ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the case study of Margravine Agnes of Baden, Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein and the questions that arose at the birth of her fraternal twins. Agnes' womb and the twins it produced were cleared of any deception. It appears that scientific knowledge of the womb had the potential to protect the nobility qua nobility, and thus the role this elite group played in the larger good of the early modern European social order. All of the considerations and theories about women, all of the doubts and emotional arguments regarding generation and inheritance that arose in early modern Europe were manifest in the case of Agnes, the Margravine of Baden, Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein and her 'seven-month twins'. For women and medicine in early modern France, see Susan Broomhall, Women's Medical Work in Early Modern France. From the theories of the ancient philosophers to medieval Christian interpretations, from the Renaissance to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.
