ABSTRACT
The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton is a history of deliverances that relies on a self-generated, clinical, biblical vocabulary to convey a woman’s experience of coming into being. In one representative episode, Alice Thornton (b. 1626) describes the horrendous ordeal of her three-day labor, which ends with the breech birth of her fifth child:
I fell into exceeding sharpe travaill in great extreamity, so that the midwife did beleive I should be delivered soone. But loe! it fell out contrary for the child staied in the birth, and came crosse with his feete first…att which time I was upon the racke in bearing my childe with such equisitt torment, as if each lime weare divided from other, for the space of two houers; when at length, beeing speechlesse and breathlesse, I was, by the infinitt providence of God, in great mercy delivered.1
