ABSTRACT
Midwifery had long been used as a trope for the production of ideas; the chapter argues that in the early modern period midwifery and its female practitioners embodied specific concerns about how the narratives that defined and underpinned male authority were produced. As Natalie Zemon Davis and others have argued, early modern childbirth provided a space within which typical gendered power relations were inverted. The poet who commends Weamys plays with language that initially diminishes but ultimately upholds her stories, hence enacting the ambivalence that characterized how early modern culture responded to the midwife’s tales. The chapter deals with the question of how “great” early modern men sought to control the terms of their progeny, focusing on Tudor England’s midwifery regulations in conjunction with its precarious monarchical line. It explores the early modern male subject more generally and examines a medical tale that explicitly connected a man’s physical and rhetorical virility to the will of the midwives and gossips.
