ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, every aspect of conception, pregnancy and childbirth was suffused with social rituals. Scholarly research has illuminated these practices in early modern England and continental Europe, but comparatively little has been written on the folklore of birth and pregnancy in Scotland, first-hand evidence of which is extremely difficult to uncover.1 Childbirth was a female province to which men were only admitted in exceptional circumstances; consequently, birthing practices are scarcely mentioned in men’s journals and correspondence, and, at least until the mid eighteenth century, Scottish women rarely had the leisure or ability to record their own experiences. Drawing upon scattered references in contemporary diaries and letters, proscriptive allusions to ‘idle superstitions’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century medical treatises, and nineteenth and early twentieth-century compendia of folklore, this chapter aims to explore some of the primary rituals associated with childbirth and post-birth celebrations involving mothers and their midwives, and to suggest how they may have changed over the eighteenth century and beyond. While many of these practices were observed across Scotland, and indeed throughout Europe, others remained peculiar to certain localities until large-scale migration from the Highlands to the Lowlands began to blur regional distinctions in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarities and differences in the observance of customs across the social spectrum are much harder to identify, however, as these tend to be obscured by the nature of the sources – whereas personal references to birthing customs stem mainly from the pens of the elite, references gathered from other sources probably refer implicitly to the lower classes.
