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
• Churchill, W. D. 2016. Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment, London, Routledge.
• Duranti, A. 2004. Agency in Language, in A. Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 451-473.
• Fife, E. 2004. Gender and Professionalism inEeighteenth-centuryMmidwifery, «Women’s Writing», 11 (2) pp. 185-200. DOI: 10.1080/096990804
  00200304
• Fissell, M. 2004. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early modern England. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Fissell, M. 2011. Popular Medical Writing. in J. Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 417-430.
• Forman Cody, L. 1999. The Politics of Reproduction: from Midwives’ alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-midwifery, «Eighteenth-century Studies», 32 (4), pp. 477-495. DOI:10.1353/ECS.1999.0033
• Forman Cody, L. 2005. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science and the Conception of Eighteenth-century Britons. New York, Oxford University Press.
• Grafton, A., Shelford A., and Siraisi N. 1992. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Green, M. H. 2008. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-modern Gynaecology, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Grundy, I. 1995. Sarah Stone: Enlightenment Midwife, in R. Porter (ed.), Medicine in the Enlightenment, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi, pp. 128-144.
• Gunnarsson, B. 1997. On the Sociohistorical Construction of Scientific Discourse, in Gunnarsson, B.-L., Linell, P. and Nordberg, B. (eds.), The Construction of Professional Discourse, London-New York, Longman, pp. 99-126.
• Gunnarsson, B. 2006. Medical Discourse: Sociohistorical Construction. «Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics», pp. 709-717. DOI: 10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/02360-9
• Gunnarsson, B. 2011. Introduction: Languages of Science in the Eighteenth Century, in B. Gunnarsson (ed.), Languages of Science in the Eighteenth Century, Berlin, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 3-23.
• Hanson, C. 2004. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750– 2000, Basingstoke, Palgrave.
• Keller, E. 2007. Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England, Seattle, University of Washington Press.
• King, H. 2007. Midwifery, Obstetrics, and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-century Compendium, London, Routledge.
• Lane, J. 2001. A Social History of Medicine. Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750-1950, London-New York, Routledge.
• Lieske, P. 2007 Eighteenth-century British Midwifery, London, Pickering and Chatto.
• Lonati, E. 2017. Communicating Medicine. British Medical Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Reference Works, Milano, Ledizioni.
• López Orellana, M. A. 2012. Popularising Scientific Discourse, «Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis lingüístics», XVII, pp. 83-96.
• O’Brien, K. 2010. Woman’s place, in R. Ballaster (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690-1750, vol. 4, London, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19-39.
• Patha, P. and I. Taavistainen. 2011. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Medical Writing in Early Modern English, in P. Patha and I. Taavistainen (eds.), Medical Writing in Early Modern English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-8.
• Patha, P. 2011. Eighteenth-Century English Medical Texts and Discourses on Reproduction, in B. Gunnarsson (ed.), Languages of Science in the Eighteenth Century, Berlin, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 333-355.
• Pirohakul T. and P. Wallis. 2014. Medical Revolutions? The Growth of Medicine in England, 1660-1800, «Economic History Working Papers», 185, pp. 1-46.
• Porter, R. 1985. Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: The Evidence of the Gentleman’s Magazine. «Medical History», 29 (138), pp. 136-168. DOI: 10.1017/s0025727300043970
• Shelton, D. C. 2012. Man-Midwife History: 1730-1930, «Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology,», 32,  pp.  718-723. DOI: 10.3109/01443615.
• 2012.721031
• Taavitsainen, I. 2011. Medical case reports and scientific thought-styles, «Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos», 17, pp. 75-98.
• Taavitsainen, I. et al. 2014. Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800: A corpus for analyzing eighteenth-century medical English, «ICAME Journal», 38, pp. 137-153. DOI: 10.2478/icame-2014-0007
• Taavitsainen, I. and Hiltunen T. (eds.). 2019. Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing Medicine in the Eighteenth Century, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
• Whaley, L. 2011. Women and the Practice of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.