ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book illustrates the early-modern childbirth ritual as an instance of women's collective resistance; but it may be appropriate to go even further, for 'resistance' is perhaps inadequate to capture what that ritual achieved. It discusses that the women of early-modern England had a thriving collective culture. The book suggests that the theme of difficult births not only makes the bodily social relationship accessible, but also brings into play rich and complex social interactions which involved considerations of gender, religion and power the very stuff of social and cultural history. One consideration surely clinches the case for social history to take seriously the management of difficult births, and particularly in seventeenth-century England: namely that this was a sphere which in this very period, and in this very polity, manifested remarkable historical change.
