ABSTRACT
The Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer included a service for women to offer thanksgiving after childbirth. The ceremony, called the “churching of women,” was held some weeks after the delivery and required the mother to “give hearty thanks unto God” who had given “safe deliverance” and “preserved in the great danger of Childbirth.” And when the time of birth approacheth near, most commonly these signs following come before, by the which the time of labor is known to be at home. Humoral medicine involves endless decoding of physical signs. In these treatises, women’s bodies emerge as complex texts which are interpreted in terms of natural balance or unnatural disruption. There is nothing under heaven which so manifestly and plainly doth declare and show the magnificent mightiness of that omnipotent living god as doth the perpetual and continual generation and conception of living things here in earth, by the which is saved, prorogued, and augmented the kind of all things.
