ABSTRACT
Time and historical indifference have obscured the lives of most midwives in the past. Few enjoyed more than the local esteem of contemporaries and posterity celebrates a mere handful, among them Justine Siegemund, Louise Bourgeois and now, of course, Mme du Coudray.1 Yet this longstanding and almost institutionalized neglect has not quite rendered their biographies either inaccessible or historically irrelevant.2 Their lives, their struggles, their ambitions, their frustrations and their successes can be recovered, and these experiences reveal much about the social construction of life in early modern Europe.
